What Are the Five Eyes, Nine Eyes, and Fourteen Eyes?:
The Five, Nine, and Fourteen Eyes are agreements between the surveillance agencies (the "eyes") of several countries. The original group is the Five Eyes (abbreviated as FVEY)—consisting of the U.S., the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand—which shortly after the second world war signed a deal (the UKUSA pact) to share intelligence among each other.
Over the years, four other countries informally joined the original five (the Netherlands, France, Denmark, and Norway), making nine.
A few years after, five more joined (Belgium, Italy, Germany, Spain, and Sweden) to come to the grand total of 14.
However, these three groups are different from each other in what they share with each other.
Naturally, deals struck between spies aren't accessible to regular people, but we do know a fair bit about these three groups, especially the original five. This is because their founding document, the UKUSA agreement, was made public in 2010. The British National Archives has the full text.
Probably the most important thing to highlight is that this deal isn't explicitly between the governments of any of the countries involved, but between their spy agencies, particularly those tasked with what's called signals intelligence or SIGINT in spy-speak, which boils down to communications surveillance like wire-tapping. In the case of the U.S., it's the agency now called the NSA, while in Britain, this role is filled by GCHQ.
Of course, most of the governments involved were aware of the deal, though not all. The Australian government was kept in the dark until 1973, for example, which gives you an idea of the impunity with which these surveillance agencies were operating.
The purpose of the Five eyes was and is to automatically share information through the STONEGHOST network, as well as share technology and methods. The other two associations, the Nine and Fourteen Eyes, are removed one and two steps away from this inner circle, respectively.
Again, details are sketchy, but it appears the four extra members that make up the Nine Eyes have to request permission to get information and don't receive everything, while the five that make up the Fourteen Eyes get even less.
On top of these "official" members, there also seem to be deals in place with countries like Israel and South Korea, though we don't know much beyond that.
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Developer Poul-Henning Kamp (PHK) has written a brief post in the July issue of Communications of the ACM about the cost of surveillance having become negligible. Furthermore, in many cases that surveillance is actually required either by large governments or by large corporations, thus making it cheaper to go with the flow and track people and their online activities very closely as it becomes more and more expensive for programmers and developers to even try to avoid tracking people and their online activities.
During his keynote address, risk management specialist Dan Geer asked the 2014 Black Hat audience a question: "What if surveillance is too cheap to meter?"
As is the case with electricity from nuclear power, technology has little to do with it: This is a question about economy, specifically the economy of the path of least resistance.
Surveillance is ridiculously cheap for governments. Many have passed laws that obligate the surveillance industry—most notably, the mobile network operators—to share their take "at cost," and we know law enforcement uses it a lot.
So why is so much cheap surveillance available for purchase?
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Tuesday August 16 2022, @09:34AM (4 children)
The answer to all three questions is "A threat to privacy".
(Score: 3, Touché) by Snospar on Tuesday August 16 2022, @10:03AM (1 child)
No, no, you're thinking about Facebook and Google there. These SIGINT guys don't sell on the data they gather and tend to keep it very securely locked up. You could say (tongue in cheek) that they're protecting privacy.
Huge thanks to all the Soylent volunteers without whom this community (and this post) would not be possible.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 16 2022, @11:50AM
There could be an opportunity here. Have the NSA sell data to China before China gets around to hacking it.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Immerman on Tuesday August 16 2022, @12:47PM
That's putting it lightly.
One of the most infamous effects of the information sharing is that all the various intelligence agencies that are strictly forbidden from domestic spying (because the information could be so easily abused for political ends), instead routinely spy on each other's citizens and then share the information.
All the same threats to democracy, none of the risk of your illegal spying coming back to bite you in the ass.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Spook brat on Tuesday August 16 2022, @04:35PM
I have a parent who worked for GCHQ at RAF Menwith Hill (hence my username), and decided to send them a gag gift for their birthday:
Behold. [zazzle.co.uk]
They, ummm, didn't think it was as funny as I did...
When I called to ask if they'd gotten it, the response was, "Oh, that was you? Pardon me while I hang up and call off a security incident investigation..."
They weren't joking.
Travel the galaxy! Meet fascinating life forms... And kill them [schlockmercenary.com]
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Tuesday August 16 2022, @12:32PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjPjD7YpX0U [youtube.com]
compiling...
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 16 2022, @01:37PM
And how do you know that a VPN is trustworthy? Just because they say so? What if they've been told to say so? If they're lying or incompetent you might actually be making it even easier for the snoops/authorities by having all your traffic go through the provider and linked to your VPN account/login. In contrast if your traffic is mixed with other Starbucks WiFi customer traffic you might have a better chance of saying "it wasn't me".
If you really can't afford to have the 5 eyes snooping on you, you better not use a VPN in those jurisdictions.
Don't ever underestimate the long arm of the USA:
https://www.zdnet.com/article/national-security-letters-everything-you-need-to-know/ [zdnet.com]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evo_Morales_grounding_incident [wikipedia.org]
https://www.businessinsider.com/new-footage-shows-just-how-crazy-the-kim-dotcom-raid-was-2012-8 [businessinsider.com]
https://www.businessinsider.com/notorious-russian-hacker-kidnapped-by-us-was-nabbed-in-the-maldives-2015-3 [businessinsider.com]
Whether or not the targets deserved it or not is beyond the scope of this.