Five Eyes

 One of the most important issues facing many countries today is security and surveillance. Nowadays, in some way or another, everyone is being watched. If you have a phone, computer, bank account, social media account, etc. you are being watched. 

One of the largest intelligence and surveillance organizations in the world is known as Five Eyes(FVEY). Five Eyes is an international intelligence sharing alliance currently consisting of the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. 

FVEY was instituted during World War II with informal, secret meetings as a way for American and British codebreakers to communicate and distribute intelligence on the Axis powers during the war. The programs continued to be used throughout the Cold War and FVEY, having originally been informal meetings, was officially instituted during the 1960s through the ECHELON surveillance system. Initially, FVEY was meant to just be used during wartime so countries under the alliance could gain an information advantage, however, seeing its success, it was turned into a global communications monitoring system. The system would continue to be broadened and intensified as the "War on Terror" came about, giving FVEY more authority to use its powers. 

FVEY collects information through two main methods. The first, called the PRISM Program, gathers information from large technology firms, such as Google and Microsoft, in order to gain information about the general public. The second, dubbed the Upstream Collection System, gathers more direct, exact information from civilian communications through fiber cables. This method is able to track precise data, down to the very word of a casual conversation, whereas the PRISM Program method gathers more broad data in order to classify civilians into groups. 

With an organization as large and as powerful as Five Eyes, there is bound to be some controversy in the mix of things. The rise of the internet across the world gave the intelligence alliance more need to up data tracking and more routes to be able to do it, yet also more ways to get caught overstepping their bounds. People all across the world had had suspicions and doubts about the alliance for some time but it wasn't truly brought to light until 2013. This is when the infamous Edward Snowden, a former NSA contractor, leaked information that FVEY was spying on the very citizens it was claiming to be protecting.