As per Wikipedia, “The Five Eyes (FVEY) is an Anglosphere Intelligence alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. These countries are parties to the multilateral UK-USA Agreement, a treaty for joint cooperation in signals intelligence.”
What you need to know about this alliance?
- Its formation can be traced back to World War II when Britain and America were in informal talks and USA had yet not entered the War.
- During the era of Cold War, this alliance became formalized.
- FVEY performs the function of doing international surveillance. Its main objective is to stop terrorism, cybercrime and regional conflicts in its member nations.
- They do this through intense use of Artificial Intelligence and other technologies.
- It is hot topic of discussion now because of its impact on privacy and civil liberty. They track all kinds of communications worldwide. This includes telecommunication and web communication.
- It is one of the spy alliance and is often blamed with espionage on citizens of other countries. As big data is the key to become next global leader, so FVEY has become a matter of concern for all countries.
- It involves defense intelligence, human intelligence and geospatial intelligence.
- As per media reports in 2013, PRISM, XKeyscore, Tempora, MUSCULAR, STATEROOM were some of the surveillance programs jointly operated by the Five Eyes.
There are many other strategic partnerships like the one given above. To name a few, The Nine Eyes Alliance and The Fourteen Eyes Alliance. These include more member countries, as the name suggests.
Of course data leakage is one of the biggest risk worldwide. So only time will tell whether these kind of alliances may or may not pose proportionately higher risk for developing countries.
