In what the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is billing as “their first-ever joint public appearance”, the heads of the intelligence services of five Western governments, known as the “Five Eyes” are now meeting in Palo Alto, California, the heart of Silicon Valley.
Heads of the intelligence services in the UK, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand were invited to an Emerging Technology and Securing Innovation Security Summit by Director Christopher Wray. The professed aim of the summit, which kicked off yesterday with what the FBI called a “fireside chat” hosted by former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, is to seek Silicon Valley assistance in erecting a cyber-shield around Western technological advances to prevent their theft by potentially hostile nation states such as China and Russia.
According to MI5 Director General Ken McCallum: “The UK is seeing a sharp rise in aggressive attempts by other states to steal competitive advantage. It’s the same across all five of our countries. The stakes are now incredibly high on emerging technologies; states that lead the way in areas like artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and synthetic biology will have the power to shape all our futures. We all need to be aware, and respond before it’s too late.”
Given the fact that China relies largely on purloined or stolen Western technology to grow its military might as well as its economy, this initiative is not before time. Events in Ukraine and the Middle East this year have also highlighted increasingly volatile geopolitics in many regions across the globe. But there is also growing concern that, once Rice’s “fireside chat” is over, the meetings now being held with Silicon Valley supremos behind closed doors may also enable Western intelligence services to spy on their own citizens to an even greater degree than they do already.
Secret data sharing agreements between Five Eyes and Big Tech
The general public would not be even aware of the existence of “The Five Eyes” coalition or its secretive past and present relationship with Big Tech if not for the trove of classified documents released to the press by Edward Snowden a decade ago. Among the secrets uncovered were long-standing information-sharing relationships between the intelligence services and Silicon Valley.
It should be remembered that Five Eyes began as an entirely top-secret alliance at the start of the Cold War and conducted its operations in darkness for years with the complicit assistance of Big Tech. The Snowden documents identified several technology companies as participants in the hitherto secret PRISM program, which included Microsoft in 2007, Yahoo! in 2008, Google in 2009, Facebook in 2009, YouTube in 2010, Skype in 2011, and Apple in 2012.
Snowden’s leaks show that private individuals’ most intimate online activities, phone conversations, and other sensitive information have routinely been dissected, analyzed, and shared by the Western intelligence services for over a decade. The Silicon Valley summit currently taking place in Palo Alto is now raising fresh concerns that intelligence services such as the FBI and MI5 may now be covertly increasing the surveillance of their own citizens to an unacceptable degree by extending their reach into areas such as private encrypted messaging.
For example, in late July of this year, UK Home Secretary Suella Braverman, along with her Five Eyes colleagues, attacked Meta’s recent proposal to encrypt messages sent through its Messenger product, mirroring a similar anti-encryption statement that Five Eyes made exactly three years ago. In July of this year, the FBI was also accused of improperly using an intelligence database to search for information about a US senator, a state senator, and a state-level judge.
However, the reach of Five Eyes goes well beyond the borders of the original five participant countries. According to the released Snowden documents, a high proportion of the world’s electronic communications outside America also pass through the US. Because electronic communications follow the cheapest rather than the most direct route, the bulk of the world’s internet infrastructure is based in the US.
Nor is the intelligence gathered on their citizens only shared among the five countries that make up the Five Eyes: the US, the UK, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. It was also revealed that there is a Nine Eyes alliance including France, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Norway in addition to the original Five Eyes members. Another, even broader alliance, the Fourteen Eyes, in addition to the Nine Eyes member states, also includes; Germany, Belgium, Italy, Spain, and Sweden. But a shroud of secrecy still surrounds the extent to which the newer participants share the intelligence data gathered by the original Five Eye member states.
