Five Eyes

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. Informally, Five Eyes can also refer to the group of intelligence agencies of these countries.

The origins of the FVEY can be traced to informal secret meetings during World War II between British and American code-breakers, which started before the US formally entered the war, followed by the Allies' 1941 Atlantic Charter that established their vision of the post-war world. Canadian academic Srdjan Vucetic argues the alliance emerged from Winston Churchill's Iron Curtain speech in 1946, which warned of open conflict with the Soviet bloc unless the Anglosphere democracies learned to cooperate:

Neither the sure prevention of war, nor the continuous rise of world organisation will be gained without what I have called the fraternal association of the English-speaking peoples. This means a special relationship between the British Commonwealth and Empire and the United States... the continuance of the intimate relationship between our military advisers, leading to common study of potential dangers...

As the Cold War deepened, the intelligence sharing arrangement became formalised under the ECHELON surveillance system in the 1960s. This was initially developed by the FVEY to monitor the communications of the former Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, although it is now used to monitor communications worldwide.

In the late 1990s, the existence of ECHELON was disclosed to the public, triggering a major debate in the European Parliament and, to a lesser extent, the United States Congress and the British Parliament. The FVEY further expanded their surveillance capabilities during the course of the "war on terror", with much emphasis placed on monitoring the World Wide Web. Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden described the Five Eyes as a "supra-national intelligence organisation that does not answer to the known laws of its own countries". Documents leaked by Snowden in 2013 revealed that the FVEY has been spying on one another's citizens and sharing the collected information with each other, although the FVEY nations maintain that this was done legally. It has been claimed that FVEY nations have been sharing intelligence in order to circumvent domestic laws, but only one court case in Canada has found any FVEY nation breaking domestic laws when sharing intelligence with a FVEYs partner.

In spite of continued controversy over its methods, the Five Eyes relationship remains one of the most comprehensive known espionage alliances in human history.

Since processed intelligence is gathered from multiple sources, the intelligence shared is not restricted to signals intelligence (SIGINT) and often involves defence intelligence as well as human intelligence (HUMINT) and geospatial intelligence (GEOINT).