Good riddance to bad rubbish: Why the ‘Five Eyes Alliance’ should be dismantled

UK media have reported that senior Trump advisor Peter Navarro lobbied his boss to cut Canada out of the Five Eyes intel-sharing network.

Navarro rejected the report. But given the harm the intel coalition has done to Trump, Americans and relations with allies, removing members or dismantling the organization wouldn’t be a bad idea. Here’s why.

In 2024, journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger revealed that Barack Obama’s CIA chief had worked with Five Eyes partners to circumvent restrictions on domestic spying to illegally tap Trump’s 2016 campaign, targeting Trump himself and over two dozen of his associates.

In 2013, NSA contractor-turned whistleblower Edward Snowden exposed his former employer’s work with the Five Eyes using tools like PRISM and XKeyscore to engage in a global, unfathomably massive warrantless spying program targeting foreigners and Americans alike.

Besides ordinary people, the Snowden leaks revealed Five Eyes spying on non-Anglosphere allied countries’ leaders, including Chancellor Merkel of Germany and President Hollande of France.

The Five Eyes have also been linked to diplomatic crises between Western nations and the developing world, with the 2023-present spat between Canada and India over the extraterritorial killings of Sikh separatists accompanied by allegations of a Five Eyes plot to destabilize India.

In 2013, a scandal erupted in Australian-Indonesian relations after it was revealed that Canberra and its Five Eyes partners sought to tap the phones of Indonesia’s sitting president, his wife and other senior officials.

And the Five Eyes’ shady activity goes back much further than that, with the ECHELON surveillance program, launched in the early 1970s, ostensibly to monitor Eastern Bloc countries and the Soviet Union, actually engaging in the interception of communications worldwide.

In the late 1990s, it was revealed that ECHELON had been used by US corporations to spy on their European competitors.

Similar activity was uncovered by WikiLeaks in 2015, with Japanese officials and companies revealed to have been monitored by the NSA using Five Eyes during negotiations on the TPP trade pact.