How the Five Eyes alliance fuels global surveillance

The Five Eyes (FVEY), Nine Eyes, and Fourteen Eyes alliances are intelligence sharing agreements between specific countries. Those countries united for the sole purpose of monitoring and sharing the activity of internet users to protect national security.

The Five Eyes alliance, also known as FVEY, has the least number of members but it is the oldest and most prominent of the three alliances. It was formed after World War II between the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The genesis of the idea was born from the UKUSA Agreement, in which the above countries agreed to cooperate for signals intelligence, or SIGINT.

The Nine Eyes alliance includes the original five members of the Five Eyes, as well as Denmark, France, the Netherlands, and Norway. These countries entered into an alliance as an intelligence-sharing partnership to enhance their surveillance capabilities. The goal of the Nine Eyes alliance is to counter terrorism and other security threats.

The Fourteen Eyes is an intelligence alliance that unites 14 countries — the original nine from the Nine Eyes agreement and an additional five: Germany, Belgium, Italy, Spain, and Sweden. The alliance was formed in 2010, when participating countries signed a series of agreements to expand their intelligence sharing capabilities.

The Five Eyes, Nine Eyes, and Fourteen Eyes alliances allow their members to share intelligence, which can help improve national security and counter terrorism. However, there are people criticizing these alliances for potential violations of privacy and civil liberties, as well as for their lack of transparency and accountability. Member countries receive data by monitoring users’ online activity, from ISPs and other online trackers, as well as by phone tapping. In 2013, NSA leaks exposed the FVEY for operating secret surveillance schemes and unlawfully spying on their citizens.

The main differences between the Five Eyes, Nine Eyes, and 14 Eyes alliances are the number of member countries and the scope of their activities in the field of surveillance and intelligence sharing.

The Five Eyes Alliance formed after WW2, when after the Cold War, the UK and US agreed to collaborate on intercepting the secret activities of the Soviet Union and share mass surveillance data.

On a mission to penetrate mainland Europe, four more countries joined to create the Nine Eyes.

These four additional countries (Denmark, the Netherlands, France, and Norway) can use the same resources as the Five Eyes but cannot access all of the data collected by them. Nine Eyes nations may also share their data with the NSA or GCHQ secret agencies.

Then, five more countries joined the Nine Eyes to create the Fourteen Eyes. The Fourteen Eyes alliance is not as potent in its activities as the Five Eyes. They can be seen as affiliates of the other alliances, but that is not to say they are any less involved with mass surveillance and intelligence sharing.

One of the most threatening things about this intelligence alliance and intelligence sharing is that they allow countries to spy on their own people by proxy. For example, it may not be legal for the UK to spy on its citizens, but they can ask the US to do so since they’re both in the Five Eyes Alliance.

The 5 Eyes, 9 Eyes, and 14 Eyes Alliances cover the majority of the world’s internet users, but, as online literacy grows in other countries, so does their desire to join the 14 Eyes alliance. Are we heading into a totalitarian surveillance world? So far, we know that the following countries are also close allies of the Fourteen Eyes intelligence alliance:

• Israel
• Japan
• South Korea
• Singapore
• The British Overseas Territories

If you live in any of the mentioned countries, your right to online anonymity is near impossible. Everything you do online is likely to be tracked: the websites you visit, the time you spend online, everything you type into search engines, your personal information, IP address, and more.

Since we now have evidence that the Five Eyes Alliance, along with the other Eyes Alliances, could be involved in all kinds of insidious surveillance schemes and intelligence sharing, we don’t know how intimate their surveillance could get. Five Eyes intelligence could have gathered information that could be stored forever or, worse, you could accidentally end up as a government target based on your search history.

Check out our video on the Five Eyes alliance below.

While there are many ways to hide your online activity, one tool in particular can help combat unwarranted surveillance from the Five Eyes Alliance: a virtual private network (VPN). VPNs are legal in all Five Eyes countries.

A VPN hides your internet activity by sending your data through its encrypted servers instead of the commercial ones owned by your ISP. If anyone tried to decipher your traffic, it would be total gibberish to them.

PRO TIP: Private browsing tabs like Incognito mode will NOT hide your browsing from your ISP. It just makes sure your activity isn’t saved in the device’s history.

Here are some other bonuses of using NordVPN.

• Get strong privacy and security: NordVPN hides your IP address as well as everything you do online so nothing can be traced back to you. As NordVPN keeps no connection data of its customers, we cannot link connection data to a specific user.
• Use NordVPN on up to 10 devices: The NordVPN app works on smartphones, laptops, PCs, and browsers. Just switch it on to instantly encrypt everything you do online.
• Provides additional security features: The Threat Protection feature blocks trackers that follow you around the internet, so you can browse the web privately, without leaving a trace. Threat Protection also warns you before you accidentally stumble upon a malware-ridden site and prevents annoying ads from ruining your browsing experience. NordVPN also comes with Meshnet, a free feature that allows you to create your own private network, routing traffic through encrypted tunnels to another device.