“With Friends Like These…” How the Five Eyes Alliance Outsourced Spying on You (Because Democracy Is a Technicality)

"You are being watched. The government has a secret system, a machine that spies on you every hour of every day…" That’s not sci-fi. That’s Tuesday.

Governments aren’t supposed to spy on their own citizens. So they’ve outsourced the job to their mates. Welcome to the global surveillance club—membership includes betrayal, backdoors, and a distinct lack of warrants.

If there’s one thing Western democracies love more than freedom, it’s quietly making sure you don’t have too much of it. Sure, your government says it can’t spy on you—pesky things like “laws” and “civil liberties” tend to get in the way. But ask yourself this: what if they didn’t have to do it themselves? What if your government could just pass the binoculars to their friends?

Enter the Five Eyes alliance: a cosy group of five English-speaking democracies—America, Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand—who long ago decided that the best way to protect their citizens’ privacy was to make a gentleman’s agreement to collectively violate it.

A Quick History of the Five Eyes (or, How to Inherit a Spy Ring).

This all started as a well-meaning little war-time friendship. In 1946, the UK and the US shook hands on the UKUSA Agreement, a deal to share intelligence and keep an eye on the Soviets. Canada, Australia, and New Zealand later joined in, because no secret club is complete without a Commonwealth buffet.

But what began as a Cold War eavesdropping arrangement evolved into something much juicier: a full-blown international surveillance syndicate. Think Ocean’s Eleven, except instead of robbing casinos, they’re quietly rummaging through your emails, texts, and web searches.

By the 2000s, it was less about the Soviet threat and more about hoovering up the daily detritus of civilian life. Need to spy on someone your laws say you can’t? Just get one of your Five Eyes buddies to do it and share the goodies. It’s like having a designated driver for mass surveillance.

And people started to notice.

From Echelon to Everything: The Early Years of “What The Hell Are They Doing?”

Let’s talk about Project Echelon, which sounds like a Marvel villain and behaves like one too. Originally set up to listen in on Soviet communications, it quickly expanded into intercepting anything with a dial tone. Business deals, activist phone calls, your mum’s calls to the Bingo clubs lost property—nothing was off-limits.

Then came Edward Snowden, who dropped the surveillance mic in 2013. His leaks confirmed what many already suspected: governments weren’t just listening in on the bad guys; they were setting up industrial-scale data vacuums, and “foreign intelligence” was often just a convenient label slapped on your nan’s WhatsApp chain.

Thanks to programs like PRISM and Upstream, the NSA hoovered up data from American tech giants like Google, Facebook, and Apple. Technically, they were going after foreign suspects. Realistically, if you had a Gmail account, you were also on the menu.

But here’s the genius part: the NSA can’t spy on Americans? No problem. Just get GCHQ in Britain to do it for you, then swap notes over a G&T.

According to Privacy International, this kind of intel-sharing happens entirely in the shadows, with no real domestic legislation, no oversight, and no paper trail. In other words: trust us, we’re the spies. Source

The Surveillance Arms Race: 2024–2025 Edition:

Fast-forward to the present, and the Five Eyes are not just alive and well—they’ve had a glow-up.

In 2024, the alliance rolled out its Secure Innovation Initiative, a glossy name for “let’s snoop on tech before China does.” Their stated aim? Protecting startups from state-sponsored cyber threats. Their actual track record? Logging 8 million biometric checks a year and swallowing a combined $25 billion annual budget like it’s a late-night UberEats order.

And it’s not just tech bros raising eyebrows. A majority of citizens in Five Eyes countries—58% as of 2025—now think the alliance is a threat to privacy. That’s up from 43% in 2015. Turns out, nobody wants their face scanned by a robot run by their own government’s poker club. Source

Meet the Greatest Hits of Governmental Gaslighting:

Let’s revisit some of the classics and a few fresh releases:

“Levitation” — Canada’s File-Sharing Stalker

The Communications Security Establishment (CSE) in Canada decided to track file downloads from popular hosting sites. Their code name for this? Levitation, which is ironic because it absolutely tanked public trust.

Using metadata scraped from downloads, they could infer browsing histories and targets of interest. And yes, Canadians were caught in the net, because… of course they were.

Apple v. The British Government

In March 2025, Apple took the UK government to court after being served a Technical Capability Notice—essentially a polite way of saying, “Give us a backdoor to everyone’s encrypted data, cheers.”

Apple fought back, warning that Britain’s surveillance regime might jeopardise the privacy of every iCloud user globally. And how did Britain respond? With a closed-door hearing, because nothing screams democratic oversight like locking the public out of a trial about mass surveillance. Source

Europe Weighs In

In a rare moment of sanity, the European Court of Human Rights ruled in September 2023 that British intelligence agencies had violated the privacy rights of non-British citizens through mass surveillance.

Translation: You don’t get to hoover up half the planet’s data just because they don’t live on your island. Source

Expanding the Circle of Trust (and Surveillance):

It’s not just the Five Eyes anymore. Welcome to the Nine Eyes (which includes France, Denmark, Norway, and the Netherlands) and the even more crowded Fourteen Eyes, which ropes in Germany, Italy, Spain, and Sweden. At this point, it’s less a surveillance ring and more a neoliberal Eurovision with wiretaps. Source

The more countries involved, the more plausible deniability you get. Did we spy on our citizens? No, we just asked our mates in Belgium to do it. Problem solved.

Legal Schmiegel: Why This Whole Thing Reeks.

Let’s be clear: all of this is technically legal, in the way that hiding your dog’s pills in peanut butter is technically feeding them medicine.

Governments aren’t breaking their own laws—they’re just working around them with a little help from their friends. But legally clever doesn’t mean morally acceptable.

There’s no serious oversight, no transparent legal framework, and—importantly—no meaningful accountability. Human rights groups have been yelling into the void for years about this. But voids, it turns out, are excellent at keeping secrets.

So, What Now?

We are deep into the 21st century and the systems meant to protect us are often the ones surveilling us the most. Our governments—who can’t organise a working train timetable—have somehow built a sprawling surveillance machine so efficient it would make Orwell spit out his tea.

If this is what democracy looks like in the digital age, then we need to start asking why the only people with real privacy are the ones violating everyone else’s.

And if you’re wondering who’s watching the watchers? Well… that’s classified.

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Sources & Further Reading:

https://privacyaustralia.net/five-eyes-surveillance/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes

https://www.privacyaffairs.com/5-9-14-eyes-countries/

https://www.privacyinternational.org/learn/five-eyes

https://privacyinternational.org/long-read/5294/key-highlights-our-results-2023

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/03/14/apple-encryption-backdoor-uk-order

https://debuglies.com/2025/02/28/five-eyes-intelligence-alliance-2025-examining-historical-roots-modern-controversies-and-calls-for-dismantlement/?utm_source=chatgpt.com