EOTO #2: The Five Eyes Alliance

The Five Eyes Alliance (or FVEY) is an intelligence alliance between five countries; the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Through this alliance, each country shares their resources and intelligence through their security agencies in order to keep their countries safe from potential threats. The purpose of Five Eyes is to prevent national security threats by aiding each other with intelligence and, in more recent times, cyber security. 

The alliance began in 1946 following World War II, when the UKUSA agreement was formed with the promise of sharing intelligence on post war threats. Canada later joined the alliance in 1948, followed by Australia and New Zealand in 1956. By the time all five countries were in the alliance, they used the majority of their resources to focus on the Cold War by combining their intelligence to aid the United States. However as time went on, their attention shifted towards combating terrorism and technological threats in order to keep their countries safe. Events that the alliance maintained surveillance on included the War on Terror, and their conflict with China in 2018. 

Initially the Five Eyes alliance was top secret, with the nature of the agreement being heavily classified for many years. That is until the details of the original UKUSA agreement were finally disclosed to the public in 2010, which showed how the two countries would share a global network of "listening posts" through their security agencies. Naturally, this later extended to the other three countries who would later join the alliance. 

While Five Eyes does keep us safe from threats, it also has it's downsides in terms of our personal privacy. When the full extent of the data being used was revealed to the public in 2013, it was discovered that the surveillance used is far more invasive of people's privacy than we initially thought. Simple online interactions such as phone calls, emails, internet history, and other kinds of online usage are all heavily tracked by these security agencies, which gives us nearly no privacy online. This also extends to any personal information a person has online, meaning that all online information is tracked, and can potentially be used in a harmful manner. 

The government having constant surveillance on people's everyday lives causes an ethical issue to rise, as the line between maintaining national security and respecting people's privacy becomes blurred by the practices used to gather information.