The Five Eyes countries are the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
Not many people know this, but the United Kingdom has some of the most extreme spying powers in the developed world. At the end of 2016, passing what some people called the "Snooper's Charter," the UK put into law some of the most draconian anti-privacy laws that we have ever known, allowing its government to compel companies to break their own encryption.
The UK plays a pivotal part in the so-called Five Eyes alliance, which also includes the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Nobody knew it at the time, but the American military base which my family and I grew up next to has played a crucial role in delivering US drone strikes across the Middle East and beyond. America's drone-strike regime, largely considered illegal for numerous reasons, is not something that countries should willingly participate in lightly and without public scrutiny.
Why am I mentioning this? Because it goes to the very heart of my point: the extent to which we know or do not know what our governments are doing behind closed doors is quite literally a matter of life and death.
Comment: 'All watched over by machines of loving grace' was a Californian hippy's poem from the 1960s, envisioning a computing/digital utopia. British docu-maker Adam Curtis named his 2011 series after it, in which he explored how the computing/internet age enslaved rather than liberated people. The original techie innovators and gurus predicted that politics-as-usual would disappear. Instead, everything has become intensely political, and the predominantly anglophone structure of world power is arguably more entrenched and brutal than ever before.