Awareness: Five Eyes

Five Eyes

The group known as five eyes is regarded as the world's most significant intelligence agency. It began as an agreement between the United States and the United Kingdom after then end of WWII, it was signed in March 1946. Three other countries joined to complete the "five" eyes name. In 1958 Canada joined and in 1956 New Zeland and Australia joined. This intelligence sharing agency mainly deals with singnals intelligence, which is defined as a category of intelligence compromising all communications intelligence, electronic intelligence, and foreign singals intelligence. Even though the whole agreement is still very confidential, the orginal agreement between the US and the UK was declassified in 2010. It stated, "the parties agree to the exchange of products of the following operations relating to foreign communications: a collection of traffic, acquisition of communication documents and equipment, traffic analysis, cryptanalysis, decryption and translation, acquisition of information regarding communication organizations, practices, procedures and equipment." You can read more about this by clicking here. Essentially each of the five governments can force any communications service provider to insert malware on its users' devices, ignore existing laws of five eyes directives, interfere with people's user experience, provide the government with new product designs in advance, and provide user information as requested in secret warrants. In the agreement, each of the five counties has the responsibility to look over certain regions. Britain monitors Europe, Western Russia, the Middle East, and Hong Kong. The United States monitors the Middle East, China, Russia, African, and the Caribbean. Australia monitors South and East Asia while New Zeland monitors the South Pacific and Southeast Asia. Finally, Canada monitors Russia, China, and some parts of Latin America. I had no idea that an alliance like this even existed, it is so interesting yet scary to learn about. I am going to be researching more about current news related to this group throughout the next two weeks for the group presentation.