14 EYES
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/02/nsa-portrait-total-surveillance
On November 2, The Guardian published a lenghty article about the Snowden-leaks, which said that besides the close intelligence-sharing group of the US, Britain, Canada, Australia and New-Zealand, known as 5-Eyes, there are also groups called 9-Eyes and 14-Eyes.
According to The Guardian, the first consists of the 5-Eyes countries plus Denmark, France, the Netherlands and Norway and the latter adding another five European nations. This caused some embarrassment, as especially France and The Netherlands were heavily opposed to NSA's eavesdropping operations.
Many new 'Eyes'
First we take a look at what The Guardian wrote about the 9-Eyes and other intelligence-sharing groups:
"The NSA operates in close co-operation with four other English-speaking countries - the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand - sharing raw intelligence, funding, technical systems and personnel. Their top level collective is known as the '5-Eyes'.
Beyond that, the NSA has other coalitions, although intelligence-sharing is more restricted for the additional partners: the 9-Eyes, which adds Denmark, France, the Netherlands and Norway; the 14-Eyes, including Germany, Belgium, Italy, Spain and Sweden; and 41-Eyes, adding in others in the allied coalition in Afghanistan."
For almost everyone the existance of these 'Eyes' came as a surprise, but as this article will show, there are also 3-, 4-, 6-, 7-, 8-, 9- and 10-Eyes communities. They were created for restricting access to military and intelligence information to respective numbers of coalition nations. These 'Eyes' are used as handling instructions and often supported by dedicated communication networks.
Did POTUS stop at Camp Smith, HAWAII? to get all that data to be transferred into our hands?
The 14-Eyes and 3rd and 4th party partners
Now let's take a look at the 14-Eyes community, which was revealed for the first time by The Guardian. Looking at the number and the participating countries, it comes very close to CFBLNet, which had 13 full members (12 nations + the NATO organization) since 2010. But there are also some differences again:
CFBLNet members:
USA, GBR, CAN, AUS, NZL, FRA, DEU, NLD, NOR, ESP, ITA, SWE
The Guardian:
USA, GBR, CAN, AUS, NZL, FRA, DEU, DNK, NLD, NOR, ESP, ITA, BEL, SWE
These lists are very similar, except that Denmark and Belgium, which are on the Guardian's list, are not a (full) member of CFBLNet. Maybe these two countries joined CFBLNet only very recently, and in that case the 14-Eyes could refer to this group. It does show though that these NATO countries (and Sweden) are cooperating in additional information-sharing initiatives.
The exact purpose of such a cooperation in the 14-Eyes group isn't clear. The New York Times only says that the nations comprising the 9-Eyes and 14-Eyes groups have formal arrangements with NSA, which is something that also makes a country a traditional 3rd party partner.
According to Snowden-documents, about 30 countries have this status, but so far only the names of Germany, France, Austria, Denmark, Belgium and Poland were published. Some other sources say that Norway, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Japan, South-Korea, Taiwan, Israel and South Africa are 3rd party partners too.
If we compare this to the 14-Eyes, we see that only France, Germany, Norway, Italy, Belgium and probably Spain are known 3rd party partners. Sweden, Denmark and The Netherlands are not, but it's assumed they had or have less formal arrangements for exchanging SIGINT and cryptologic information with NSA. This also applies to Finland and Taiwan, and therefore these countries are sometimes called 4th party partners.
It seems there are roughly three possibilities:
A. All countries of the 14-Eyes (and subsequently those of the 9-Eyes) are actually 3rd party partners, because of having formal arrangements with NSA. Which means Sweden, Denmark and The Netherlands must have acquired that position in recent years. Grouping them in two 'Eyes' would only make sense if that's for some specific initiatives.
B. Countries belonging to the 9-Eyes and 14-Eyes have a more close relationship with NSA and are therefore somewhere in between the 2nd party and the 3rd party nations. This is what both papers suggest, but it seems not very likely that relationships like these allow that much of (formal) refinement.
C. The 9-Eyes and 14-Eyes are groups created for specific goals and consist of the Five Eyes with some additional 3rd and 4th party nations, depending on whether their participation is needed for achieving those goals.
Update:
A newly disclosed document has shown that all countries of the 14-Eyes are 3rd Party partners of NSA and that the actual name of this group is SIGINT Seniors Europe (SSEUR). More about this: 14-Eyes are 3rd Party partner forming the SIGINT Seniors Europe
The 6, 8 and 10 Eyes
Creating separate access groups for coalition operations, and describing them with a certain number of 'Eyes' can be traced back to the early years of this century. The first occasion seems to have been the Joint Warrior Interoperability Demonstration 2003 in which also non-traditional partner countries were added to the communications network used by the UKUSA and NATO coalition.
Information sharing between different groups of coalition partners required that separate domains had to be created within one network: in 2003, the 5-Eyes countries and the NATO organization comprised the 6-Eyes domain, while these six members plus four Pacific Rim nations (Japan, South Korea, Thailand and Singapore) comprised the 10-Eyes domain. Each domain had its own Type-2/3DES-encrypted Virtual Private Network (VPN) which ran over a network secured by classified Type-1 encryption algorithms.
CENTRIXS networks
The main US-led multinational coalition networks are called CENTRIXS, which stands for Combined ENTerprise Regional Information eXchange System. It's a secure wide area network (WAN) architecture, which can be established according to the demands of a particular coalition exercise or operation. CENTRIXS supports intelligence and operations information sharing at the SECRET REL TO [country/coalition designator] level. Some notable CENTRIXS networks are:
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CENTRIXS Four Eyes (CFE) for the US, Britain, Canada and Australia.
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CENTRIXS-NZ for the Four Eyes plus New Zealand.
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CENTRIXS-JPN for the United States and Japan.
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CENTRIXS-K for the United States and South-Korea.
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CENTRIXS-PHI for the United States and the Philippines.
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CENTRIXS-CNFC for the Combined Naval Forces CENTCOM (VPN within GCTF).
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CENTRIXS-MCFI for the Multinational Coalition Forces Iraq.
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CENTRIXS-ISAF (CX-I) which is the US component of the Afghan Mission Network to share critical battlefield information among 50 coalition partners.
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CENTRIXS-GCTF (CX-G) for the Global Counter Terrorism Forces, which is the US coalition network in Afghanistan to share information among more than 80 Troop Contributing Nations.
The countries connected to CENTRIXS-ISAF can be recognized as the 41-Eyes of the allied coalition in Afghanistan mentioned by The Guardian. This group grew slowly and was called 43-Eyes in 2010, when the NATO exercise Empire Challenge 2010 (EC10) changed its "main participating security domain" to "an International Security Assistance Forces (ISAF) equivalent 43-Eyes domain".
Probably also because of the steadily increasing number of coalition partners, shareable information is not marked with REL [..] EYES anymore, but with REL ISAF and REL GCTF.
Conclusion
We have seen that designations consisting of a number of 'Eyes' are used as a dissemination marking or handling instruction showing among which group of countries specific military or intelligence information may be shared.
The Guardian and the New York Times listed various 'Eyes' and some other groups in a way that suggests a hierarchy of how close their relationship with NSA would be: first the Five Eyes community, followed by 9-Eyes, 14-Eyes, NACSI, and with the 41-Eyes Afghanistan coalition being the loosest kind of cooperation.
A scheme like this looks attractive, but is at least partially misleading. For sure the Five Eyes are cooperating in the closest way, but the other groups have different scopes. NACSI is more like an advisory working group of NATO than an alliance of signal intelligence agencies, and the 41/43-Eyes community is for sharing battlefield information between members of the Afghanistan coalition.
Regarding the 9-Eyes and 14-Eyes communities, it's now up to journalists who have access to the Snowden-documents to provide more detailed information about whether they really represent more close alliances with NSA, or whether they're just 'working groups' of selected 3rd and 4th party nations, like most of the other 'Eyes' communities.
Update #1:
A newly disclosed document has shown that all countries of the 14-Eyes are 3rd Party partners of NSA and that the actual name of this group is SIGINT Seniors Europe (SSEUR). More about this: 14-Eyes are 3rd Party partner forming the SIGINT Seniors Europe
Update #2:
From remarks made on Twitter by a Dutch journalist who works on the Snowden-papers, it seems that the 9-Eyes is a group for exchanging military signals intelligence related to operations in Afghanistan.
Summary of all known 'Eyes'
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3-Eyes: USA, GBR, AUS (TEYE)
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4-Eyes: USA, GBR, CAN, AUS (ACGU)
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5-Eyes: USA, GBR, CAN, AUS, NZL (FVEY)
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6-Eyes: USA, GBR, CAN, AUS, NZL, NATO
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7-Eyes: USA, GBR, CAN, AUS, FRA, DEU, ITA (MIC?)
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8-Eyes: USA, GBR, CAN, AUS, NZL, NATO, ?, South-Korea
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9-Eyes: USA, GBR, CAN, FRA, DEU, ITA, NLD, NOR, ESP (CFBLNet)
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9-Eyes: Five Eyes + FRA, DNK, NLD, NOR (Guardian)
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10-Eyes: USA, GBR, CAN, AUS, NZL, NATO, Japan, South-Korea, Thailand, Singapore
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14-Eyes: Five Eyes + FRA, DNK, NLD, NOR, DEU, ESP, ITA, BEL, SWE (SSEUR)
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41-Eyes: ISAF-countries in ? (Guardian)
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43-Eyes: ISAF-countries in 2010
dude, THAT IS SO FUCKIN' BIG. God, I love this timeline. And just this week, I heard so many reporters say "NK wouldn't de-nuke, and they'll ask for something last minute. That they are playing POTUS."
too funny, can't wait till they all shiff their pants.
sauce me please
he is, he's just not doing it for YOU. He's doing it for the WORLD. Which YOU reside and live in. You want to be free of this shit or not? I sure as hell do, so buckle up and shut up. Enjoy the ride. No ticket returns.
great rebuttal, child.
thank you patriot.