Unmasking the Five Eyes’ Global Surveillance Practices
September 29th, 2014Via: GIS Watch:
The Five Eyes alliance – comprised of the United States National Security Agency (NSA), the United Kingdom’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), Canada’s Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC), the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD), and New Zealand’s Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) – is the continuation of an intelligence partnership formed in the aftermath of the Second World War. The patchwork of secret spying programmes and intelligence-sharing agreements implemented by parties to the Five Eyes arrangement constitutes an integrated global surveillance arrangement that now covers the majority of the world’s communications. Operating in the shadows and misleading the public, the Five Eyes agencies boast in secret how they “have adapted in innovative and creative ways that have led some to describe the current day as ‘the golden age of SIGINT [signals intelligence]’.”
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The Five Eyes agencies are playing a dirty game. They have found ways to infiltrate all aspects of modern communications networks: forcing companies to hand over their customers’ data under secret orders, and secretly tapping fibre optic cables between the same companies’ data centres anyway; accessing sensitive financial data through SWIFT, the world’s financial messaging system; spending years negotiating an international agreement to regulate access to the data through a democratic and accountable process, and then hacking the networks to get direct access; threatening politicians with trumped-up threats of impending cyber war while conducting intrusion operations that weaken the security of networks globally; and sabotaging encryption standards and standards bodies, thereby undermining the ability of internet users to secure information.
