Have you ever seen the movie Wizard of Oz?
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
It's all about power, money and control.
The Five Eyes Alliance was created in
the aftermath of World War Two to
monitor enemy communications and share
intelligence between its founding nations.
It is now recognized as the
largest spying network in history.
There are standard things which intelligence agencies do.
So, war warning -- are our enemies
going to attack us tomorrow?
That's an unchanging target.
What you're doing is you're establishing a
background of indicators, perhaps 200 indicators
and what you want to know is
has anything changed today?
If suddenly there's more railway traffic
if suddenly Russian hospitals are buying more blood plasma
whole load of things which might
say your enemy is going to --
So those things you will just do routinely.
Then there's questions relating to policy.
America's changing its policy towards China.
It's thinking about invading Iran
So a very broad spectrum of threats.
The end of the Cold War in the early 1990s
saw the demise of the Soviet Union as a
superpower and a threat.
Up until then, the Five Eyes had been primarily focused on
collecting intelligence from the Communist Bloc.
So politicians began to
question their agency's worth.
So they were sitting there
How can we justify our existence?
So you look around and say well there's this explosion in
digital communications.
And there's bad guys in there doing things
so this is our new target.
In order to keep up with it
we have to have an ever-increasing budget.
We need more and more people
That's how you build an empire.
While funding to the Five Eyes Alliance has dramatically increased
since the beginning of the 21st century
the agencies continue to remain largely
autonomous from the governments who fund them.
Governments come and go.
They are told the minimum.
In a way they're kind of scared of the spies.
And so these agencies are mostly ships that run themselves.
Most people outside of the
intelligence apparatus themselves in
foreign governments don't even know the
existence of that relationship.
Politicians don't want to talk about it
They just want the the one up in
whatever negotiation they're entering into.
So they're left alone, they're left to
kind of do their own business.
I think it's an inevitable tension
all countries with major intelligence agencies.
Most of what goes on doesn't
seem to be known.
And that builds up a culture where the agencies start to
believe that that's their right.
They see political accountability as a risk
so while you can't say that they
completely run themselves as a rogue or something
in practice a lot of what
they do is completely separate from the
governments that they're under.
The 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States
gave the Five Eyes a legitimate reason to expand.
It was going in this direction anyway
but 9/11 incredibly accelerated it.
Once you got the terrorist attack here
we became very unforgiving in not
grabbing communications.
And so we accelerated our ability
our, for want of a better word, invasiveness
into communications networks in which
legitimate targets coexisted with
legitimately protected communications.
There was a distinct change after
September 11, something changed which
at least in the smaller agencies
had been a no-go zone which was that
using these Cold War massive national
security resources against the citizens
of the Five Eyes countries.
That had been something that just never usually
happened in a country like New Zealand or Australia
or Canada.
And September 11 loosened that.
The United States and Britain completely dropped
all their sense of restraints about it.
And these agencies are closer to each other than
they are to their own governments.
As a result of changes since September 11, 2001
the Five Eyes alliance is now
capable of capturing virtually every
phone conversation, email, Internet search
or social media entry in the world.
What kind of information?
Your location for where you currently are
text messages, emails
your buddy lists, your calendar
as it gets sent around the world.
If you're having a video chat with somebody
that gets recorded.
This level of mass surveillance raises
important questions about the trade-off
between security and democracy.
The absolute raw fact of the matter is
that if you want a GCHQ or NSA or ASD or these other
services to do for you what it was they
did in the 70s and 80s
intercept communications of those who would will you harm
if you wanted them to do that in the 21st century
the flow of data that actually contained
your information and mine, there's no other way.
Once you adopt these totalitarian procedures
I mean, this is straight out of the KGB, Stasi, Gestapo, SS
you know, Mao's people, everybody.
All dictators and despots down through history do this kind of thing.
And so once you adopt that, then you have to
you have to do, in secret, pass laws
or change things and suppress your
population and and keep them from
knowing what you're doing.
And so you have an uninformed public
and so you've destroyed your democracy.
That's what's happening.