There's something called The Five Eyes Alliance which is an intelligence sharing agreement
between the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
During the second world war, the UK and the US were sharing intelligence about the nazis.
They had an agreement called BRUSA, which allowed them to exchange personnel and it
gave both countries rules on handling all that classified information.
That arrangement was working out so well for them that they carried it on after the war
with the originally titled UK-USA agreement.
In fact the agreement was working out so well for the intelligence agencies, that it expanded
to include three parts of the Queen's commonwealth; Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
And there you have it, the Five Eyes Alliance was born.
It was supposed to help with the sharing of intelligence on the Soviet Union and China,
but it's not always been used for that.
The Five Eyes set up a system called ECHELON - it's what's called a signals intelligence
sharing system.
In a nutshell, ECHELON was a project to share wiretapped phone conversations, satellite
information, and eventually fibre optic communications.
It's rumoured that the project dates back to 1971, but obviously it's been developing
like new technologies do.
No one can be 100 percent sure who it targets or how often because it's so highly classified.
When politicians started asking about it in 1999 - the UK and the US both denied that
is existed and they still do today, even though Australia and New Zealand have admitted it
does.
It's now thought to be an automated global spying network capable of listening in to
every single phone call or reading every email around the world.
We've known that this system exists since at least 2000, but there was a BBC documentary
by a guy called Duncan Campbell that came out in 1987 and it was brought up then.
He had a source inside this site in Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire.
His work revealed it to be part of the ECHELON system.
The weird spherical structures are known as radomes and that's where the snooping happens.
Back then they were capable of making two million intercepts every single hour.
They looked out for key words and message patterns trying to uncover terrorist plots
or cross-border crimes and any communications flagged would be passed on to intelligence
analysts.
That base was linked to the the Headquarters of the US National Security Agency, and GCHQ
and it wasn't the only base - the Five Eyes Alliance had listening posts all over the
world.
Even in 1999 when these politicians were asking their questions there were concerns that the
power these listening posts gave the intelligence agencies could be quite easily abused, maybe
by spying on individuals or giving information to certain companies so that they could have
an advantage when bidding for contracts.
Even back then there were accusations that the NSA and it's allies were operating a dragnet
system and invading the privacy of American citizens.
Now that sounds familiar, right?
Because of Edward Snowden's whistleblowing we've all become aware of the NSA's PRISM
and perhaps to a lesser extent GCHQ's TEMPORA programme.
Both of them allowed the agencies to store and analyse vast amounts of data, metadata,
emails and so on.
The UK's foreign secretary William Hague has refused to comment on whether or not the information
collected by those programmes was shared and the same goes for GCHQ.
Then a spokeswoman for the NSA said this:
"Any allegation that NSA relies on its foreign partners to circumvent U.S. law is absolutely
false.
NSA does not ask its foreign partners to undertake any intelligence activity that the U.S. government
would be legally prohibited from undertaking itself,".
But if all of our intelligence agencies are collecting this information anyway, does the
NSA really need to ask for it?
What the Five Eyes Alliance and echelon shows us is that for a long long time our governments
have been able to collect this information and that they have the legal basis to share
it.
So given that they've extended their dragnet programmes so far and wide without any public
knowledge, should we believe them when they say they aren't actually sharing this information?
Let us know what you think in a comment below and check out our Edward Snowden playlist,
if you need a bit more information on the NSA and PRISM then there's a couple of videos
over there that you can click on and they should be in the video description.
Please don't forget to subscribe to the channel and we'll see you again next time.