Which Other Countries Are ‘In Bed’ With The NSA?

By Hayes Brown

With three of their partners’ signal intelligence collection programs revealed, it’s only a matter of time before all eyes turn to two of the most seemingly innocuous members of the world stage: Canada and New Zealand.

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Australia has recently found itself the most recent target of Snowden’s cache of documents. Just days ago, the land down under’s participation in the NSA’s intelligence gathering was splashed across headlines. In the pages of Brazil’s O Globo newspaper, Glenn Greenwald — one journalist who originally received the NSA documents from Snowden — catalogued the existence of a series of four NSA listening stations throughout Australia.

What the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia all have in common is joint membership in an organization known colloquially as “The Five Eyes.” In a 1943 agreement — not even officially acknowledged until 2005 and declassified in 2010 — the U.S. and Britain agreed to share signal intelligence between themselves and the Dominions of Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. Under the terms of the pact, formally known as the UKUSA Agreement, electronic information collected in the course of espionage can be passed freely among themselves, circumventing the normal controls against foreign sharing that intelligence usually possesses.

For those keeping track, that still leaves two of the Five Eyes’ participation remaining relatively concealed or at least not the focus of a leak. Thus far, the Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC) and New Zealand’s Government Communications Security Bureau have managed to avoid major scrutiny or revelations about the programs that they operate. Given the new interest in revealing legal cooperation in intelligence sharing, however, it’s not hard to guess that they might be next.

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http://thinkprogress.org/security/2013/07/10/2276191/snowden-five-eyes/