Blog Post #9: EOTO 2- Five Eyes

 What is Five Eyes?

The Five Eyes Alliance (abbreviated as FVEY in government documents) is a cooperative intelligence network that monitors the electronic communications of citizens and foreign governments. The Alliance includes five countries (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, The United States, and The United Kingdom). FVEY is often described as the world’s most intelligent alliance as they all work together as one massive team to share intelligence information and technology with each other. There is actually no formal structure to Five Eyes as instead agreements occur through information sharing. Within Five Eyes, there is a large sense of mutual trust between the five nations to ensure that they do not target each other as they share information with one another to ensure their national interests are being protected. The alliance itself uses various communication methods such as signals intelligence (SIGINT) to monitor the citizens of the other nations part of Five Eyes. Information collected through Five Eyes includes various forms of private communication including telephone calls, emails, text messages, etc. In addition, records of user data from some of the major tech companies like Google, YouTube, and Facebook are collected. Many responsibilities fall on each member country as typically three to five government agencies are involved with one to two roles being assigned to each agency.

History of Five Eyes

The origins of Five Eyes goes way back to World War II where there was a urge for vital information to be shared mainly between Britain and the United States so both countries could enhance their close war effort. The Five Eyes was then formally founded in the aftermath of World War II through the multilateral agreement for co-operation in signals intelligence (SIGINT), known as the UKUSA Agreement, on 5 March 1946. Initially, compromising only the UK and the United States, it expanded to also include Canada in 1948 and Australia and New Zealand in 1956, all of these last three English-speaking countries, members of the Commonwealth of Nations and with similar political systems when compared to Britain. The “Five Eye” term was created from the lengthy ‘AUS/CAN/NZ/UK/ Eyes Only’ classification level that included the ‘eyes’ that could have access to high profile papers and information. During the 1950's, Five Eyes shared intelligence and various communications during the Cold War, Gulf War, and Vietnam War. As these five countries joined forces together, a stronger relationship among these nations was formed, especially Britain and the United States was made allowing for more unity across the alliance. Over the years, the surveillance program has steadily increased resulting in more data being able to monitored more proficiently. The intelligence sharing agreement came through fruition in 1990 under the ECHELON surveillance system. This was made because the government had been invading our privacy and tracking our steps, so Five Eyes had the hope of using the project of ECHELON as a method to track enemies within and outside the United States that would help create a safer living experience for those residing in their nations.

Who monitors what?

Each country apart of Five Eyes is responsible for "monitoring" other countries and areas in the world. These countries all work together as one massive team by dividing up the work. Listed below are the areas of where each country monitors...

Britain: Europe, Western Russia, Middle East and Hong Kong

U.S.: Middle East, China, Russia, Africa and the Caribbean

Australia: South and East Asia 

New Zealand: South Pacific and Southeast Asia 

Canada: Interior of Russia and China and parts of Latin America

The addition of an Asian country in Five Eyes could help out with monitoring what's happening in Asia. As shown in which areas of the world each member country monitors, they are all looking at least one area of Asia, proving that Asia, specifically China is posing as the biggest threat to the members of Five Eyes right now. The members of Five Eyes can only research and do so much because they are not geographically located in Asia and therefore do not have as much access to surveillance in these areas, but an addition of an Asian country can make it easier for these bigger countries to receive access to information about China.

Positive Effects of Five Eyes

Five Eyes was able to bring a sense of unity in the world. Having come to existence shortly after a time with severe conflict with WWII, it was nice to see that nations were joining forces in hopes of helping each other and protecting one another from any danger and harm. The relationship between the U.S. and UK was able to be displayed first and then countries like Canada, Australia, and New Zealand allowed for more diversity and variety to be incorporated into the alliance. With all of these five countries do speak English, these nations were easily able to communicate with one another making it easy to formulate plans and protect each other’s privacy. The presence of five powerful nations also allowed for a better look with these five being together as one force. A country like the U.S. is already viewed as the world's most powerful nation alone but when you look at it being associated with ANOTHER powerful nation like the U.K. it reduces the chance that another nation will try to take them on. A good sports analogy for this would be a college basketball team thinking they can beat an adult rec league basketball team until they find out Steph Curry will be playing on the team. The college basketball team then still feels confident they can hang in there because all they have to contain is Curry and it’s a fair ball game. Obviously that task is MUCH easier said than done but it’s still possible. However, moments later they find out LeBron James will also be a part of the rec league team with Curry. This is just like the U.K. joining Five Eyes after the U.S. giving it more awareness and credibility.

Negative Effects and Controversy of Five Eyes

Despite Five Eyes being known as the world's most intelligent alliance, there has been some immense controversy that has been sparked over time throughout its existence. In 2013, information about Five Eyes had been leaked to the public which raised many eyebrows considering that this whole alliance was about these nations working together to protect their national security and privacy. As a result, many citizens of these Five Eyes nations felt displeased that their privacy was being invaded. Then in 2016, the U.K. created the Investigatory Powers Act which created for debate over the overall balance between privacy and security. Overall, people from these nations just feel that this whole Five Eyes Alliance is a form of spying and is a complete violation of their basic human rights. The intention of the alliance was that its activities would focus solely on foreign countries, not formulating communication records from their own citizens. Five Eyes has targeted many major companies through its existence including Google, Yahoo, and Mastercard. Today, the alliance is just having trouble meeting the standards of what it was actually created for which was for the five nations to just simply share information with one another in a trustworthy manner. In addition, today, all members of Five Eyes are dealing with ongoing issues with China. Certain countries like the U.S. and the UK have been dealing with more severe conflicts with China than the other nations. This has caused for each nation to have its own series of problems to deal with against China and it seems like the nations part of Five Eyes have not been able to fully come together and combine their power as one full force to take down China successfully yet. Each of these nations even the U.S. has been threatened and harmed by China in some fashion recently caused for frustration to be sparked across these nations as these issues are also affecting the citizens of these various countries.

Prevalence in today's society

Because of China's increased attempt at messing with the nations part of Five Eyes, there have been increased talks that more countries could be added to the alliance. South Korea, Japan, India, and Germany have discussed as the four potential nations that could join. An addition of an Asian country especially would help increase the presence of the alliance in the Indo-Pacific Region where the U.S. is uniting allies to counter China’s growing power. China has posed as the biggest threat to Five Eyes and now many consider New Zealand to be the weakest link of the Five Eyes because China has recently gotten very close to the political core of New Zealand which could cause severe disruption for the mission of Five Eyes which is to take down its biggest threats which are China and Russia. Five Eyes is essentially planning to take down China and Russia together as one massive unit and having an Asian country can help increase the probability of the alliance taking a country like China down. The U.S. and UK are actually the two nations that are most in favor of adding a country like Japan to the Five Eyes alliance. This makes sense as both the U.S. and UK are considered as two of the top 5 most powerful nations in the world. China is also one of those other nations with Russia and Germany rounding out the top 5 making it a major competition when it comes to the U.S. and UK attempting to ensure that China and Russia do not steal their power in any sense nor do they rise above them in terms of being the more powerful nation overall. However, there are some drawbacks to a country like Japan joining at this instant. For starters, rushing Japan into Five Eyes could cause errors to be committed when it comes to them communicating with other nations. Keep in mind that all of these nations in Five Eyes have been working together as a 5 course unit since 1958. That’s a LONG time!!! Any addition of a new nation would be a new change that would take some getting accustomed to and for a nation like Japan they could feel heavily pressured to play their role in the Five Eyes proficiently. Especially since these nations are looking for a country that can compete with China, Japan’s role is not going to be something small, it’s going to be big and perhaps the most important one for the time being if they were to become a part of Five Eyes. The level of Japan’s relationship with the countries in Five Eyes is still up in the air right now too. The Japanese Government has spoken more highly of countries like the U.S., UK, and Australia recently but it’s one thing to be doing work together in a loose manner versus actually cooperating together as a full unit. Furthermore, while Japan does have access to a fairly solid intelligence system at the moment which could bring a lot of benefit to Five Eyes, the risks it brings is very high and may be a little too high for the other nations to go ahead fully risk it by adding Japan to the mix. As a nation, Japan needs to continue to work on expanding its cyber security system to ensure that it is able to share information with other members in an intelligent and discrete way. The last thing the U.S. or UK would want is for information from Japan to get leaked and then China and/or Russia finds out. Japan is almost there with being on that level where it can compete with other countries like China and Russia, but it’s still missing some of the final touches to ultimately make it a reliable member of Five Eyes.

Conclusion

To conclude, Five Eyes is still a VERY critical component of our society today. Its future outlook is in question right now because we don't know if more nations will be added to it soon or not. It has been a LONG time since a nation was added to the alliance and as I mentioned in the last section of my blog, a nation needs to be fully ready to enter and help out the Five Eyes alliance. There is little to no room for error and especially with countries like China and Russia attempting to take over as the world's most powerful nation, Five Eyes needs to add a country that is going to help them fight that battle aggressively and proficiently. The whole concept of Five Eyes is almost set up like a movie with the nations of Five Eyes being the protagonists and then countries like China and Russia being the antagonists. It shall be reminded that the nations part of the Five Eyes alliance still have faced immense controversy themselves and need to be careful to not go overboard and harm their own citizens in the process of battling against China and Russia. Verbal discussions between these nations can easily result in the start of a war which would be COMPLETELY unbeneficial for everybody. Perhaps a nation will be added to the Five Eyes alliance as early as the end of this year. It will be curious to see how that whole process unfolds, how the world reacts to the news, and most importantly how the new nation affects the alliance of Five Eyes. Obviously, if another nation were to join, the name of the alliance would have to change to Six Eyes, Seven Eyes, and so on. I'm a big fan of Five Eyes. You've got Five Eyes, Five Guys, that all sounds great right?! Only time will tell if the Five Eyes alliance expands, if the participating nations of the alliance can increase their reputation, keep control, and accurately defend themselves from threatening nations such as China and Russia. The Five Eyes alliance has not even existed for 100 years, but it has already had such an immense impact on world history and U.S. history more specifically. It can almost be guaranteed that its role in society will continue to rise and the discussion of Five Eyes will gain more attention across mainstream media platforms VERY soon.