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