Cyber101x Cyberwar, Surveillance and Security - Week 3 - Surveillance and National Security - Five Eyes

Five Eyes

 DALE STEPHENS: In this module, I'm going to be discussing the creation of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance and will outline reasons why surveillance capacity in national governments is a necessary activity. I will also describe how the threats previously faced in the national security arena, principally state-on-state activity, have largely been transformed in more modern times and how techniques for ensuring effective security have also changed. I will look at a sample of national legal systems that regulate domestic surveillance and will outline the balance between privacy and security that these systems seek to achieve. I will address the capacity of states to undertake overseas electronic surveillance and ask whether there is an international right to privacy in the face of such surveillance, and if so, how that may be accommodated. While rights to privacy are important international legal rights, so is the national security of a state and the right to life of citizens within a state, another human right that also needs to be protected by states. The debates dealing with overseas surveillance have recognised the need to reconcile rights of privacy with the imperatives of state security. And a number of tests have been suggested that seek to resolve this conundrum. These raise both legal and policy questions that we will canvas. In terms of general introduction, though, I will start with an outline of the Five Eyes intelligence arrangement, as it represents a useful historical reference point for understanding the nature of threats faced. While Five Eyes remains a useful arrangement, it is critical to understand that intelligence sharing, generally, between countries is necessary due to the nature and volume of potential threats faced. The Five Eyes arrangement is an intelligence gathering alliance between the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. This alliance grew out of the bilateral UKUSA Agreement. At its core, the UKUSA Agreement was an arrangement to cooperate in gathering and sharing signals intelligence. The UKUSA Agreement was originally established between only the United Kingdom and the United States. The agreement grew out of close intelligence cooperation between these two countries during the Second World War. At the beginning of the Cold War, faced by growing Soviet conventional and nuclear threats, the American and British intelligence cooperation became even more integrated, particularly in the realm of signals intelligence. In 1946, the UKUSA Agreement cemented this intelligence alliance, formalising the sharing of intelligence between the two allied powers. In 1955, the agreement was expanded to include Australia, New Zealand, and Canada as collaborating commonwealth countries who could similarly contribute to and benefit from the alliance. Given the five nations that were involved, the term Five Eyes was used to describe this agreement. Within the current global intelligence realm, there are numerous other examples of arrangements between states who share information for mutual security. Along with the Five Eyes relationship, there are also the so-called 9 Eyes and 14 Eyes relationships involving most of the European countries. Indeed, intelligence sharing between Russia and Iran, and between China and Pakistan are also being reported in the media. Given the nature of the enduring terrorist threat, the UN Security Council has repeatedly called on states to cooperate in response. So it is little wonder that state intelligence agencies do this through sharing arrangements such as these. The modern era has seen not only increased intelligence sharing, but also radically changed types of threat. While foreign state activity will always be a significant concern to national intelligence agencies -- witness the recent claim by South Korea that North Korea has a 6,000-strong cyberarmy -- modern security threats now include terrorists, organised crime syndicates, and empowered small agents. As one author has identified, these new threats are largely fleeting, elusive, low profile, and highly security conscious. They directly contrast to the traditional Cold War state-based targets that were relatively ponderous, slow-evolving, and predictable by comparison. At the same time, the volume of information that can be captured has increased monumentally. And the capacity of analysis has not kept pace. The Five Eyes alliance, along with all other intelligence sharing arrangements, is crucial to combating these threats. No one state or agency can collect and analyse intelligence to cover all threats everywhere all of the time. The intelligence sharing arrangements are particularly useful in combating the asymmetric nature of modern intelligence targets. The asymmetry between the meagre resources of the intelligence targets and the sizable resources of the states that collect the information against them, is precisely what makes the target so dangerous. To compensate for their lack of resources, the targets have adapted strategies and tactics that take advantage of many of the characteristic vulnerabilities of modern states. While the existence of open communications, transportation, and financial networks are seen as a basic principle of many modern states, for terrorist and criminal organisations, these open networks are available to be exploited. Targets also avoid detection by exploiting geographic, political, and bureaucratic boundaries, and by out-manoeuvering intelligence agencies by constantly evolving their structure. For example, where state agencies and older terrorist organisations operated through hierarchical pyramid structures similar to those found in the military, modern terrorist and criminal organisations have moved towards increasingly flat and cellular networks to counter the efforts of state-based intelligence. The cellular nature of these networks makes it increasingly difficult for intelligence agencies to develop a comprehensive understanding of their targets. While information may be obtained about certain individuals or groups within a network, this information often gives very little insight into the structure of the network as a whole. This makes it very difficult for agencies to use their knowledge of existing groups to identify emerging threats. A French terrorism expert has stated, "If you have a good knowledge of the network today, it is not operational tomorrow." Collection activities that may have long lead times are obsolete before they have a chance to yield results. Traditional forecasting techniques, such as trend analysis, are unlikely to see very far over the horizon.