No more secrets anymore, what ever happened to our privacy?

At the end of World War II five nations that’d built up intelligence-gathering links during the conflict agreed to pool their capabilities and signed up to the 1946 UKUSA Agreement to formalise the relationship going forward.

The five signatories to the classified agreement were the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, who entered into the world’s oldest and most-established snooping collaboration to establish formal cooperation on signals intelligence.

The alliance grants member countries the right to swap information gathered by their national intelligence agencies and, while signals intelligence remains the foundation of the relationship, it has expanded to include areas such as cybersecurity, counterterrorism, human intelligence and geospatial intelligence.

Originally established to ensure collective security and combat global threats, the "Five Eyes" alliance might sound like a thread from a spy novel but the implications for our privacy are far from fictional. Although the relationship represents a compelling tool to strengthen national security and monitor global threats it comes at a price... access to our personal information.

In the interconnected digital world we now inhabit there’s a very thin line between surveillance for safety and invasion of privacy as the 2013 revelations by former US National Security Agency (NSA) intelligence contractor Edward Snowden exposed.

Snowden’s revelations slid apart the door protecting the extensive data harvesting activities of the alliance, highlighting the precarious path between security and personal privacy where our digital footprints – emails, phone calls, online shopping and social-media activity – become open books read without our knowledge or consent.

We’re told if we’re “doing nothing wrong, we have nothing to fear” but this simplistic standpoint overlooks a key aspect of privacy... hiding wrongdoing is not the issue, privacy is about respecting a person’s right to not have personal information broadcast against their wishes and the freedom to express opinions without fear of reprisal, while maintaining spaces free from outside observation.

But in the realm of the military-industrial complex your information is a precious and valuable commodity, with unauthorised holders of it paid handsomely to pass it on to eager buyers. Just as an example, beam in Palantir here, a private company seeded by the CIA with contracts with military and state bodies as well as private organisations providing a highly lucrative bridge for the transfer of our information from private to public domains.

No more privacy anymore, your information sold to the highest bidder with security the last thing on the minds of those driven by greed in the military-industrial complex.

So, Five Eyes participants sweeping up our personal data, which organisations such as Palantir can then sift into bite-size packets of information to be passed on to their private-sector clients, whose data on us can then be siphoned back to the military, police and government departments the company also represents. A bipartisan flow of our personal information, all carried out without our consent but, don’t stress, it’s all for our benefit to keep us safe from the manufactured threats thought up by the military-industrial complex.

But hold on there, surely every Five Eyes country has laws restricting what its intelligence agencies can do with their own citizens’ information? This is true, in the US the NSA needs a warrant to monitor Americans, while in the UK Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) is restricted in its surveillance of Britons. And, in theory, these laws protect our privacy... but there’s a catch, not “22” it’s five.

The theory is our country’s laws protect our privacy but the Five Eyes arrangement creates a loophole: the NSA can't legally carry out mass surveillance on Americans but GCHQ in the UK can. Then, if GCHQ shares that data with the NSA, it then has information on American citizens without violating US law.

It’s a neat workaround that applies in all directions. Canadian intelligence can keep tabs on Britons and share with GCHQ; Australian intelligence can snoop on Canadians and pass it on to Canada’s Communications Security Establishment (CSEC)... so each country can "subcontract" surveillance of its own citizens to its partners.

And technically it’s all above board and legal. The surveillance doesn't violate the collecting country's laws because they're monitoring foreigners. The receiving country didn't conduct the surveillance itself so both countries can claim their hands are clean, agencies in all countries using the alliance to circumvent judicial oversight.

According to State of Surveillance, an online site exposing “the surveillance state through investigative journalism”, Canadian federal judge Richard Mosley ruled in 2013 that the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) had been "illegally enlisting” Five Eyes allies in “global surveillance dragnets, while keeping domestic federal courts in the dark”.

But the report highlights a deeper problem... how little law there is to actually break. Quoting a Privacy International assessment, State of Surveillance states: “There is no domestic legislation governing intelligence-sharing, meaning that many of these arrangements lack legal basis and therefore democratic legitimacy.”

So, the report concludes, if you're a citizen of a Five Eyes country your communications may be collected by a partner nation and shared with your own government “all without the legal protections that would apply if your government collected the data directly”.

And 80 years on from their marriage of convenience in 1946 the Five Eyes signatories are now believed to be debating whether or not to formalise their snooping operations with other states, who they’ve built up informal ties with for who knows how long... including Israel, South Korea, Singapore and Japan.

Already Denmark, France, the Netherlands and Norway have slid onto the list in a group dubbed Nine Eyes; with Belgium, Germany, Italy, Spain and Sweden extending the cooperation to Fourteen Eyes but it’s all just a case of semantics and definitions really because with the rise of the military-industrial complex our information has become available to whoever is prepared to pay the asking price.

Palantir bridges the divide between public and private interests very lucratively, but a vast array of Private Military Companies (PMCs) also operate internationally and can circumvent boundaries allowing the dissemination of personal information across the globe.

Modern information-gathering surveillance comes under an array of different acronyms from SIGINT (signals intelligence), COMINT (communications intelligence) and ELINT (electronic intelligence) which is carried out by a broad spectrum of the miliary-industrial complex from state-security operations to the publicly-listed social media groups such as Meta (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp), Google, X, YouTube and TikTok.

But, of course, our personal information is private, isn’t it? Companies can’t just share or sell our information, can they? Oh, you poor deluded fools! What governments and companies say and do are very different things... welcome to the surveillance state where everything you do is being scrutinised and can be used against you, whether you know about it or not!