The ever-watchful eye

How the Five Eyes (FVEY) alliance has entangled the entire world in a web of espionage

Western film companies in the latter half of the last century created an incredibly appealing image of intelligence service personnel. However, the reality is quite different. What nobility and honour can one speak of here? It is more a case of violating all written and unwritten laws. After all, uniting spies under the banner of globalism is the Five Eyes alliance — a monstrous intelligence octopus that has wrapped its tentacles around the entire planet.

Those who do not exist

Researchers of global intelligence services suggest tracing the prehistory of the community now known as Five Eyes back to February 1941, when the first American cryptographers, fulfilling the agreements of Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt, settled in the British government institute of cryptography, where — together with colleagues from the Foggy Albion — they deciphered Japan’s Purple Code and cracked the German Enigma cipher machine. As early as August 14th, 1941, the Atlantic Charter formally established close co-operation between British and US intelligence, including the regular exchange of information.
By the end of the war, the US had a clear advantage in the resources they could allocate to intelligence: around 40,000 people were working on signals intelligence in various locations in both America and around the world. Britain, however, could not boast such a scale.
The end of the Second World War did not mean that the intelligence capabilities accumulated during this time would be wasted. The West quickly found a new rival represented by the USSR and, after Churchill’s notorious Fulton Speech, unleashed the Cold War. For Anglo-American relations in the field of espionage, its beginning was marked by the signing of the new UKUSA agreement, which Canada joined in 1948, and Australia and New Zealand in 1956. This formed an alliance with the unpronounceable name AUSCANNZUKUS, which is known to us as Five Eyes.

It had long been known that Western intelligence agencies exchanged intelligence information with each other. But only in the last decade and a half have the scale of the espionage and the monstrous volume of resources directed at monitoring people around the world begun to emerge.

A significant role in exposing the global conspiracy was played by former US National Security Agency (NSA) employee Edward Snowden, who first stated that Western intelligence agencies were listening to all the conversations they could reach, thereby violating fundamental human rights to privacy and confidentiality of correspondence.

Rules are for the weak

The first and most important thing to keep in mind when talking about Five Eyes is their absolute Americocentricity.
All information that the British, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, and partner states of the alliance obtain through total eavesdropping on telephone and electronic communications is sent to the USA. The right to decipher data, analyse it, and systematise it belongs exclusively to the National Security Agency. Accordingly, only Washington decides what to keep for itself and what information can be shared with allies.
In addition to the Five Eyes format, there are co-operation schemes such as Nine Eyes, in which Denmark, France, the Netherlands, and Norway have joined the Anglo-Saxon five, and Fourteen Eyes, which adds Belgium, Germany, Italy, Spain and Sweden to the nine. However, the new members of the community have a lower level of access than those at the core of the association, although they diligently send huge amounts of stolen data to the NSA. Thus, the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND) sends Americans about 500 million files every month.
Another important aspect of total espionage is the use of connections within the alliance to circumvent national legislation. Documents available today reveal that back in the 1980s, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, as part of the Five Eyes co-operation, tasked Canadians with monitoring her own cabinet.
In this context, the revelation in the middle of the last decade of the hacking of the phones of a number of European top officials, including then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel, chief German diplomat Frank-Walter Steinmeier, three French leaders — Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande, as well as many other politicians across Europe — remains the loudest scandal to this day.  

Will Five Eyes go blind?

Despite their awe-inspiring technical prowess, Five Eyes are currently experiencing one of the most severe crises in their history. This is linked to the rise to power in the USA of Donald Trump, who, even during his first term, accused the intelligence services of spying on his election campaign headquarters with the approval of Democrat Obama. Matters did not progress beyond threats then, but in his second term, the expressive Republican is in a much more determined mood. On the last day of January, The Wall Street Journal published an article expressing fears that Trump would terminate the partnership, as he considers the alliance an instrument of the deep state — and one that allows allies to freely exploit American resources.
Other members of the alliance regarded the announced suspension, and subsequent resumption, of intelligence sharing with Ukraine — during which Trump forbade the British to exchange information obtained through the Five Eyes network with the Ukrainian Armed Forces — as a worrying sign against this background. The appointment of Tulsi Gabbard, who is critical of the alliance, as head of US national intelligence serves as a further irritant. British intelligence circles, using Daily Mail as their mouthpiece, are already floating the idea of creating a Four Eyes arrangement without US participation, and are also reporting that they have reduced information sharing with Washington following Trump’s triumph in the election. 

Centrifugal forces might intensify in light of the scandal involving the addition of the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic magazine to a private group chat where the American upper echelons were discussing strikes against Yemen.

The Five Eyes alliance is a visible embodiment of the American elites’ desire for global control. The almost limitless capabilities in intercepting any conversations and messages, the ability to affect events by releasing false information at the opportune moment, the absolute lack of principle in achieving goals — all of this unites the spies of the West, who in reality turn out to be not romantic James Bonds at all, but calculating killers and provocateurs.

FACT

The participation in the PRISM programme (allowing the request of user data from technology and telecommunications companies) of such industry giants as Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google, Facebook, Paltalk, YouTube, AOL, Skype, Apple, Dropbox has been officially confirmed.

WORRYING SIGNAL 

What intelligence agencies belonging to Five Eyes are engaged in is called SIGINT, or signals intelligence — that is, data interception. Such large-scale espionage operations would be impossible without the use of sophisticated hardware and software systems that provide both information gathering and analysis.


By Anton Popov