Source: https://www.privacyinternational.org/feature/1998/newly-disclosed-documents-five-eyes-alliance-and-what-they-tell-us-about-intelligence
Timestamp: 2019-04-22 01:21:58+00:00

Document:
The United States is party to a number of international intelligence sharing arrangements—one of the most prominent being the so-called “Five Eyes” alliance. Born from spying arrangements forged during World War II, the Five Eyes alliance facilitates the sharing of signals intelligence among the U.S., the U.K., Australia, Canada and New Zealand. The Five Eyes countries agree to exchange by default all signals intelligence they gather, as well as methods and techniques related to signals intelligence operations. When the Five Eyes first agreed to this exchange of intelligence—before the first transatlantic telephone cable was laid—they could hardly have anticipated the technological advances that awaited them. Yet, we remain in the dark about the current legal framework governing intelligence sharing among the Five Eyes, including the types of information that the U.S. government accesses and the rules that govern U.S. intelligence agencies’ access to and dissemination of Americans’ private communications and data.
In July 2017, Privacy International and Yale Law School’s Media Freedom & Information Access Clinic filed a lawsuit against the National Security Agency, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the State Department, and the National Archives and Records Administration seeking access to records related to the Five Eyes alliance under the Freedom of Information Act. Over the past few months, we have begun to receive limited disclosure from the NSA and the State Department. While we have not seen the text of the current agreement—as well as other records that would shed important light on how the agreement operates—the disclosures to date give us insight into the nature and scope of U.S. intelligence sharing agreements.
Below, we summarize a few of these disclosures and talk through their implications. In particular, we highlight how, taken together, they suggest that the U.S. government takes an inconsistent approach to legal classification and therefore publication of these types of agreements. We also take a closer look at one agreement—the 1961 General Security Agreement between the Government of the United States and the Government of the United Kingdom—which further illuminates our understanding of the privatization of intelligence activities and provides us with a rare glimpse of the “third party rule,” an obstacle to oversight and accountability of intelligence sharing.
The sharing arrangements undergirding the Five Eyes alliance were first memorialized in the British-U.S. Communication Intelligence Agreement in 1946, later renamed the United Kingdom-United States Communication Intelligence Agreement. At the time we brought our lawsuit, the 1956 version of the that agreement was the most recent publicly available. In response to our litigation, the NSA disclosed several appendices that span from 1956–61 and therefore update our understanding of the agreement by several years.
The State Department disclosed the General Security Agreement as well as a set of procedures developed to implement the provisions of that agreement. The General Security Agreement relates to the protection of classified information exchanged between the U.S. and the U.K. and provides that “[o]fficial information given a security classification by either of [the] two Governments ... and furnished by either Government to the other through Government channels will be assigned a classification by ... the receiving Government which will assure a degree of protection equivalent to or greater than that required by the Government furnishing the information.” The State Department also disclosed an exchange of letters between then-U.K. Ambassador to the U.S. Harold Caccia and then-U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk expressing their respective governments’ acceptance of the terms of the agreement.
The State Department disclosed an exchange of letters between then-Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs Alexander Downer and then-U.S. Ambassador to Australia Genta Holmes expressing their respective governments’ agreement to extend the terms of the 1966 “Agreement between the Government of Australia and the Government of the United States of America relating to the Establishment of a Joint Defence Facility at Pine Gap.” Pine Gap is a base located in Alice Springs, Australia jointly operated by the U.S. and Australia. From Pine Gap, the U.S. controls satellitesacross several continents, which can conduct surveillance of wireless communications, such as those transmitted via cell phones, radios and satellite uplinks. The intelligence gathered supports both intelligence activities and military operations, including drone strikes.
this Note and your confirmatory reply thereto shall together constitute an Agreement between our two Governments concerning this matter which shall enter into force on the date that the Government of Australia notifies the Government of the United States of America that all domestic procedures as are necessary to give effect to this Agreement in Australia have been satisfied.
The Pine Gap and General Security Agreements described above differ in a notable respect: While the 1998 extension to the Pine Gap Agreement is available to the U.S. public, the 1961 General Security Agreement has not been published by the United States. This difference reveals gaps in the laws requiring the publication of international agreements. And it bolsters calls, raised elsewhere, for greater executive branch transparency and accountability in the formation and legal bases of these types of agreements.
The United States plainly considers the 1998 extension to the Pine Gap Agreement a legally binding international agreement. The U.S. State Department has made the 1998 Pine Gap Agreement publicly available in the Treaties and Other International Agreements Series (TIAS), a repository which serves as “competent evidence” of the treaties and other international agreements entered into by the United States. 1 U.S.C. § 113. Likewise, the Australian government has published the Pine Gap Agreement in the Australian Treaty Series. But whereas the Australian government has also published the text of the original 1966 Pine Gap Agreement, the United States has not. This omission is significant. Only the 1966 agreement contains the terms agreed upon by both parties—in other words, the nature and scope of the agreement to establish a joint defense facility to conduct intelligence activities.
Similarly, neither the U.S. nor the U.K. appear to have published the 1961 General Security Agreement. According to the U.K. government’s response to a Parliamentary question in 2000, the General Security Agreement had not been declassified at that time. Searching through a variety of publicly available materials, including government websites and academic databases, we found several references to the General Security Agreement, but not the Agreement itself (nor portions of it). For example, the 2007 Treaty with United Kingdom Concerning Defense Trade Cooperationrecognizes “principles established under the General Security Agreement.” However, prior to the State Department’s disclosure in response to our FOIA request, we did not know what these principles were.
There is a colorable argument that State has a legal duty to publish both the original text of the Pine Gap Agreement and the 1966 General Security Agreement, as well as any updates to both. Under 1 U.S.C. § 112a, the Secretary of State is required to publish all treaties and non-treaty international agreements to which the United States is a party. This duty is subject to a short list of exceptions outlined in § 112a(b). Most notably, the State Department may elect not to publish an international agreement if, “in the opinion of the President,” disclosure would prejudice national security interests.
The government could justify its failure to publish the agreements on two grounds. First, the national security exemption might apply. However, this claim falls apart in light of the facts that the original Pine Gap Agreement has already been published by the Australian government and the United Nations, and State released the General Security Agreement in response to a FOIA request notwithstanding FOIA’s national security exemption in 5 U.S.C. § 552(b)(1).
(3) sole executive agreements, in which an agreement is made pursuant to the President’s constitutional authority without further congressional authorization.
The 1966 Pine Gap Agreement and the General Security Agreement appear to fall into the third category. Both were formed under the executive’s Article II powers in foreign affairs and national security and without congressional authorization.
Prior to the 1970s, executive agreements were unregulated and undefined. Indeed, it was not until after the Case-Zablocki Act’s passage in 1971 that the State Department outlined criteria for identifying non-treaty international agreements. By this logic, the United States perhaps did not publish the agreements because it did not understand them to trigger § 112a’s publication requirement at the time they were signed.
This argument, however, is suspect because both agreements appear to remain in force. In fact, evidence suggests that the 1966 General Security Agreement is not the most recent version in effect. The British House of Commons referenced 1983 and 1984 amendments to the General Security Agreement, as well as a “new Security Implementing Arrangement for operations between the [U.K. Ministry of Defense] and the [U.S. Department of Defense]” formed in 2003. And since it was the State Department that gave us these disclosures, State possessed these agreements (and even recognized the Pine Gap Agreement in the TIAS). Accordingly, the State Department should have published the agreements pursuant to § 112a.
The U.S. government’s failure to publish these agreement adds to longstanding confusion about what constitutes an international agreement under U.S. law, their legal bases, how many have been formed, and what they contain. It also makes it more difficult for the public to hold the government accountable. As others have noted, “Today nearly all of U.S. international law is made by the President acting alone with little oversight by Congress or the U.S. public.” Put simply, members of the public should not have to undertake lengthy FOIA processes (these disclosures were made nearly a year after we filed our request) in order to uncover the text of agreements that underpin our understandings of national security and international cooperation.
Below, we take a closer look at the 1961 General Security Agreement. In particular, we consider its provisions on the role of private contractors, which contributes to our understanding of the privatization of intelligence activities. We further consider the General Security Agreement’s invocation of the “third party rule,” a rarely-seen but common feature of intelligence sharing agreements, which presents a challenge to the effective oversight and accountability of intelligence sharing.
The Annex governs “those cases in which contracts, subcontracts, precontract negotiations or other government approved arrangements involving classified information of either or both countries, hereinafter referred to as classified contracts, are placed or entered into by or on behalf of the” U.K. or U.S. governments.
[a]s an exception, the US may transmit classified material directly to a firm located in the US which is under the ownership, control, or influence of a UK entity, and the UK may transmit such information directly to a firm in the UK which is under the ownership, control, or influence of a US entity provided such firms have been granted a reciprocal security clearance ... and the information is determined to be releasable under the national disclosure policy of the releasing government.
As Shorrock notes “many of the companies that dominate the intelligence industry today got their start by providing technical services and products to the Intelligence Community.” The conventional wisdom is thus that the public-private partnerships of the 1950s and 1960s were predominantly of a technological nature, namely to facilitate the development of new surveillance capabilities. One would therefore expect the Industrial Security Annex to limit the scope of access by contractors to information strictly necessary to accomplish those kinds of technical assignments. In reality, however, the Annex places no such limitation on the type of information that may be shared with contractors. Rather, the Annex covers the transmission of “classified information in any form, be it oral, visual or in the form of material,” and defines material as encompassing “everything regardless of its physical character or makeup including” documents, writing, maps and letters. Furthermore, the Annex establishes no criteria for what intelligence community activities may be outsourced, whether they may be outsourced to foreign contractors, and under what circumstances.
First, democracy and the rule of law are compromised. Escaping parliamentary and judicial scrutiny are important reasons for privatisation in the first place. Second, value for money is compromised since the private sector operates at higher costs and the necessity of security clearances limits competition to an extent undermining the economic rationale for privatisation in this sector dominated by national security and secrecy concerns. Finally, national security is compromised by the higher costs for intelligence on the one hand and intelligence and know-how being transferred outside the intelligence agencies on the other hand. The public interest enshrined in the three objectives of the triangle does not appear to be served by the current state of privatisation of intelligence services in the United States.
The 1961 General Security Agreement also provides a rare glimpse of the “third party rule” or “originator control principle,” considered a common feature of many intelligence sharing arrangements. The third party rule prohibits the disclosure of information shared between agencies to third parties, which may include oversight bodies, without the prior consent of the state from which the information originated. As Privacy International has noted, such rules limit oversight and weaken accountability of intelligence sharing.
a. Will not release the information to a third Government without the approval of the releasing Government.
b. Will undertake to afford the information substantially the same degree of protection afforded to it by the releasing Government.
c. Will not use the information for other than the purpose given.
As articulated, the third party rule illustrates the desire for a partner agency to retain some measure of control over shared information. In some instances, that control might also protect human rights. For example, the rule helps to prevent the further dissemination of shared information to third party agencies, particularly those that the originating agency is concerned would potentially misuse the information. One example of misuse is the Maher Arar case where the Canadian government produced inaccurate intelligence, which was later shared with the U.S. government. The U.S. government subsequently detained Mr. Arar for 12 days and then proceeded to subject him to rendition in Syria where he was tortured.
Governments have also interpreted the third party rule as prohibiting disclosure to other third parties and have included oversight bodies within that prohibition. Under this interpretation, the rule can be fundamentally detrimental to intelligence oversight. As a matter of principle, requiring oversight bodies to seek consent from a foreign agency to access intelligence information shared with a domestic agency can cripple their capacity to exercise independent and impartial oversight. And as a matter of practice, foreign partners are unlikely to consent to such requests. Seeing the two different articulations of the third party rule in the General Security Agreement highlights that there is no “one size fits all” phraseology for the rule. Alternative versions of the rule attentive to human rights might include, for example, a carve-out that would explicitly permit oversight bodies in both countries to review shared information.

References: § 113
 § 112
 § 112
 § 552
 § 112
 § 112