Leo S.
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Verified by
Adam B.
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Last updated:
July 24, 2024
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We’re living in the 21st century but the time of alliances between countries is still very much alive. And while history is full of beneficial alliances that have achieved humane results, others are still raising some questions and concerns about the impact they have on people’s lives. This in particular can be applied to the 5/9/14 eyes alliances, for instance, which are essentially groups of countries that spy on one another as well as on every ordinary citizen, too. The roots of these alliances date back to WWII, evolving over time to absorb some of the world’s most powerful countries. The mass surveillance and espionage that is carried out by some of the members of this alliance has even reached some celebrities and high-ranking political people like Nelson Mandela, Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel, and many others.
The premise of the five eyes alliance were, essentially, the signing of three agreements. The Atlantic Charter was issued on 1941 to define the Allied goals for the post-war world and two years later the UK and the U.S. signed the BRUSA Agreement to facilitate the cooperation between the respective departments of defense for both countries. These set the basis for the so called ‘secret treaty’, which would be formalized as the UKUSA Agreement in 1946, launching the basis for all signal intelligence cooperation between the American NSA and UK’s GCHQ (Government Code and Cypher School) that remains to this day.
Two years later the treaty would be extended to include more countries as ‘third-party alliances’ only to finally formalize Canada, Australia and New Zealand as official members of the alliance in 1955. Over time, new world conflicts have emerged – from the Cold War to the 9/11 attacks that started the war on terror – and led the intelligence-sharing alliance to be extended to other countries, forming the six, nine and finally the 14 eyes alliance.
Nowadays, the alliance members conspire with much more than military intelligence and work together to collect and share mass surveillance data on governments and citizens.
The term five eyes alliance – or the abbreviation FVEY – owes its nomenclature to the countries that compose it. Originally, it was called “AUS/CAN/NZ/UK/US EYES ONLY” (AUSCANNZUKUS), which is a code still used today to name the abbreviations of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, United Kingdom and United States – the founders of such alliance.
The alliance was known to have existed long after its creation but it had lost some prominence until the world-famous whistleblowing case of former CIA employee Edward Snowden, who revealed the extensive surveillance techniques that are used by American agencies and their allies. Many of the privacy questions of today were brought to light thanks to Snowden’s revelations of how the NSA, the CIA, the FBI, and every other agency actively spy on U.S citizens. More than 90% of the nation’s data is collected by PRISM, a super program that gathers everything from ISPs to Facebook, Google, Apple and much more.
And, thanks to the alliance, this surveillance also took place in other countries through their respective agencies, such as the MI5 and MI6 in the UK or the Secret Intelligence Services in Australia, New Zealand and Canada.
With the constant development of technology, spying techniques have become more advanced than ever and FVEY began to enlist other powerful countries. The former French president Nicolas Sarkozy was reportedly proposed by the U.S. in 2009 for the country to join the alliance, though the initial requirement was rejected. As it turns out, only the director of the NSA approved it initially, while the director of the CIA didn’t and neither did former president Barack Obama.
Nevertheless, France eventually joined as did Denmark, the Netherlands, and Norway. The nine eyes alliance was born with a similar cooperation between the old and new countries to collect and share mass surveillance data. Afterwards, yet more countries joined the alliance to make the suitably named 14 eyes alliance, including all the former nine countries plus other powerful European nations like Belgium, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Sweden.
But the story doesn’t end there as other privacy organizations have pointed further international cooperation between the 14 eyes alliance and many others in a giant net of global surveillance and intelligence trading. The Club de Berne, for instance, is just one of them and includes all the state members of the European Union plus Norway and Switzerland.
It’s not only governments that are placed under FVEY’s surveillance, though. Notable British comedian, filmmaker, and composer Charlie Chaplin, for instance, was under surveillance from the MI5 and MI6 back in the 1950s for his alleged ties to communism, just as the former South African president, activist, and philanthropist Nelson Mandela was on CIA’s and UK’s SIS radar after critics denounced him as a terrorist. More famous people like John Lennon, Princess Diana of Wales, and more recently the German chancellor Angela Merkel among others were and still are being monitored.
The 5/9/14 eyes alliances include many of the world’s greatest nations which means that it’s hard to find a company that’s not headquartered in one of them, including VPNs. However, as stated by restoreprivacy.com, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t trust VPN companies that are located in these countries as it’s quite “difficult to determine exactly how much influence a VPN’s jurisdiction has on your privacy and data”. At the end of the day, we live in one big web of global surveillance and even if there are cases where a no-log company ended up being found to be quite the opposite, the same can still happen the other way around with trustworthy companies to be found within mass surveillance countries.
PIA is headquartered in the U.S. and is proud of its privacy efforts, despite the fact that America is not the safest country for privacy. A while back PIA alerted the world to the hidden truth behind warrant canaries, just as other companies located outside of the United States or other FVEY countries also reported users for abusive torrents in the past. Achieving complete privacy is harder than ever nowadays, but that doesn’t mean you should delete yourself from the world.
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