Privacy
5/9/14 Eyes is a global surveillance partnership with far-reaching privacy consequences. Edward Snowden’s revelations and other media articles show that your online activities, phone calls, and other sensitive information are fair game.
Five Eyes nations, including New Zealand, are linked to a U.S. military contractor’s attempt to obtain Pegasus Detection Tool. The New York Times recently reported that U.S. defense contractor L3Harris had talked to Israeli business NSO Group about buying spyware, despite NSO Group being barred by the U.S. Government. Five Eyes countries do more to harm privacy than share communications data. The 2001 USA PATRIOT Act authorized unprecedented surveillance of U.S. citizens. But wide-scale surveillance is not exclusively a U.S. phenomenon. U.K. and Australia also require ISPs to store user data.
Lack of Oversight
Oversight involves reviewing and monitoring public sector organizations’ policies, plans, programs, and projects to ensure they achieve intended objectives, provide excellent value for money, and comply with applicable policies, laws, regulations, and ethical standards. But when it comes to the five-eyes, nine-eyes, and 14-eyes pacts, it becomes a question of who watches the watchers. The lack of oversight of these operations is widespread and commonplace now.
Overreach
Another danger of the pact is that member countries can overreach and extend beyond the initial purpose; of sharing secrets. The public was made aware of this by Snowden’s media release where it was pointed out that the NSA had moved from spying on specific targets to spying on everyone.