The Intelligence community called the Five Eyes has been for decades an obscure agreement that escaped the knowledge of the public and in many cases of the country leaders. The Five Eyes arise from the UK-USA agreement. During the Second World War, the intelligence services of the Five Eyes countries worked individually. In wartime, the US managed to decipher the system of codes and ciphers of Japan, while the UK managed to decipher the German Enigma-encrypted communications. Those Intelligence services milestones during the war led to the signature on March 5, 1946, of the UK-US agreement with the idea of monitoring the URSS communications systems. The agreement extended to Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The intelligence community was collecting and sharing information for decades. The agreement was not made public until 2010 when the documents were declassified.
The main interest of the Five Eyes was SIGINT, or electromagnetic signals analysis, that send through global communication systems. SIGINT has two fields; COMINT, Communications Intelligence, which is the analysis of intercepted signals. The second field is ELINT, Electronic Intelligence, that analyzed not communication signals, like the radars. As the Canadian Brigadier-General James S. Cox explained to the Strategic Studies Working Group (SSWG), each Five Eyes member was in charge of monitoring signals on their geographical area. They covered all the globe; Australia handled signals from South and East Asia, New Zealand from South Pacific and Southeast Asia, UK dealt with Europe and Western Russia, the US with the Caribbean, China, Russia, the Middle East, and Africa. Canada monitored the north of Soviet Russia. With the advance of the technologies, the use of SIGINT allowed the interception of diplomatic cables or military information. With the arrival of the satellites, the Five Eyes extended their Intelligence tools to GEOINT, that is the use of satellites to monitor human life, or armies’ movements, in every corner of the planet. The interception and monitoring systems were an advantage for the Five Eyes compared to other countries.
To this day the Five Eyes are still active. They expanded the community to the Nine Eyes: including the Five Eyes, plus Denmark, France, the Netherlands, and Norway; even more; the Fourteen Eyes: including the 9 Eyes, plus Germany, Belgium, Italy, Spain, and Sweden. The Intelligence community has become a colossal global human activity data compiler. With the excuse of monitoring terrorist activities and drug trafficking, the Five Eyes & CO have developed a massive surveillance system for internet activity. Now the Five Eyes have turned their eyes towards China, whom they accuse of generating cyberattacks against the online systems of their countries. The distrust of the Five Eyes comes from the economic growth of China and its commercial alliances with several countries around the world. For that reason, the Five Eyes have developed a new system of alliances to counteract the advance and influence of China.