Nine Eyes is a name frequently heard in the Cybersecurity community. However, it is very difficult for the layman to understand what it is and how it could impact the average person’s daily life.
We will be taking you through all of the controversies, issues, and information that is available right now about the Nine Eyes Surveillance Alliance.
First, we will go through the nine countries that are a part of the Nine Eyes surveillance group. After that, we will go through all of the controversies that the group is entangled in along with how they could have an impact on your life. But before all that, we will tell you an easy solution for all of your privacy concerns that may arise if you live in a Nine Eyes country.
Avoid Nine Eyes Scrutiny: Use a VPN
Before we delve into details about the Nine Eyes countries and the activities that they do, remember that protecting yourself from any sort of scrutiny when browsing the internet is quite simple. All you need to do is to use a VPN. A VPN will divert all of your traffic through a server hosted at a location of your choice, creating an extra layer of security between you and the web server.
ExpressVPN is the industry standard when it comes to VPN and it has all of the features that you need. Not only does it have some of the best security from all the VPNs, but it also has amazing speeds.
ExpressVPN will allow you to spoof your location as well as ensure that anyone who does tap into your data will not be able to access it due to the AES-256 encryption that is included in ExpressVPN. ExpressVPN may be a little bit pricier than other VPNs. But it comes with several attractive features.
Nine Eyes Countries
Initially, there were a total of 5 countries which decided to share information with each other when it came to surveillance. This agreement was based on the UKUSA agreement and the participants were the United Kingdom, United States, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand.
Later on, a total of 4 more countries became a part of the agreement and decided to share their information with one another. These countries were Denmark, Netherlands, Norway, and France. This was the first time that mainland Europe took an active part in the surveillance alliance program.
Later on, the SIGINT Seniors Europe countries also became a part of this organization. Nine Eyes is also referred to as Fourteen Eyes because of this addition. The countries that entered the alliance during this phase were Germany, Italy, Sweden, Spain, and Belgium.
This is not all since other countries also have loose tries to the aforementioned surveillance alliance. These countries are close allies with one or more of the Nine Eyes countries and thus, they also take part in the distribution of information. These countries are Singapore, Israel (people claim it is an ‘observer’ of the alliance), South Korea, and Japan.
What does the Nine Eyes do?
This is an interesting question, and one which has no clear-cut answers since the data of these organizations is not released to the public. Essentially, the Nine Eyes is an alliance which agrees to share their surveillance data with one another, supposedly to protect against terrorist threats.
However, this leads to a lot of problems. For example, if the US government cannot legally spy on one of its citizens for one reason or the other, they may have the UK government do it by proxy. On top of that, the fact that almost everyone uses the internet makes it really easy to spy on anyone.
A perfect example of this is the Snooper’s Charter, which allowed the UK government to have extensive surveillance on whichever citizen it wanted to. Although it has recently been outlawed and the government has to rewrite it, the implications of such a bill being approved through the parliament are enough to make the average person worry about his or her privacy.
Conclusion
Since the entire functionality of the Nine Eyes alliance has been kept in the dark by all of the participants, it definitely raises some questions when it comes to our privacy. With the advent of the internet, it is not a huge leap to imagine that we might constantly be under surveillance.
The good news is that you can solve most of the problems that may arise if you live in a Nine Eyes territory. Using a VPN will allow you to have a stress-free online experience. It will protect your online anonymity, and make sure that not only are you safe from any government surveillance, but you are also protected against any private entity that may be trying to poach your data.
Yadawanka Pal
