Monday, April 8, 2024

UKUSA Agreement - FVEY

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Born out of the Cold War, Five Eyes is a multinational spy network comprised of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain, and the United States. The member states of Five Eyes gather intelligence about foreign countries, sharing it freely between themselves.

The United Kingdom – United States of America Agreement (UKUSA) is a multilateral agreement for cooperation in signals intelligence between Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The alliance of intelligence operations is also known as the Five Eyes. In classification markings this is abbreviated as FVEY, with the individual countries being abbreviated as AUS, CAN, NZL, GBR, and USA, respectively.

Emerging from an informal agreement related to the 1941 Atlantic Charter, the secret treaty was renewed with the passage of the 1943 BRUSA Agreement, before being officially enacted on 5 March 1946 by the United Kingdom and the United States. In the following years, it was extended to encompass Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Other countries, known as "third parties", such as West Germany, the Philippines, and several Nordic countries, also joined the UKUSA community in associate capacities, although they are not part of mechanism for automatic sharing of intelligence that exists between the Five Eyes.

Much of the sharing of information is performed via the ultra-sensitive STONEGHOST network, which has been claimed to contain "some of the Western world's most closely guarded secrets". Besides laying down rules for intelligence sharing, the agreement formalized and cemented the "Special Relationship" between the UK and the US.

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 25 June 2010, for the first time in history, the full text of the agreement was publicly released by the United Kingdom and the United States, and can now be viewed online. Shortly after its 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.

The global surveillance disclosure by Edward Snowden has shown that the intelligence-sharing activities between the First World allies of the Cold War are rapidly shifting into the digital realm of the Internet.


The documents, including diary entries, detail the war time meetings that began at Bletchley Park and led to the UKUSA deal being signed in March 1946. The alliance involved working together to intercept communications and break codes, sharing almost everything.

A short entry from February 1941 in the diary of Alastair Denniston, released for the first time today by GCHQ, marked the beginning of what was once the most secret of relationships. Denniston was head of Bletchley Park and he was welcoming a group of American code breakers at a time when the US had not yet entered WW2.

"The Ys are coming!" the entry read - meaning the Yanks. The Americans had undertaken a perilous crossing with their boat shot at by Nazi planes but they arrived at the home of British code breakers on a mission of huge importance.

With the permission of then-Prime Minister Winston Churchill, the two groups of spies would share their most sensitive secrets - that the UK had broken the German Enigma code and the US the Japanese code called Purple. 

Further diary entries reveal how key figures would travel back and forth over the Atlantic, including Denniston to meet with his opposite number as well as code breaker Alan Turing.

The power of the alliance in WW2 has made it the heart of what is sometimes called the "special relationship" between the two countries. The term seems increasingly outdated but the one place where it has always been real is when it comes to code breaking.

The relationship forged in that visit would outlast WW2 and, after a series of meetings, be formalised at the start of the Cold War with a document signed in Washington on 5 March 1946. The agreement was something of a "marriage contract" - each agreed honesty, openness and commitment to the other including a "no spy agreement" in which they would not target the other side. They would share nearly all the intelligence they produced through breaking codes and intercepting communications (known as signals intelligence or SIGINT) although the agreement did allow some wiggle room if one side felt they had to act independently.

Initially known as UKUSA, over the next 10 years it would be expanded as Australia, Canada and New Zealand joined, making up what is known today as the Five Eyes alliance. 



23-5-25 Xina-backed hackers ‘living off the land’ to target critical systems, says Five Eyes group: Targets include US military facilities on Guam that would be key in an Asia-Pacific conflict, say Microsoft and western spy agencies. ... The US and western security agencies warned in their advisory that the activities involved “living off the land” tactics, which take advantage of built-in network tools to blend in with normal Windows systems. The advisory warned that the hacking could then incorporate legitimate system administration commands that appear “benign”. While Xinese hackers are known to spy on western countries, this is one of the largest known cyber-espionage campaigns against American critical infrastructure.

United Nations Declaration 1942-1-1

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On 1 January 1942 the Declaration by the United Nations was agreed and signed by the
representatives of four major Allied nations during the Second World War.

The original signatories – United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, the USSR’s Ambassador to the US Maxim Litvinov, and Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs T. V. Soong – were joined the next day by a further 24 nations.

Having been drafted by Churchill, Roosevelt, and Roosevelt’s aide Harry Hopkins, the short declaration was linked to acceptance of the principles of the Atlantic Charter of 1941. The document also provided a foundation for the later establishment of the UN itself, but was firmly rooted in the political and military situation of the time. All signatories agreed to apply themselves fully to ‘a common struggle against savage and brutal forces seeking to subjugate the world’. Referring to these forces under the umbrella term ‘Hitlerism’, it is clear that the Allied leaders did not differentiate between the different regimes against which they were fighting.

The declaration also presented the intended conclusion of the war. Rather than accept an armistice as had happened at the conclusion of the First World War, the signatories agreed that ‘complete victory over their enemies is essential’. This meant that the Allies would only accept the unconditional surrender of their enemies. Furthermore, they agreed to cooperate with every other signatory in the ongoing war and therefore not pursue a separate peace for their own nation’s advantage.

By the time the war ended in 1945, a further 21 countries had signed the declaration.

The Declaration by United Nations was the main treaty that formalized the Allies of World War 2 and was signed by 47 national governments between 1942 and 1945. On 1 January 1942, during the Arcadia Conference, the Allied "Big Four"—the United Kingdom, the United States, the Soviet Union, and China—signed a short document which later came to be known as the United Nations Declaration, and the next day the representatives of 22 other nations added their signatures.

The other original signatories in the next day (2 January 1942) were the four dominions of the British Commonwealth (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa); eight European governments-in-exile (Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, and Yugoslavia); nine countries in the Americas (Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama); and one non-independent government, the British-appointed government of India.

The Declaration by United Nations became the basis of the United Nations (UN), which was formalized in the UN Charter, signed by 50 countries on 26 June 1945.

US Intelligence Agencies

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14-6-7 America's intelligence community - WaPo > .
CIA Spies - Declassified >> .
CIA, MI6, FVEY, XX - Intelligence, Espionage, Cyber - Guy Lewis >> .


The United States Intelligence Community (IC) is a group of separate U.S. federal government intelligence agencies and subordinate organizations that work both separately and collectively to conduct intelligence activities which support the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States. Member organizations of the IC include intelligence agencies, military intelligence, and civilian intelligence and analysis offices within federal executive departments.

The IC is overseen by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), which is headed by the director of national intelligence (DNI) who reports directly to the president of the United States.


Sunday, April 7, 2024

Vatican

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25-2-27 How the Vatican's Embassies Work - Wendover > .

Visegrád Group

2021 Poland and Hungary at Odds Over the Visegrad 4 > .
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23-8-29 Demographics of The Visegrád Countries - KaiserBauch > .
22-12-28 Too many people? Challenges of demographic change | DW > .
22-11-27 Polish military modernisation & buying Korean kit - Perun > .
22-10-14 HUNGARY | The West's Enemy Within? - J K-L > .
22-9-7 Intermarium - Poland Ukraine Baltics | George Friedman > .
22-7-22 Poland could become strongest land force in the EU - Binkov > .
22-7-21 Why Every NATO Member Joined (Why Others Haven't) - Spaniel > .
22-7-4 Intermarium: Is Strongest Union In Europe About To Appear? - Complete > .
22-5-6 Could Ukraine cause fall of Belarusian Dictator? - VisPol > . skip ad > .
22-3-23 Polish citizens join army b/o Russian invasion of Ukraine - BBC > .
21-9-4 How Viktor Orbán rigged Hungary's Democracy - Into > . skip > .
> EU >

Geostrategic Projection
European Geostrategic Projection ..

The Visegrád Group recently (Feb 15, 2021) celebrated its 30th birthday. The last 3 decades have been a time of great development for all V4 countries. However, does the format still have any value today?

00:00 Intro
00:45 The Path to Prosperity
03:44 Different Optics
12:30 Troublesome
16:30 Outro

The Visegrád Group, Visegrád Four, V4, or European Quartet, is a cultural and political alliance of four countries of Central Europe (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia), all of which are members of the EU and of NATO, to advance co-operation in military, cultural, economic and energy matters with one another and to further their integration to the EU.

The Group traces its origins to the summit meetings of leaders from Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland held in the Hungarian castle town of Visegrád on 15 February 1991. Visegrád was chosen as the location for the 1991 meeting as an intentional allusion to the medieval Congress of Visegrád in 1335 between John I of Bohemia, Charles I of Hungary and Casimir III of Poland.

After the dissolution of Czechoslovakia in 1993, the Czech Republic and Slovakia became independent members of the group, thus increasing the number of members from three to four. All four members of the Visegrád Group joined the European Union on 1 May 2004.

All four nations in the Visegrád Group are high-income countries with a very high Human Development Index. V4 countries have enjoyed more or less steady economic growth for over a century. In 2009, Slovakia adopted the euro as its official currency and is the only member in the Group to do so.

If counted as a single nation state, the Visegrád Group's GDP would be the 4th in the EU and 5th in Europe and 15th in the world. Both in terms of exports and imports, the V4 is also at the forefront not only in Europe, but also in the world (4th in the EU, 5th in Europe and 8th in the world).

Based on gross domestic product per capita (PPP) estimated figures for the year 2020, the most developed country in the grouping is the Czech Republic (US$40,858 per capita), followed by Slovakia (US$38,321 per capita), Hungary (US$35,941 per capita) and Poland (US$35,651 per capita). The average GDP (PPP) in 2019 for the entire group is estimated at around US$34,865.

Within the EU, the V4 countries are pro-nuclear-power, and are seeking to expand or found (in the case of Poland) a nuclear-power industry. They have sought to counter what they see as an anti-nuclear-power bias within the EU, believing their countries would benefit from nuclear power.

sī vīs pācem, parā bellum

igitur quī dēsīderat pācem praeparet bellum    therefore, he who desires peace, let him prepare for war sī vīs pācem, parā bellum if you wan...