Talk:Five Eyes

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Five Eyes currently redirects to UKUSA Agreement, referring to an agreement between Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the USA. Would it be more appropriate to redirect to AUSCANNZUKUS, referring to the joint organisation of these countries?

For example, the article ECHELON states:

operated on behalf of the five signatory states to the UK–USA Security Agreement (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States, referred to by a number of abbreviations, including AUSCANNZUKUS and Five Eyes).

So, is Five Eyes equatable with AUSCANNZUKUS or UKUSA Agreement? —sroc (talk) 03:20, 7 October 2012 (UTC)Reply

• Oppose - The three articles are quite descriptive. From them it seems quite clear to me that the "UKUSA Agreement" is the starting point, and defines the whole community; AUSCANNZUKUS is the name of an organisation addressing a subset of the community. The ECHELON example seems to reinforce my interpretation - i.e. AUSCANNZUKUS and Five Eyes are abbreviations that refer to the five signatory states to the UK–USA Security Agreement.

You ask: "is Five Eyes equatable with AUSCANNZUKUS or UKUSA Agreement?".

My answer is: "Both and Neither - it refers to the community defined by five signatory states to the UK–USA Security Agreement."

(AUSCANNZUKUS may only refer to a subset of the community defined by five signatory states to the UK–USA Security Agreement, but never-the-less, they are often referred to as Five Eyes, and vice-versa.)

I hope that helps? Cheers, Pdfpdf (talk) 11:49, 10 October 2012 (UTC)Reply

Comment If UKUSA Agreement does become a redirect to the "Five Eyes" article, 1946 details should be added to the 1943 BRUSA Agreement article, which I will do anyway Hugo999 (talk) 01:23, 2 October 2016 (UTC)Reply

I was surprised to find the "List of FVEY surveillance targets" section of the article contains only a dozen or so individuals. While that is interesting, and might have been all that was notable and verifiable prior to last spring, it is certainly out of date now.

The past eight months have provided us reams of verifiable information in reliable sources that the surveillance targets are, indeed, vast--exceeding even the most surveillance-oriented "excellance" of the East German Stasi. While we cannot show all of the individuals being surveilled in the list, it would seem that a row or two of additional (plural) targets ought to be added to that table. Leaving it as it is now is simply writing an incorrect view and POV info in the encyclopedia. It is missing much. N2e (talk) 21:39, 11 February 2014 (UTC)Reply

Thanks for the ping, N2e - this is really a good question for A1candidate, as I know very little. petrarchan47tc 22:34, 11 February 2014 (UTC)Reply

• The issues pointed out by N2e are valid, but fixing them would be admittedly difficult. Unlike topics such as science, history, and popular culture, when it comes to government secrecy, you can't just consult the usual reference sources and expect to find what you're looking for. Neither the Five Eyes nor the UKUSA Agreement are mentioned in Encyclopædia Britannica, and, despite their historical importance, reliable information about these items are excruciatingly rare. If anyone is able to provide some sources to add more targets to the list, I would definitely support it. -A1candidate (talk) 23:19, 11 February 2014 (UTC)Reply

• Would it be a fix if we prefaced this with a paragraph making it exceedingly clear that we know the list is vast? Then make clear the images are shown merely as an illustrative example? petrarchan47tc 01:19, 12 February 2014 (UTC)Reply

Yeah, I hear you. And obviously Wikipedia can only document that which meets the standard Wiki-criteria of notability, verifiability,reliable sourcing, etc., and the secrecy of these government programs and intergovermental agreements no doubt adversely affect what we can find. Still, it would seem that we have myriad sources in the past half year to show that, literally, millions (or tens of millions?) of persons are being surveilled in these countries by the five governments of the FiveEyes intergovernmental agreements.

Perhaps we could do something like this, just to reflect the reality of the truly massive surveillance that we do have sources for:

As the surveillance capabilities of the FVEY continue to increase to keep up to pace with technological advancements, a global surveillance system has been gradually developed to capture the communications of entire populations across national borders.^[1]

An example of some new prose follows:In the early decades of FVEY surveillance, targets tended to be specific individuals or organizations that could be surveilled from particular addresses and phone numbers by xyz_foobar techniques.refs By the 2010s, and particularly after the advent of internet technology in the mid-1990s, new techniques were developed to surveil truly massive numbers of people, both citizens and foreign nationals, and to maintain the surveillance records in large electronic storage databases for later sifting and analysis.ref1, ref2, refn

The following list contains a handful of the targets of the FVEY who are public figures in various fields, and have well-documented evidence based on reliable sources, such as leaked or declassified documents or whistleblower accounts, which demonstrate that the person involved is, or was, intentionally targeted for FVEY surveillance, as well as much larger numbers of individuals who have not been publicly identified.

Anyway, see what you think. At least it doesn't leave the (quite incorrect) impression to the reader that the list is a small number of individuals and organizations. Cheers. N2e (talk) 01:26, 12 February 2014 (UTC)Reply

This article is about the Five Eyes. The Global surveillance template (on the right) was added, which I replaced with a See also template (above) in the most relevant section. Whizz40 (talk) 19:12, 12 October 2014 (UTC)Reply

Five Eyes is mentioned in the Concepts section of {{Global surveillance}}, so it would've been useful if you would've added why you made the change. By the way, in the future please use template links ({{Tl}}) to refer to templates instead of embedding them on the talk page. They take up a lot of space and a template link is enough. --82.136.210.153 (talk) 00:05, 3 December 2014 (UTC)Reply

I'm unsure why a list of surveillance targets is included on this page. It seems to be off topic in relation to the actual existence of the agreement. We don't put a list of targets on the pages of other agencies like the CIA. A "controversies" or "history" section would seem like a more appropriate place. Puppier (talk) 15:28, 24 November 2014 (UTC)Reply

Not only that, the list also appears to be WP:OR, because (most of/all?) those references in the table do not mention Five Eyes (or FVEY). Editors just fill in the "Surveillance agencies" column and then their reasoning is 'see, those agencies are part of Five Eyes, so those individuals were targeted by Five Eyes'. This basically means everyone on the planet can be added. The same applies to the Organizations section, where virtually all references mention the NSA and not Five Eyes. --82.136.210.153 (talk) 00:12, 3 December 2014 (UTC)Reply

I strongly believe that section needs to be removed. There’s some irritating almost-NPOV in this article before it gets into a “Targets” list. Jasphetamine (talk) 06:28, 8 January 2020 (UTC)Reply

The former NSA contractor Edward Snowden described the Five Eyes as a "supra-national intelligence organisation that doesn't answer to the known laws of its own countries".^[1] Documents leaked by Snowden in 2013 revealed that the FVEY have been spying on one another's citizens and sharing the collected information with each other in order to circumvent restrictive domestic regulations on surveillance of citizens.^[2][3][4][5]

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This section has a misleading title - there is no future enlargement of Five Eyes - there are other groupings beyond Five Eyes with lesser integration (eg Nine Eyes) - and there have been in the past possible but failed enlargements. Unless a source is found for any current, official plan to enlarge the Five Eyes community, the section should (remain) renamed. Sumorsǣte (talk) 21:20, 11 January 2017 (UTC)Reply

For the record, it should be noted that in the current form, this article about the Five Eyes is highly misleading. It's based too much on things said by Edward Snowden, who is not a reliable source, as it is in his personal interest to present NSA and it foreign partners as evil as possible. Furthermore many things here are apparently written by people who have no real understanding of intelligence agencies, except for what they read in the (often biased) press reportings about the Snowden revelations.
Things that are wrong, misleading or otherwise not as certain as presented in this article are:

• The Five Eyes is a group of Signals Intelligence agencies. For example the domestic security agencies of the countries involved also cooperate, but not within this FVEY framework.
• PRISM and Upstream are NSA collection methods, not of the FVEY. Also this is different from the ECHELON network.
• The other (6, 9, 14, 41) Eyes groups are different from the Five Eyes: as far as we know, they are set up independently and for specific purposes, so it's incorrect to present them here as extensions of the FVEY. These other Eyes should rather be described in a separate article, or in a paragraph about international cooperation in the NSA article.
• "intentionally spying on one another's citizens and sharing the collected information with each other in order to circumvent restrictive domestic regulations on spying" is forbidden within the Five Eyes and there's no hard evidence that the agencies are intentionally bypassing that.
• As mentioned by others before, the list of targets is ridiculous: the Five Eyes is not a supra-national spy organisation, but a cooperation of five independent agencies. These agencies have their own targets, and they share information about each other's targets, but that's fundamentally different from the idea of "Five Eyes targets".

Unfortunately I don't have the time to correct all this in the article, because I don't want to end up in endless discussions about even the slightest changes. Articles should present a truthful picture of the issue, which requires a broader knowledge of the subject, rather than piecing together quotes from the press. P2Peter (talk) 09:19, 20 April 2017 (UTC)Reply

Peter:

While I agree in principle with almost every point you make, I would take issue with one, and that is the assertion that "there's no hard evidence that the agencies are intentionally bypassing that". I do not mean to sound like a nut-job conspiracy theorist here, and I would understand if you might think that. And I agree there is no "hard evidence". But hard evidence is especially difficult to come by in this arena.

Some have pointed out Edward Snowden cannot be considered a reliable source, but the evidence (not his own statements) presented in his data dumps is compelling, as are other reputable international journalistic sources. I would refer you to the Wikipedia article Global Surveillance Disclosures (2013-present), and specifically the phrase and references 7. 39. 40, and 41, in the Background section; to wit, "and its secret treaties with foreign governments that were recently established for sharing intercepted data of each other's citizens." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_surveillance_disclosures_(2013%E2%80%93present) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Bryanm61 (talk • contribs) 23:33, 22 March 2019 (UTC)Reply

I think the currently cited sources provide evidence that agencies have spyed on each others' citizens, and shared some of that data with each other. However, they don't seem to support that this is done "in order to circumvent restrictive domestic regulations on spying". This hypothesis is only mentioned in one of the references,,^[4] and there it's quite speculative. Also, more information was revealed later that year, and UK courts decided that the procedures with which the GCHQ requested data from the NSA were lawful except for them being secret (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_in_the_United_Kingdom). I've removed "in order to circumvent restrictive domestic regulations on spying" for now. If someone knows better sources for the original claim, though, they should feel free to add them. TurquoiseEllipse (talk) 12:07, 5 May 2020 (UTC)Reply

@P2Peter:@TurquoiseEllipse: I would like to begin fixing some of these issues, which really come down to good housekeeping. As well as tidying up mistakes, seems to me there's important material missing. Five Eyes has emerged as the global counterpoint to CCP political warfare — and there's nothing about that here. I feel there should be a section on its geopolitical significance. Erasmus Sydney (talk) 20:11, 5 May 2020 (UTC)Reply

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Someone has written this:

Five eyes is not an espionage alliance. It's an intelligence sharing agreement. The USA agrees to share certain intelligence information with the other signators. This is not a coordinated spying organization.

It reads more like a Python script than encyclopedia text. C'mon, people. Grinding axes is perhaps inevitable given the topic, but the semantic jiggery-pokery of vacuous euphemism is at best counter-productive, even more so when it's used to construct a self-contradictory peremptory declaration ("Five eyes is not an espionage alliance. It's an intelligence sharing agreement"). 47.32.20.133 (talk) 18:18, 17 August 2018 (UTC)Reply

The article claims, "The Five Eyes, often abbreviated as FVEY,..."

I believe this to be incorrect. "FVEY" appears in my Bing/Google searches only in internal documents written by unimportant clerical workers in offices peripheral to intelligence work. That doesn't add up to "often." It is rather specific.

That usage strikes me as rather parallel to the funny capitalization of personal names used by FBI agents in their internal documents, sometimes reproduced in public. These do not constitute public use of the funny capitals; it is the public reproduction of an oddity peculiar to the FBI. Same sort of thing here.

I suggest simply dropping the ", often abbreviated as FVEY," but more tiresomely one could substitute ", FVEY in in-house argot, " to make it accurate.

David Lloyd-Jones (talk) 13:58, 13 November 2018 (UTC)Reply

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/28/new-zealands-five-eyes-membership-called-into-question-over-china-links Kaihsu (talk) 14:01, 17 November 2018 (UTC)Reply

Does Britain's National Crime Agency (NCA) have responsibility for catching spies? Andrew Swallow (talk) 16:21, 23 November 2018 (UTC)Reply

No, the Wikipedia National Crime Agency article explains its role in detail. Regards, David J Johnson (talk) 16:25, 23 November 2018 (UTC)Reply

Greetings. It is my distinct understanding that FVEY is (also) a classification marking, used for the purpose of restricting distribution to only the Five Eyes signatories. Here is an example:

https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/icotr/RawSIGINTGuidelines-as-approved-redacted.pdf

I can find no mention of this, although the Wiki query for FVEY redirects to this article. I propose adding a brief statement to this effect. Bryanm61 (talk) 22:59, 22 March 2019 (UTC)Reply

I just removed a bunch of excessive links, mostly wikilinks to countries. In general we dont link to countries per WP:OVERLINK, please dont re-link them. Jtbobwaysf (talk) 07:07, 11 December 2019 (UTC)Reply

I think discipline is needed to keep articles about IC leaks, controversy, and conspiracies separate from a topic that should be tidy, factual, historically focused, and well sourced. There is so much room on the internet for the tinfoil hat folks to do their WP:SYNTH thing, it doesn’t have to be here.

It is absolutely possible to have an article about the IC that cites Antonio Mendez or Robert Wallace more than it does some disaffected hipster who gave the Russians a backpack full of US state secrets.

I mean hey, if the countries involved have admitted on the official record to a bizarre collective insider-trading of mass citizen data, or published a “targets” list in the lobby of their HQ, I’m all for including that stuff. Jasphetamine (talk) 06:53, 8 January 2020 (UTC)Reply

Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab lobbies Five Eyes allies to ‘share burden’ of possible Hong Kong exodus. Kaihsu 13:08, 3 June 2020

@Konli17:@116.98.161.55:@Konli17:@TurquoiseEllipse:@2406:3400:218:c980:a8ff:34e6:2642:48c4: to avoid an edit war, I suggest we bring out the concerns that you and other editors may have about the introduction on this article. My view is that it needs to briefly sketch out the history and the common ground that have brought Five Eyes nations together. Views? Concerns? Please share? Erasmus Sydney (talk) 00:04, 29 May 2020 (UTC)Reply

There are only five countries in the world that share these three attributes; white-majority, English-speaking, and Protestant-majority. While many other countries share one or two of these, only these five have all three. My attention was brought to this when a user blanked a reference to the only one of these shared attributes noted in the article. I don't understand why they'd do that. Konli17 (talk) 01:15, 29 May 2020 (UTC)Reply

It seems that some users are trying to rewrite history. The introduction is correct regarding the nations that had common ground to found the Five Eyes concept. I agree with Erasmus Sydney's view above. I cannot see how we can alter facts. David J Johnson (talk) 10:29, 29 May 2020 (UTC)Reply

I don't understand what you mean about rewriting history. The current introduction ignores their common ground. Konli17 (talk) 10:41, 29 May 2020 (UTC)Reply

Hi @David J Johnson:; hi @Konli17: and thank you for making me look at something I had never considered before. The correlation of Protestantism and the Western alliance system. You forced me to research and I'm grateful for that. However what I found, especially after looking through some reports from the excellent Pew Research Center is that Protestantism has its most vital populations in Africa. Take Anglicanism for example. There are more Anglicans in Ghana than there are in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States (where they are known as Episcopalians) combined. In terms of countries with raw majorities of Protestants you'd be looking at the Solomon Islands, Botswana, Jamaica, Papua New Guinea, South Africa and Namibia. None of these countries are part of Five Eyes. An interesting thread to pull on, but this alliance ain't about religion or race. Erasmus Sydney (talk) 10:43, 29 May 2020 (UTC)Reply

It is also worth stating that all the countries in the Five Eyes alliance have multi-racial populations. It appears to me that some "contributors" are trying to introduce a racial element into this discussion. Regards, David J Johnson (talk) 10:52, 29 May 2020 (UTC)Reply

You seem to be missing my main point; there are only five countries in the world that share these three attributes; white-majority, English-speaking, and Protestant-majority. I'm not talking about countries that have just one or two of them. You may as well accuse me of introducing a religious or linguistic element. You could use quotation marks. Konli17 (talk) 11:18, 29 May 2020 (UTC)Reply

Oh, I absolutely understand your point, and I think it's a genuinely interesting observation - and in my mind I'm seeing a Venn Diagram regarding ethnic origin, religion and language group. However, I could equally argue that the Five Eyes are a collection of nations where there is a popular consumption of anchovy paste on toast, or Earl Grey Tea. It wouldn't be hard for me to build the data. But it still wouldn't prove that this is what Five Eyes is really about. An interesting excursion, but I believe it's time to return to the main track.Erasmus Sydney (talk) 09:15, 30 May 2020 (UTC)Reply

I don't recall saying that's what they're about, which is an unusual way to characterise my recent edits. You certainly could equally argue about tea and paste, and if I thought your findings were relevant to international relations articles I'd be in favour of their use. But when considering relevance to international relations, alliances etc., I'd guess tea and paste would be well behind language, race and religion in most people's view. Konli17 (talk) 11:20, 30 May 2020 (UTC)Reply

@Konli17:Why don't we look at what the members of the grouping themselves say? What do they say the affinity is all about? I found the minutes of a meeting of the 2019 Annual Meeting of the Five Eyes Intelligence Oversight and Review Council and, I was disappointed to see no mention of fish paste or Earl Grey Tea. Equally as deflating nothing about white-ness or protestantism. What does come up is "shared values" and "democratic statecraft." If we're going to spot a binding idea for this group, I think that's probably a good start. https://www.dni.gov/files/ICIG/Documents/Partnerships/FIORC/Executive%20Summaries/2019/Executive%20Summary%20-%20FINAL.pdf Erasmus Sydney (talk) 12:16, 31 May 2020 (UTC)Reply

By all means let's look, as long as that doesn't preclude us from looking at what they don't say. OK, shared values. Do they list any values that no other countries apart from these five have? Now, democratic statecraft. That's a puzzler. Surely they realise they're not the only democracies? If they've neglected to realise how unique they are, or are shy about it for some reason, that's no barrier to us noting it. Konli17 (talk) 13:46, 31 May 2020 (UTC)Reply

@Konli17:You're right, the Five Eyes members are not the world's only democracies. My working assumption is that its shared history that has bound them - knowing of course that all members belong to other security alliance systems too, such as NATO, the RIO Pact and EU Defence. I would like to do some more research on this and make some suggestions. I think we all know the entire article needs improving. Needs deeper research and a better structure.Erasmus Sydney (talk) 23:07, 3 June 2020 (UTC)Reply

Yes, it's their shared history that has led to the unusual distinctions of the membership of Five Eyes. It's Britain and the four largest of its white-majority, Protestant-majority former colonies. Konli17 (talk) 15:01, 30 June 2020 (UTC)Reply

I never contributed to this discussion when it first occurred, but I was suddenly reminded of it by this article, which refers to these five countries as simply "the rich English-speaking countries". (Apparently another connection between them is that they historically have gotten the lion's share of economics research.) That term might work as a more concise description, though it does conspicuously leave out Ireland. Or, if you wanted to be cheeky, I think you could also accurately describe them as "Britain and the former British colonies in which the majority of the native population was replaced by colonists".--Shmarrighan (talk) 06:41, 15 January 2021 (UTC)Reply

https://www.statewatch.org/news/2020/august/five-country-ministerial-official-communique-short-on-substance/

Could an explanation of the initialism be provided (duly sourced, of course)? Is it simply a construction to approximate to the pronunciation that looks right among other acronyms? Is it an attempt to save resources by removing 5 keystrokes? Has a back formation been applied? (Five Viewers for Every Yawn? Finding Various Excuses Yearly?)

When did it come into use? etc etc Kevin McE (talk) 08:15, 12 May 2024 (UTC)Reply