the 5 eyes

 

The Five Eyes (FVEY) is an intelligence agency comprising 5 English-speaking countries, consisting of the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Australia, and New Zealand. They originally assembled in 1945 after World War II. They signed the agreement between 1946 USA and Great Britain in 1946. In the follow-up years, Canada in 1948 and the Oceanic duo in 1956. All 5 countries can share information between all 5 countries and must share information with one another. Some of the key roles of this group are intelligence sharing, early warning. This shows that it can see what terrorists are doing and share it to prevent an attack. Disturbed terrorists, they can prevent Ideologies. They also perform post-attack investigations, gaining information to find out who is behind terrorist activities. FVEY has been credited with preventing numerous terrorist plots involving transportation systems, public buildings and sensitive locations. 

For most of FVEY’s existence, it has been confidential that the former prime minister of Australia didn’t even know about it. Some documents were declassified in 2010, which meant FVEY was exposed, and with Edward Snowden leaking additional information in 2013, its existence was confirmed. Recently, Canada had to temporarily stop sharing information. We don’t want to know who is sharing with whom, so it was obvious in the metadata to see what country was sharing information, which is a bad way of stalking terrorists. It’s great that we share information because it can prevent terrorist attacks and it has in the past, as mentioned above. One of the most interesting things is that if it’s a true emergency, they can expand from 5 eyes to 9 eyes to 14 if necessary. The 14 eyes are in Europe.  

Something interesting I learned is that one country has access to look at other servers via the law in the country that they are spying on. For example, it’s illegal for Great Britain to be looking at other people’s servers in the United Kingdom. What the country can do is they can call the USA to look into their servers to see if there is any trouble in the country. They can spy on the browser. Surveillance can help catch criminals and prevent terrorist activities, but as we learned in class, surveillance is not always benevolent, and surveillance on regular citizens is a sensitive topic. While the agencies may be looking for terrorists, they are also potentially violating First Amendment rights to free political speech and are considered government overreach. We cannot know exactly who or what FVEY or any intelligence agency is looking into. Casting broad surveillance over entire populations can cause many issues and put people at risk, yet this is what they do. We may ask if our privacy is at risk from these agencies, but we also have to ask if even more would be at risk without them. So, some things we can do to protect ourselves as individuals are to hide our IP addresses, secure our passwords and browsers, and use encryption. This is good advice for anyone living in the modern era

AntiWar

 

Anti-War

It seems like we are always hearing about anti-war protests. People are protesting the war in Gaza and the war in Ukraine, so we are still able to protest as citizens, at least for now. If we think about the anti-war movement, we think about the Vietnam War protests in 1965 through the late 70s. We think about protests taking place on college campuses. We do hear about protests about wars in the news, but we never talk about the hot spot of the war itself.  We know what these protesters are complaining about, usually it is human rights violations taking place in the war, the deaths, and the violence against people, animals and land. We can read about what started a war, but it is usually in vague terms with buzzwords and rage bait thrown about to get the reader upset. And the readers get upset, but what can they do about it? And what are they upset about? The war or the cause of the war? 

If we wonder why we went to war in the Middle East in the 2000s, we may hear about weapons of mass destruction, but as we know now, there were no weapons like that. Were we lied to? Why were we lied to? What was the real cause? We never hear about it. The news doesn’t explain why these wars happen, and the government doesn’t want citizens to go up against it, so we know there are wars, and we know there are protests, and that is about all we know, except that the media does not seem to be doing its job in explaining. Why? This is all because of the First Amendment. People have the right to protest against anything like the government and businesses. Sometimes we protest in person, sometimes we protest with our wallet. This amendment gives us the right to free speech with very few exceptions, but there are exceptions and the one that is in play here is incitement. In criminal law, incitement is the encouragement of another person to commit a crime. Depending on the jurisdiction, some or all types of incitement may be illegal. Where illegal, it is known as an inchoate offense, where harm is intended but may or may not have actually occurred. 

So how is writing about the war or expressing anti-war sentiment encouraging someone to commit a crime? The government believes that if people know the details of wars, they may resist the government’s actions. This resistance could be violent and that could be a crime. If a news organization is accused of incitement, they would lose their credentials and reporters could be imprisoned. While looking at the website Anti-War, it’s confusing to understand what each article means.  It’s almost like it's a jumble on purpose for deniability. They want to make you see the facts and make sure they don't get caught for incitement. It leaves you with questions on what is possibly going on with this war. In another website, The American Conservative, they talk about wars in small details because the organization does not want to get in trouble and they can avoid that by only looking at small details of larger wars. The news organization does not need to be violent; the people’s violent response is caused by the news organization according to the law.