Five Eyes Watching You
A Deep State Exposé
In the 21st century, most intelligence agencies operate more or less autonomously from the governments that fund them, particularly in America. After all, Trump will come and go, but the CIA will remain long after he is gone. This is what is meant by the “Deep State”, and it’s responsible for the largest spy network in recorded history. The Five Eyes are a supra-national intelligence alliance comprising the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United Kingdom. For decades, the countries involved in this global espionage ring have been spying on each other and sharing their collected information in order to circumvent restrictive domestic regulations on the surveillance of citizens, by way of organizations like the CIA and MI6. Since September 11th of 2001, a number of these groups have significantly expanded their surveillance capabilities, with tremendous emphasis having been placed on monitoring the Internet.
The origins of the Five Eyes alliance can be traced back to the Atlantic Charter of 1941 which was issued to lay out the goals of the post-war efforts. Five years later a treaty was formalized by the US and the UK and the agreement still forms the basis for all signal intelligence cooperation between the NSA and the GCHQ to this very day. Despite the impact of whistleblowers, many experts in the intelligence community believe that no amount of outrage will ever affect the Five Eyes relationship, which remains to be one of the most comprehensive data sharing alliances in human history. What’s more, since their intelligence is gathered from multiple sources, it’s not restricted to signals intelligence and often involves defense intelligence as well as human intelligence. So, they tell us our privacy is being stolen in the name of national security, but in reality, we are just being spied on for the sake of being spied on. It’s inhumane and entirely impractical for the government to just indiscriminately track and monitor everyone in this way.
Personal privacy should be the right of every law-abiding citizen in the 21st century, but it is being taken away more and more with each passing day. To make matters worse, mass surveillance has never successfully thwarted a terrorist attack. Not once! It’s completely invasive and entirely ineffective as a means of security. Most people have no idea how much we really lost on 9/11. The terrorist attack gave Five Eyes a seemingly legitimate reason to expand. This rapidly accelerated the rate at which the Deep State grew. This turned the nations of Five Eyes into much stronger Surveillance States, particularly in the US and the UK. This is nothing short of a Digital Age use of Cold War national security resources against the citizens of the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. There’s just no good reason for Five Eyes to record and share everyone’s phone calls, text messages, emails, search histories, and social media entries. Why do they need all of our selfies? What could they possibly do with millions of dick pics, and all the other nonsense that’s out there? Do they blackmail people? What’s the point of harvesting all of our data? Better yet, do we really even need to sacrifice our privacy, and our democracy, just to get what they claim to be security?
Oh yeah, by the way, just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, it turns out that there are really nine other countries watching you, and Fourteen Eyes is just getting started…
This is dedicated to Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, and all the other heroes who have fought on the front lines of information warfare. We never would have known about these things without them.
