Five Eyes Intelligence Sharing

"One of the things we tried to do with the private sector is to say, 'Be on the lookout because now what they cannot do from the front door, they're going to do it through the back door'." 

"We had a very difficult discussion with a business leader in Canada where we essentially were able to show that person that we had discovered ... that some components of high-tech guidance had been used in Russian drones to kill Ukrainians, absolutely unbeknownst to that business leader."

CSIS director David Vigneault

"[The Chinese government is engaged in the] most sustained, scaled and sophisticated theft of intellectual property and acquisition of expertise that is unprecedented in human history."

"The problem with that is they're engaged in wholesale intellectual property theft and the acquisition of expertise."

Australian Security Intelligence Organization director-general Mike Burgess

"They [Beijing Communist Party] have a bigger hacking program than that of every other major nation combined."

"Combine that with human intelligence [humint] operations [and China is deploying intellectual property theft tools] at a scale that the likes of which we've never seen."

FBI head Christopher Wray

"[Five Eyes agencies are seeing intellectual property theft rise at an unprecedented rate]."

"There is real concern amongst our organizations that AI, over time and potentially sooner than we might think, will give various of our adversaries and less sophisticated adversaries, new ideas and new access to dangerous knowledge."

"[MI-5 collects] thousands and thousands [of  hours of audio data in] lots of interesting places [every week that it uses to glean knowledge and train AI."

"You can imagine the tiny microphones that we might plant lawfully in certain locations to achieve that."

But what that means is we end up with a lot of audio products that we need quickly to translate into knowledge that is searchable. And the best means of doing that is to have AI scan across the material."

British Security Service (MI-5) director general Ken McCallum 

Sharing intelligence between partner-nations who have the most to gain by using their expertise and information-gathering to advise and alert collegial intelligence services is usually conducted under covert circumstances, relaying secret data to others in a manner that is circumspect and secure. This, however, was an occasion when members of the Five Eyes panel congregated in a public arena and permitted their findings and conclusions to be echoed by legacy media outlets.

 

The event, billed as "Emerging Threats, Innovation, and Security", a conference that included the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, took place this week at Stanford University. It is where Canada's head of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service revealed in a semi-public forum that Russia is making use of front companies and agents to surreptitiously bypass Western sanctions and trade barriers.

 

His agency, stated David Vigneault, had discovered an unfortunate situation where Canadian technology was being incorporated into weapons deployment in the Russian invasion of Ukraine, linking that technology and its manufacturer to Moscow's growing death toll of Ukrainian lives. What ensued, he said was a "very difficult discussion" with the company, to alert its head to the situation and to ensure the understanding that any further such trade would represent a criminal action.

 

Additionally, following an ensuing panel discussion Eric Balsam, a CSIS spokesperson stated that the agency's 2022 annual report noted as well that Canadian technology had been discovered in Iranian-produced Shahed-136 drones, used by Russian resident Vladimir Putin's military against Ukrainian civilians in his all-out war to destroy Ukraine. 

 

One of the most pressing impediments to CSIS effectiveness, director Vigneault explained to his audience, is its internal culture and "finding a way for our officers or our experts to think differently. That cultural reticence from our organization is something we need to break". CSIS is at work to emerge from its "silos" to engage with more external institutions such as universities, research centres and venture capitalists.

Moreover, he admitted the agency must search out concrete methods to explain the threat from Canada's adversaries such as China and Russia, since it is no longer sufficient to "cry wolf". There was general agreement that the threat China poses to the western world and specifically to members of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, dominated the conversation.

FBI head Wray informed attendees that China's state-operated hacking program vastly exceeds those of the world at large. Concerns echoed by British Security Service director general McCallum who also mentioned the speed at which artificial intelligence is now developing and providing new and increasingly vital hacking tools to actors in cyber threats.

From left to right: Australian Security Intelligence Organization Director-General Mike Burgess, Canadian Security Intelligence Service Director David Vigneault, FBI Director Christopher Wray, New Zealand Security Intelligence Service Director-General of Security and Chief Executive Andrew Hampton, and MI5 Director General Ken McCallum pose for a group photo during the Emerging Technology and Securing Innovation Summit in Palo Alto, California, on October 16, 2023.