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Are you of this? I have seen examples to the contrary even though most of this activity is very secretive since they are not allowed to disclose activity to third parties per the five eyes agreements. The agreements are about sharing of information. The patriot act explicitly allows spying on foreigners' communications and the five eyes agreements allow sharing by default. If you can share where in the five eyes agreements that spying on people in the five or nine eyes jurisdictions is not permitted, I would really like to see.

The controversy which caused this misunderstanding is that incidentally collected SIGINT (i.e. not intentionally targeted) of UK citizens, collected by NSA, was shared back with GCHQ.

Because this 180 degree myth about skirting domestic law by spying on each other's citizens is so widespread, it actually makes accurate information difficult to find.

The Wikipedia page is squatted by editors who refuse to admit they are wrong, but this article is pretty clear [0]; "The partnership has one core rule, that the members agree not to spy on each other."

Wikipedia implies this is limited to governments but it is not.

[0] https://www.lowyinstitute.org/publications/we-need-five-eyes...

Uh oh. I'll need to look into this myself. I thought I've learned enough about keeping track of the provenance and validity of any information I consume, and weighing my beliefs by it - but this one, if true, will be something that completely blindsided me. I'm wondering how I never heard anything like this over what's now few weeks short of a decade.

How are you going to look into a secret agreement yourself?

What the original aim of the agreement is somewhat unknown, but the Snowden documents revealed multiple examples of spying on each others civilians and sharing the results. Such as, https://web.archive.org/web/20140125021330/http://uk.reuters...

You've never heard anything like this because it's the intelligence agencies responses to the Snowden documents. They're usually mentioned in the same articles but nobody really buys their excuses.

NSA previously hosted the original UK-USA 1946 agreement[0] which was declassified in 2010 i.e. pre-Snowden (seems to 404 now). It is limited to sharing of "foreign communications" which is defined as those not being UK/USA.

The Snowden leaks included material acknowledging that this was the purpose of the agreement. The reason the incidental collection was controversial was _because_ it was against a strict reading of the agreement.

See this article[1] which I believe is quoting straight from Snowden leaks; "[The March 1946 UKUSA agreement] has evolved to include a common understanding that both governments will not target each other's citizens/persons. However, when it is in the best interest of each nation, each reserved the right to conduct unilateral Comint action against each other's citizens/persons.

"Under certain circumstances, it may be advisable and allowable to target second-party persons and second-party communications unilaterally when it is in the best interests of the US."

Note that this is saying that they reserve the right to do it unilaterally i.e. without the knowledge of the other, and this is considered against the purpose of the agreement.

I stand by the statement that the general understanding of the agreement - that it is a way for countries to request surveillance of their own citizens to skirt domestic law - is 180 degrees wrong. The agreement is the opposite.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20120202160554/https://www.nsa.g...

[1] https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/02/history-of-5-e...

You keep looking at what the intelligence agencies are publicly saying and ignoring the leaked documents showing they are regularly spying on each other's citizens and then using the agreement to share the data. Like this comment

>Note that this is saying that they reserve the right to do it unilaterally i.e. without the knowledge of the other, and this is considered against the purpose of the agreement

Yes, the US independently decides to spy on Brits. What makes it malicious is they then share that data with the British. The UK didn't request anything, but the end result is the UK intelligence agencies having sensitive data on UK citizens.

My quote wasn't said publicly, it was from the Snowden leaks

My mistake, that one part (that says it's fine for us to spy on Five Eyes citizens) was a directive to staff, not the public. Nothing in my post changes.

Yes, if they are not spying on OTHER countries in the agreement, what that actually means something worse:

The five countries are actively spying on their own people if they are respecting the agreement, Constitutions be damned.

Because modern governments are going to spy on everything they can.

We already know FBI agents used domestic spying infrastructure to stalk women and mistresses and ex-wives. That level of casual use means there is a 99.9999% chance it is used by the government for tracking journalists, leakers, liberal activists (but not right wing ones), profiling uppity citizens, etc.

If facebook and internet ad companies have complete information on you and your associates and post history and beliefs and location, the government has it. Multiple government have it.

We're already running shameful (Obama and Trump) concentration camps for immigrants (aka "lesser" humans), have detained US citizens as enemy combatants, performed extrajudicial assassinations on US citizens overseas, have two gestapo departments (Immigration Customs Enforcement and Customs Border Patrol) with radicalized right wing membership in their ranks.

All it takes is a charismatic strongman (probably from the right but can be from the left too), a false flag event like Gulf of Tonkin, do McCarthy hearings in Congress to stoke fear of external enemies within us, and start rounding up people.

The US could turn into a fascist regime in record time aided by complete IT awareness, soon with AI for profiling and analysis, AI agents for complete propaganda, and all the legal, historical, and dirty pool history to enable it.

> https://www.lowyinstitute.org/publications/we-need-five-eyes...

This is an article for an AU government-funded policy think-tank, written by a China-hawk who is also a fellow at America's government-funded, war-hawk Center for Strategic and International Studies, saying that 5Eyes is actually fine. His main thrust seems to be that AU just needs super-effective oversight like the US has with its secret rubber-stamp courts and nothing-to-gain-from-it Congressional review.

> The partnership has one core rule, that the members agree not to spy on each other.

The US's core rule #4 is that you can't rifle through people's shit without convincing a judge of the crime you suspect them of committing, and why you need to look, and what the narrow limits of your search are.

Yet here we are.

As I understand it, the 5 eyes are not allowed to spy on their citizens nor on the citizens of the partner nations. How are we here then discussing these problems?

Is the actual working of the intelligence alliance known?

I'm sure the PR departments proclaim that this is the agreement, but afaik there are no legal grounds to hold them accountable to that.

i am reasonable sure that this is not the publicly accepted interpretation.

It is on the other poster, the one making the claim, to provide a citation.

They both made claims. Spy agencies claim that they're not spying on their collective citizens. But it seems that they do, eg:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/20/us-uk-secret-d...

On the other hand, I'm not sure that the USA has enough protections in place that they feel the need for an intermediary.

This article supports what I said!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes#Domestic_espionage_s...

U.S. Director of National Intelligence, Admiral Dennis C. Blair, said in 2013: "We do not spy on each other. We just ask."

"In recent years, documents of the FVEY have shown that they are intentionally spying on one another's citizens and sharing the collected information with each other."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes

The quote from Dennis Blair means the opposite to what you think.

If ASIS is interested in a US citizen, they ask the FBI to spy on them. The FBI does this _within US law_, and gives the intelligence to Australia.

This is the opposite of what OP claimed.

In order to ask for that data, the US needs to obtain a warrant. Similar laws apply in the other countries.

Your quote is just saying that the parties think that any information they could get by spying on each other they could get by directly asking the person they would have spied on instead.

I mean we are seeing that they didn't even bother with a loophole 280k times, just straight up broke the law. Do you really think they might follow procedure in this situation.

An individual analyst can't ask another government for data, so yes, of course.