Five Eyes Looking Over Your Shoulder

By: American Decency Staff

Implicit to every privacy agreement that we sign, every application we download to our phone, every hospital form agreeing to allow the hospital to save and maintain your health records, every waiver we sign allowing photographers to share our family photo on Facebook is a common understanding: we own the rights to that information and data – at least until we sign it away.

But the fact is most of us don’t read the agreements, and if we did, we’d sign them anyway based on the –usually fair- assumption that the worst that could happen is that advertisers will know how to target us a little more effectively.

But sometimes, as in with the “Face App” craze going around not too long ago, people start to realize how dangerous that data can be in the wrong hands.

Face App, when you download it to your phone, requires that you agree to a license agreement as many apps do, and then it takes your picture and applies an algorithm to alter the image and show you what you might look like when you’re old. One week I opened up my Facebook and the top four or five posts were friends of mine sharing what they would look like as a senior citizen. The app was crazy popular overnight, but came to a pretty quick death when it was revealed that license that users signed without ever reading gave the Russian developer access to do basically anything that it wanted with your likeness, including sell it, give it away, use it for advertising or for others to use, etc. People don’t want the Russians having that kind of information, particularly when you consider that the last few generations of smart phones use facial recognition to unlock the phone and potentially get into certain accounts and access private information.

The moral of that story is that we need to consider who might want access to our information, what they might do with it now, and how it could be used in the future.

And with that we come a recent meeting by a committee which seems like it’s trying very hard to be antagonists in a comic book: Five Eyes – officially, the Five Country Ministerial.

The Five Country Ministerial is made up of intelligence organizations from five allied nations, the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. Intelligence organizations from these countries agreed that"The inability of intelligence and law enforcement agencies to lawfully access encrypted data and communications poses challenges to law enforcement agencies' efforts to protect communities. Therefore, we agreed to the urgent need for law enforcement to gain targeted access to data."

The meeting was specifically in response to encrypted messaging applications like the popular “Whatsapp,” which basically scrambles a message on one end before it is sent, and then unscrambles it when the recipients receives it, making interception difficult or impossible.

It should be noted that these agencies aren’t just focusing on encrypted messaging because that’s where the really bad stuff is. It’s because they already can access regular old messages.

The statement stated that, "Privacy laws must prevent arbitrary or unlawful interference, but privacy is not absolute."

The gist of it is, our government is carving out for itself the legal right to access our data at will, ostensibly so that they can sift through it to find terrorists and criminals. And maybe today, stopping terrorists is a good reason for them to have access that information.

But consider how far left both parties have moved in the past few election cycles.

Who’s going to be deciding what a terrorist is in the next ten or twenty years? Kamala? Beto? AOC?

Someone is always looking over your shoulder online and we need to think about who and why.

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