The 5 EYES

The Five Eyes, often abbreviated asFVEY, grew out of a UK-US agreement after World War II, a partnership which later expanded to include Canada, Australia and New Zealand, it entailed the mutual sharing of signals and communications intelligence between these countries — with the understanding, they would not spy on each other.

The terms of the arrangement had not always been upheld, and relations had occasionally been fraught, with Washington previously threatening others with expulsion or suspension from the group.

 

The members have since extended co-operation to include exchanging personnel and strategic assessments.

Like an omnivorous, 24-hour news organisation, the Five Eyes’ operations and facilities cover all time zones and continents, from listening stations at Naval Station Norfolk, to naval ships off Iran and satellite ground stations in the UK countryside, on top of the partnership’s hub, the National Security Agency, near Washington.

The Five Eyes has given America’s deep state a phenomenal reach and an unmatched level of integration with its allies that the West’s geopolitical rivals, notably China and Russia, cannot replicate.

It also provides an intelligence windfall for its smaller members, like Australia.

For decades, the intelligence partnership was never acknowledged by respective governments, let alone talked about in public.

Duncan Campbell, a longtime investigative reporter in the UK, thinks the first time the Five Eyes name was mentioned in public was barely a decade ago, in the pages of The Sydney Morning Herald.

During the course of the Cold War, the ECHELON surveillance system was initially developed by the FVEY to monitor the communications of the former Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, although it is now used to monitor billions of private communications worldwide.

 

In the late 1990s, the existence of ECHELON was disclosed to the public, triggering a major debate in the European Parliament and, to a lesser extent, the United States Congress.

As part of efforts in the ongoing War on Terror since 2001, the FVEY further expanded their surveillance capabilities, with much emphasis placed on monitoring the World Wide Web.

Documents leaked by Snowden in 2013 revealed that the FVEY have been spying on one another’s citizens and sharing  collected information with each other, in order to circumvent restrictive domestic regulations on surveillance of citizens.

In spite of continued controversy over its methods, the Five Eyes relationship remains one of the most comprehensive known espionage alliances in history.

The origins of the Five Eyes alliance can be traced back to the Atlantic Charter, which was issued in August 1941 to lay out the Allied goals for the post-war world.

On 17 May 1943, the British–U.S. Communication Intelligence Agreement, also known as the BRUSA Agreement, was signed by the UK and U.S. governments to facilitate co-operation between the U.S. War Department and the British Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS).

On 5 March 1946, the secret treaty was formalized as the UKUSA Agreement, which forms the basis for all signal intelligence cooperation between the NSA and the GCHQ to this day.

In 1948, the treaty was extended to include Canada, followed by Norway (1952), Denmark (1954), West Germany (1955), Australia (1956), and New Zealand (1956).These countries participated in the alliance as “third parties“.

By 1955, the formal status of the remaining Five Eyes countries was officially acknowledged in a newer version of the UKUSA Agreement that contained the following statement:

At this time only Canada, Australia and New Zealand will be regarded as UKUSA-collaborating Commonwealth countries.

The “Five Eyes” term has its origins as a shorthand for a “AUS/CAN/NZ/UK/US EYES ONLY” (AUSCANNZUKUS) classification level.

Cold War (1950s–1990s)
During the Cold War, the GCHQ and the NSA shared intelligence on the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China, and several eastern European countries

Over the course of several decades, the ECHELON surveillance network was developed to monitor the military and diplomatic communications of the Soviet Union and its Eastern Bloc allies.

During the Vietnam War, Australian and New Zealand operators in the Asia-Pacific region worked directly to support the United States, while GCHQ operators stationed in the (then) British colony of Hong Kong were tasked with monitoring North Vietnamese air defence networks.

During the Falklands War, the British received intelligence data from its FVEY allies such as Australia, as well as from third parties such as Norway and France.

ECHELON network disclosures (1988–2000)
By the end of the 20th century, the ECHELON surveillance network had evolved into a global system capable of sweeping up massive amounts of private and commercial communications, including telephone calls, fax, e-mail and other data traffic.

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RAF Menwith Hill, North Yorkshire, England

This was done through the interception of communication bearers such as satellite transmission and public switched telephone networks.

The Five Eyes has two types of information collection methods: the PRISM program and the Upstream collection system.

The PRISM program gathers user information from technology firms such as Google, Apple and Microsoft, while the Upstream system gathers information directly from the communications of civilians via fiber cables and infrastructure as data flows past.

 

In 1988, Duncan Campbell revealed in the New Statesman the existence of ECHELON, an extension of the UKUSA Agreement on global signals intelligence [Sigint].

The story, ‘Somebody’s listening,’ detailed how the eavesdropping operations were not only being employed in the interests of ‘national security,’ but were regularly abused for corporate espionage in the service of US business interests. The piece passed largely unnoticed outside of journalism circles.

In 1996, a detailed description of ECHELON was provided by New Zealand journalist Nicky Hager in a book titled “Secret Power – New Zealand’s Role in the International Spy Network“, which was cited by the European Parliament in a 1998 report titled “An Appraisal of the Technology of Political Control” (PE 168.184).

On 16 March 2000, the Parliament called for a resolution on the Five Eyes and their ECHELON surveillance network, which, if passed, would have called for the “complete dismantling of ECHELON”.

Three months later, the Temporary Committee on ECHELON was set up by the European Parliament to investigate the ECHELON surveillance network.

However, according to a number of European politicians such as Esko Seppänen of Finland, these investigations were hindered by the European Commission.

In the United States, congressional legislators warned that the ECHELON system could be used to monitor U.S. citizens. On 14 May 2001, the U.S. government cancelled all meetings with the Temporary Committee on ECHELON.

 

 

War on Terror (2001–present)

In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the surveillance capabilities of the Five Eyes were greatly increased as part of the global War on Terror.

During the run-up to the Iraq War, the communications of UN weapons inspector Hans Blix were monitored by the Five Eyes.

An NSA memo detailed plans of the Five Eyes to boost eavesdropping on UN delegations of 6 countries as part of a “dirty tricks” campaign to apply pressure on these six countries to vote in favor of using force against Iraq.

In 2013, documents leaked by the former NSA contractor Snowden revealed the existence of numerous surveillance programs jointly operated by the Five Eyes.

The following list includes several notable examples reported in the media:

1. PRISM – Operated by the NSA together with the GCHQ and the ASD
2. XKeyscore – Operated by the NSA with contributions from the ASD and the GCSB
3. Tempora – Operated by the GCHQ with contributions from the NSA
4. MUSCULAR – Operated by the GCHQ and the NSA
5. STATEROOM – Operated by the ASD, CIA, CSE, GCHQ, and NSA

In March 2014, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ordered Australia to stop spying on East Timor.

• This marks the first time that such restrictions are imposed on a member of the FVEY.

Domestic espionage sharing controversy
The Five Eyes alliance is sort of an artifact of the post World War II era where the … countries are the major powers banded together to sort of co-operate and share the costs of intelligence gathering infrastructure. … The result of this was over decades and decades some sort of a supra-national intelligence organisation that doesn’t answer to the laws of its own countries.
—Edward Snowden

In recent years, documents of the FVEY have shown that they are intentionally spying on one another’s citizens and sharing the collected information with each other in order to circumvent restrictive domestic regulations on spying