| Title | What are the Five Eyes, Nine Eyes, and Fourteen Eyes? | |
| Date | Tuesday August 16 2022, @07:53AM | |
| Author | janrinok | |
| Topic | ||
| from the EREs-have-it dept. | ||
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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printed from SoylentNews, What are the Five Eyes, Nine Eyes, and Fourteen Eyes? on 2024-04-19 22:10:15