EOTO #2 (Learned): Five Eyes

 

During the EOTO presentations there was a lot of really interesting topics discussed but one that really peaked my interest that I knew nothing about was Five Eyes. An intelligence partnership formed in 1946 between the US, New Zealand, Australia, United Kingdom, and Canada. In the past FVEY collected and shared intel on foreign communications from a number of countries. In today's world FVEY is responsible for collecting private communication data on billions of people around the world.

I found it weird that almost no one ever talks about Five Eyes. Being the oldest intelligence partnership in the world you would think they would be well known but they are never mentioned in mainstream media. Of course after some research this is not by accident. Five Eyes does get up to some morally questionable things as you'd expect and this was confirmed with the Snowden leak. After the leak documents were found that suggested FVEY was monitoring citizens that belonged to the partnering countries. A loophole to bypass several mass surveillance laws.

Of course there's a serious privacy problem in the modern world, the governments around the world can keep their hands off our information. They want to know what we are talking about and it's become concerning. Something has to be done. 

I learned a lot during this presentation, I wasn't aware of what our government and Five Eyes were getting up to behind the scenes. I was aware of Edward Snowden and how he leaked national secrets but I had no idea he leaked Five Eyes secrets. There's been no mention of Five Eyes anywhere and that does seem a little ominous. It's stuff like Five Eyes that put me on edge when it comes to sharing information online. We have to be more careful of what we put out there, we don't always know whos looking.