UKUSA Agreement

UKUSA Community
Map of UKUSA Community countries with Ireland Australia Prime Minister John Howard Canada Prime Minister Stephen Harper New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark United Kingdom Prime Minister Gordon Brown United States President George W. Bush

The UKUSA Community is an alliance of English-speaking nations led by the United States and United Kingdom for the purpose of gathering intelligence via signals intelligence.

Member States

The constituent agencies are:

• Australia - Defence Signals Directorate (DSD)
• Canada - Communications Security Establishment (CSE)
• New Zealand - Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB)
• United Kingdom - Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ)
• United States - National Security Agency (NSA)

Organization

The UKUSA Community is often associated with the ECHELON system. The members of the UKUSA intelligence alliance have maintained ties in collecting and sharing intelligence since World War II. Each member of the UKUSA alliance is allegedly assigned responsibilities for monitoring different parts of the globe. Canada's main task used to be monitoring northern portions of the former Soviet Union and conducting sweeps of all communications traffic that could be picked up from embassies around the world. In the post-Cold War era, a greater emphasis has been placed on monitoring satellite, radio and cellphone traffic originating from Central and South America, primarily in an effort to track drugs and non-aligned paramilitary groups in the region. The United States, with its vast array of spy satellites and listening posts, monitors most of Latin America, Asia, Asiatic Russia and northern mainland China. Britain listens in on Europe and Russia west of the Urals as well as Africa. Australia hunts for communications originating in Indochina, Indonesia and southern mainland China. New Zealand sweeps the western Pacific.

See also

• Quadripartite Agreement
• Mass surveillance
• Text mining
• Anglosphere
• Old Commonwealth

References

• Richelson, Jeffrey T.; Ball, Desmond (1985). The Ties That Bind: Intelligence Cooperation Between the UKUSA Countries. London: Allen & Unwin. ISBN 0-04-327092-1
• Secret Power, New Zealand's Role in the International Spy Network; Craig Potton Publishing, Nelson, NZ; ISBN 0-908802-35-8; 1996 (ONLINE EDITION)
• Bryden, John. Best Kept Secret: Canadian Secret Intelligence in the Second World War. Toronto: Lester Publishing, 1993.
• Hamilton, Dwight. Inside Canadian Intelligence: Exposing the New Realities of Espionage and International Terrorism. Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2006.
• Frost, Mike and Michel Gratton. Spyworld: Inside the Canadian and American Intelligence Establishments. Toronto: Doubleday Canada Limited, 1994.
• Rosen, Philip. The Communications Security Establishment – Canada’s Most Secret Intelligence Agency. Ottawa: Library of Parliament Research Branch, 1993.
• Rudner, Martin. Canada’s Communications Security Establishment: From the Cold War to Globalization in Intelligence and National Security. Volume 16 Number 1 (Spring 2001). 97-128.
• Whitaker, Reginald. Cold War Alchemy: How America, Britain, and Canada Transformed Espionage into Subversion in Intelligence and National Security.