UKUSA Agreement

The United Kingdom – United States of America Agreement (UKUSA, ) is a multilateral agreement for cooperation in signals intelligence between the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The alliance of intelligence operations is also known as Five Eyes (FVEY).

Emerging from an intelligence sharing agreement related to the 1941 Atlantic Charter, the secret treaty was renewed with the passage of the 1943 BRUSA Agreement, before being formally enacted on 5 March 1946 by the United Kingdom and the United States. In the following years, it was extended to encompass the three Commonwealth realms of Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Other countries, know as "third parties", such as West Germany, the Philippines and several Scandinavian countries also joined the UKUSA community.

Much of the sharing of information is performed via the ultra-sensitive STONEGHOST network, which contains "the Western world's most closely guarded secrets". In addition to intelligence sharing, the UKUSA agreement forms the basic foundation of the Special Relationship between the UK and the USA.

Due to its status as a secret treaty, its existence was not known to the Prime Minister of Australia until 1973, and it was not disclosed to the public until 2005. On June 25, 2010, for the first time in history, the full text of the agreement was publicly released by Britain's National Archives, and can now be viewed online. Shortly after is release, the seven-page UKUSA Agreement was recognized by Time magazine as one of the Cold War's most important documents with immense historical significance. Currently, the 2013 mass surveillance disclosures by Edward Snowden has shown that many intelligence-sharing activities between the First World allies of the Cold War are rapidly shifting into the realm of the World Wide Web.

History
The agreement originated from a ten-page British–U.S. Communication Intelligence Agreement, also known as BRUSA, that connected the signal intercept networks of the U.K. Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) and the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) at the beginning of the Cold War. The document was signed on March 5, 1946 by Colonel Patrick Marr-Johnson for the U.K.'s London Signals Intelligence Board and Lieutenant General Hoyt Vandenberg for the U.S. State–Army–Navy Communication Intelligence Board. Although the original agreement states that the exchange would not be "prejudicial to national interests", the United States often blocked information sharing from Commonwealth countries. The full text of the agreement was released to the public on June 25, 2010.

Under the agreement, the GCHQ and the NSA shared intelligence on the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China, and several eastern European countries (known as Exotics). The network was expanded in the 1960s into the Echelon collection and analysis network.

In July 2013, as part of the 2013 Edward Snowden revelations, it emerged that the NSA is paying GCHQ for its services, with at least £100 million of payments made between 2010 and 2013.

On 11 September 2013, The Guardian released a leaked document provided by Edward Snowden which reveals a similar agreement between the NSA and Israel's Unit 8200.

Overview
Although the UKUSA alliance is often associated with the ECHELON system, processed intelligence is reliant on multiple sources of information and the intelligence shared is not restricted to signals intelligence. The following table provides an overview of the government agencies involved and their respective responsibilities within the "Five Eyes" community:

Global coverage
Each member of the UKUSA alliance is officially assigned lead responsibility for intelligence collection and analysis in different parts of the globe.

Australia
Australia hunts for communications originating in Indochina, Indonesia, and southern China.

Canada
Formerly the northern portions of the former Soviet Union and conducting sweeps of all communications traffic that could be picked up from embassies around the world. In the post-Cold War era, a greater emphasis has been placed on monitoring satellite, radio and cellphone traffic originating from Central and South America.

New Zealand


New Zealand is responsible for the western Pacific. Listening posts in the South Island at Waihopai Valley just south-west of Blenheim, and on the North Island at Tangimoana. The Anti-Bases Campaign holds regular protests in order to have the listening posts closed down. New Zealand is responsible for targeting Southeast Asia.

United Kingdom
Europe, Africa, and European Russia.

United States
Monitors most of Latin America, Asia, Asiatic Russia, and northern China.

Third parties
The "Five Eyes" community is part of a huge alliance of Western democracies sharing signals intelligence with each other. These allied countries include NATO members (such as Denmark) and other U.S. allies (most notably Singapore and South Korea).

As early as the 1950s, several Scandinavian countries such as Norway and Sweden joined the community. They were soon followed by Denmark (1954) and West Germany (1955). These countries became "third parties" participants in the UKUSA network.

According to Edward Snowden, the NSA has a "massive body" called the Foreign Affairs Directorate that is responsible for partnering with other Western allies such as Israel.

However, being a partner of the NSA does not automatically exempt a country from being targeted by the NSA. According to an internal NSA document leaked by Snowden, "We (the NSA) can, and often do, target the signals of most 3rd party foreign partners."

Controversy
During the 2013 NSA leaks cyber spying scandal, the surveillance agencies of the "Five Eyes" have been accused of intentionally spying on one another's citizens and willingly sharing the collected information with each other, allegedly circumventing laws preventing each agency from spying on its own citizens.

The 2013 NSA leaks are not entirely new, but rather, they are a confirmation of earlier disclosures about the UK-USA espionage alliance. For example, the British newspaper The Independent reported back in 1996 that the U.S. National Security Agency "taps UK phones" at the request of the British intelligence agency MI5, thus allowing British agents to evade restrictive limitations on domestic telephone tapping.

The mutual surveillance and sharing of information between allies of the UK and USA resurfaced again during the 2013 mass surveillance disclosures. As described by the news magazine Der Spiegel, this was done to circumvent domestic surveillance regulations:

"Britain's GCHQ intelligence agency can spy on anyone but British nationals, the NSA can conduct surveillance on anyone but Americans, and Germany's BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst) foreign intelligence agency can spy on anyone but Germans. That's how a matrix is created of boundless surveillance in which each partner aids in a division of roles.

They exchanged information. And they worked together extensively. That applies to the British and the Americans, but also to the BND, which assists the NSA in its Internet surveillance."

According to The Guardian, the "Five Eyes" community is an exclusive club where new members "do not seem to be welcome":

Espionage




Political

 * Ban Ki-moon - The 8th Secretary-General of the United Nations was spied on by U.S. diplomats.


 * Dilma Rousseff - The President of Brazil and her aides were put under surveillance by the NSA


 * Dmitry Medvedev - The Russian Prime Minister's phone calls were monitored by the NSA


 * Enrique Peña Nieto - The President of Mexico was spied on by the NSA.


 * Ghazi Mashal Ajil al-Yawer - Iraq's Interim President made several romantic phone calls that caught the NSA's attention


 * Kofi Annan - The 7th Secretary-General of the United Nations was spied on by UK intelligence agents.


 * Mehmet Şimşek - Turkey's Minister of Finance was identified as a target of Britain's GCHQ


 * Mohamed ElBaradei - The Director of the International Atomic Energy Agency was put under surveillance by the Bush administration


 * Nelson Mandela - The President of South Africa and his ANC hideout were closely watched by British MI6 agents


 * Tony Blair - The former British Prime Minister was put under surveillance by the U.S. National Security Agency, which routinely listened into and recorded all of Blair's private telephone calls.
 * Princess Diana - The Princess of Wales was put under surveillance by the U.S. National Security Agency, which intercepted all her phone calls right until she died in a Paris car crash with Dodi Fayed in 1997. The NSA currently holds 1,056 pages of classified information about Princess Diana, which cannot be released to public because it is still classified Top Secret.

On behalf of the former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the Communications Security Establishment of Canada (CSEC) spied on two British cabinet ministers in 1983, according to former CSEC agent Mike Frost. Thatcher's office refused to confirm or deny these claims.

Airlines

 * Aeroflot

Broadcasting networks

 * Al Jazeera

Financial institutions

 * MasterCard
 * Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication
 * Visa Inc.

Oil corporations

 * Petrobras

Search engines

 * Google

Telecom operators

 * Alcatel-Lucent
 * Belgacom
 * Pacnet

Universities

 * Tsinghua University