The Five Eyes, Nine Eyes, and Fourteen Eyes Explained

What is the Five Eyes / Nine Eyes / Fourteen Eyes alliance?

Certain countries have formed alliances to create a mass surveillance beast peering into the lives of their citizens. The different alliances make up what is known as the Five Eyes, Nine Eyes, and Fourteen Eyes.

• Five Eyes Countries: United Kingdom, Unites States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand
• Nine Eyes Countries: Five Eyes plus Denmark, France, the Netherlands, and Norway
• Fourteen Eyes Countries: Nine Eyes plus Germany, Belgium, Italy, Spain, and Sweden. The “full-house“ of Eyes is also officially known as SIGINT Seniors Europe, or "SSEUR".

The foundation alliance with the most power is the Five Eyes (FVEY) with the US National Security Agency (NSA) and the UK's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) being the ringleaders. They, together with the state intelligence agencies of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand are bound by an agreement to share signals intelligence, or “SIGINT”.

According to the NSA website, SIGINT is defined as: “...intelligence derived from electronic signals and systems used by foreign targets, such as communications systems, radars, and weapons systems that provides a vital window for our nation into foreign adversaries' capabilities, actions, and intentions.”

The problem is the surveillance never just focused on “foreign targets”. In fact, as we'll see, every citizen is fair game. More on that later.

The additional countries making up the Nine and Fourteen Eyes are considered third-party countries. They still conduct mass surveillance and can trade raw data but they have less access to the Five Eyes database.

Very little is known about the way in which the Nine Eyes and Fourteen Eyes alliances are structured and work. But we do know that the alliances exist and that they collect and share data on a MASSIVE scale.

IP addresses, browsing history, phone calls, video calls, private messages, and so much more are all being scanned by the “Eyes”.

It has been claimed that this invasive mass surveillance is essential in the fight against terrorism and organized crime. But many of the practices have been unethical, breaching human rights, and they ultimately sacrifice the privacy of millions of innocent people.

Even though in most democratic countries it's illegal for a government to spy on its own citizens, it's a minor inconvenience easily bypassed by the FVEY alliance. For example, in 1983, former UK Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher made use of the Canadian intelligence service to spy on two British ministers whom she thought “weren't on side”.

Why spy on your own when you can just ask one of the alliance buddies to do it for you?

Of course, none of this was out in the open at the time.

For the best part of 70 years, the existence of the Five Eyes alliance was nothing more than a conspiracy theory. But thanks to a few brave whistleblowers and relentless journalists, the world now knows that it is very real.

Let's look at some of the details they uncovered.

A brief history of the Five Eyes

FVEY evolved from a secret treaty signed in 1946 between UK Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) and the US National Security Agency (NSA).

The pact called the UKUSA Agreement made official the intelligence-sharing relationship that had formed between the WWII allies during their fight against the Nazis.

The war may have ended but there was a new threat emerging in the East with the Soviet Union as “Bad Guy Number 1”.

As the Cold War era began heating up, the alliance needed more “eyes”. In 1948, the pact was extended to include Canada, and later, in 1956, Australia and New Zealand joined the secret alliance. The term “Five Eyes” came from a shortening of the classification level of documents that were for “AUS/CAN/NZ/UK/US EYES ONLY".

The FVEY countries worked together to create a global communications monitoring program to intercept satellite messages.

The umbrella program, code-named, FROSTING included two sub-programs:

• TRANSIENT, targeting the Soviet Union's communications satellites used for military and government communications, and
• ECHELON, targeting the west's Intelsat satellites used for TV broadcasts and for private, government, and commercial communications.

It was the existence of ECHELON that got the most attention and caused the most concern, as this was a mass surveillance system specifically set up by the West to spy on the West.

The secret of government mass surveillance was out

In 1988, investigative journalist Duncan Campbell wrote about a secret mass surveillance system in his New Statesman article entitled “Somebody's Listening”. But intelligence officials denied its existence and it was brushed under the carpet.

Almost ten years later in 1997, New Zealand journalist, Nicky Hager described the very same program in his article “Exposing the Global Surveillance System”. In it, Hager spoke of an indiscriminate mass surveillance system designed to intercept very large quantities of messages and scan them for pre-programmed keywords.

If this was indeed true, it would mean that every word of every message ever sent, no matter the sender or receiver, was being read. Hager's claims were substantial enough to spook the European Parliament into conducting its own investigation.

In 2001, they published their findings in a report stating,

“...the existence of a global system for intercepting communications, operating by means of cooperation proportionate to their capabilities among the USA, the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand under the UKUSA Agreement, is no longer in doubt; whereas it seems likely, in view of the evidence and the consistent pattern of statements from a very wide range of individuals and organizations, including American sources, that its name is in fact ECHELON.”

But it wasn't until 2013 that they finally had definitive proof.

Edward Snowden's NSA revelations included documents that directly referred to ECHELON. But it went much further.

The thousands of documents also presented evidence of the NSA infecting 50,000 global networks with spyware, collecting telephone records, tapping into the servers of Facebook, Yahoo, and Google, collecting records of emails, photos, and videos, and tapping fiber-optic cables to gain access to phone calls and internet traffic. These documents also mentioned how the NSA shared this information with its FVEY partners.

The Five Eyes today

You might think that with such shocking revelations, the Five Eyes mass surveillance program would wind down its activities. No chance!

While the US and UK governments did face some legal action in the wake of the leaked NSA, it's hard to know what (if any) surveillance practices actually changed. Surveillance is, of course, a job done in secret.

In some instances, particularly in the case of the UK, the government actually passed legislation in 2016 allowing intelligence agencies to continue certain surveillance activities. This legislation was nicknamed the “Snooper's Charter” and has since been deemed “partially” illegal.

Snowden's revelations may not have brought down the system, but what it did do was make people much more aware of government mass surveillance. In an interview with The Guardian five years after he exposed the NSA, Snowden said,

“The government and corporate sector preyed on our ignorance. But now we know. People are aware now. People are still powerless to stop it but we are trying. The revelations made the fight more even.”

But is it really?

Pitting everyday internet users against the mass surveillance power of the Five Eyes and its' nine other sidekicks is hardly a fair fight. And it would be very naive to think that it's only these 14 countries that are in cahoots.

It's not just the 14 Eyes...

Many VPN service providers use the fact that their server is outside of the 14 Eyes countries as a privacy plus point. But just because a server isn't located in a 14 Eyes jurisdiction doesn't necessarily mean that it is safe from mass surveillance.

First of all, pretty much every single country has its own intelligence service and you can bet that they will be snooping on internet activity, at least to some extent.

Some countries, not within the 14 Eyes, have issues with VPNs. Governments, particularly those that like to censor internet content will either restrict the use of VPNs or ban them completely.

Then there are countries like Russia that allow VPNs to operate but only if the government has access to the servers. Or India, where they require VPNs to log and store user information. Check out our list of countries with VPN restrictions in place.

Just because a country isn't in the fold of an official alliance, doesn't mean that they don't conduct its own mass surveillance and it also doesn't mean that it won't cooperate with a surveillance request from a 14 Eyes country.

For example, the Swiss Federal Intelligence Service (NDB) has confirmed that it shares intelligence reports with Europol, and other global intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

Recently Swiss agencies cooperated in an operation that saw 150 people arrested in a dark web drug bust. As did the Bulgarian agency, the General Directorate Combating Organized Crime. Bulgaria is also not a 14 Eyes country.

So, how can you protect yourself from all these Eyes?

State-level mass surveillance is pretty much impossible to avoid 100%. With the right tools and amount of care, you can give yourself the best chance of protecting your privacy from overly invasive surveillance. Here are a few tips to safeguard your online identity, private communication, and your daily browsing activity.

Use privacy-focused email services

Gmail may be the most popular email inbox, but coming from the data-hungry beast that is Google, it's not the most secure. Look for an email service provider that will allow you to create alias email addresses and make sure they use some form of end-to-end encryption.

Use privacy-oriented browsers

Just as with our point on the emails, if you want more privacy, steer clear of Chrome. If you care about privacy protection then there are much better browser options out there with fewer trackers. Try DuckDuckGo, Brave, Ahola, or Firefox. Or check out the Tor browser. The onion routing network is a favorite browser option for journalists, activists, and anyone wishing to bypass censorship or have better online anonymity.

But keep in mind, while these privacy-focused browsers are a useful tool, they aren't a complete anonymity cloak. Most of them will stop some tracking and some fingerprinting, but there are hundreds of data points that make up a digital fingerprint that allows identification.

The Tor browser is known to be the most private among all of the privacy-orientated browsers, but even that struggles with fingerprinting. To avoid it you'd have to disable Javascript, which would result in most websites not running. And it does also slow down the loading of websites.

Don't overshare on social media

Social media isn't just a way for your friends to keep track of what you're up to. The amount of information we share across our social media accounts can paint a very clear picture of who we are, where we live, grew up, interact with, what our opinions are on certain topics, and so much more. Even if you were to delete photos or posts from your profiles, thanks to screenshots and websites such as Wayback Machine, your posts may never truly be deleted. It's much better to limit what you share in the first place.

Use privacy tools

You might expect to see VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) here, but despite what they claim to be, they are not dedicated privacy tools. Sure, they can hide your IP address from your Internet Service Provider but they don't make your browser activity private.

Plus any VPN located in one of the alliance countries might not be as secure as you think it is. In fact, it's very possible that everything you do online will be tracked, from the websites you visit to how long you spend on them, your searches, as well as your personal information, location, IP address, and more.

So what privacy tool can you use?

Well, the Hoody app is your best option. It works in a similar way to a VPN but goes much further. Hoody not only hides your IP address and allows you to bypass the geo-location restriction but does it faster than Tor and more secure than VPNs.

It uses a multi-node relay system that operates on a private, fully-encrypted network otherwise known as the Bulletproof Privacy Network (BPN).

The BPN is just one of three key technologies that work together to ensure the highest levels of privacy. The other two are Hoody Smart Routing™ and Hoody Phantom Browsing™.

Hoody Smart Routing™ automatically chooses the most optimized and secure location for every website you visit. You don't have to do anything, you don't even have to disconnect to reconnect to a new location. Privacy and security are automatic.

Hoody Phantom Browsing™ is an abstraction layer that completely blocks fingerprinting and tracking. Every time you open a tab in Hoody and send a request, a remote virtual browser does the actual work. It then injects the results back into your system meanwhile your data never actually “touches” the websites.

Using privacy tools such as Hoody and implementing the previous tips above, you can better safeguard your privacy from the prying 5, 9, 14 Eyes!

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