The Five Eyes alliance—Australia, New Zealand, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada—once shrouded in the quiet confines of secrecy, now steps into the daylight. The shadows where it thrived are traded for a stage where it demands recognition. Its message: We are watching.
Its latest endeavor, a dossier titled Young People and Violent Extremism: A Call for Collective Action, is not merely a report; it is a statement. For the first time, this intelligence leviathan speaks openly to the public in such a manner. A covert institution seeking overt acknowledgment. Why? Perhaps to justify the cost of consultants hired to craft this pivot to transparency, to fashion the alliance a more palatable face. More likely, the next round of budget discussions loom.
The report lands with a sense of somber urgency. Its tone is not one of alarm, but of inevitability. It paints a stark picture—a stage where innocence meets ideology, where the young are ensnared by forces beyond their reckoning. It tells us that children, unwitting actors, are being thrust into a drama they neither authored nor understand. And the Five Eyes, now in plain sight, insists it is the custodian of that stage, promising vigilance in the spotlight’s glow.
Once, they answered to another name: Echelon. Born in the shadowed corridors of the late 1960s, its mission was clear—to eavesdrop on the military and diplomatic chatter of the Soviet Union and its Eastern Bloc allies as the Cold War simmered. By 1971, as we fought actual hot wars in South East Asia, the project shed its formative guise and took on a formal identity, a silent partner in the grand theater of global espionage.
For three decades, the Australian government denied its very existence. The secret lay buried, whispered about but never confirmed, until March 1999. That month, in an unprecedented admission, the veil lifted—just slightly. Martin Brady, then-director of the Defence Signals Directorate (now the Australian Signals Directorate), took to the airwaves of Nine Network. He confirmed, for the first time, that Australia’s intelligence apparatus was indeed part of the clandestine UKUSA Agreement. “The DSD,” he admitted, “does cooperate with counterpart signals intelligence organisations overseas under the UKUSA relationship.”
And so, a secret whispered in locked rooms found its way into the public ear—not willingly, but inevitably. The machinery of Echelon had been laid bare, if only briefly, by the same world it once sought to surveil unseen.
Now, the Five Eyes step boldly into the spotlight, holding press conferences and issuing media releases. They speak not in hushed tones but through carefully crafted statements, their words wrapped in the trappings of modern branding.
And then, there is the logo—a peculiar creation, as though someone hastily fused five Easter eggs into the semblance of a propeller. It lacks the gravitas one might expect from a global intelligence alliance. Instead, it sits uneasily on their communiqués, a jarring reminder that even the most clandestine of organisations must now grapple with the optics of their public face.
It is a strange evolution for an alliance born in silence. But in a world where perception is power, even those once defined by invisibility must step forward, awkward logos and all.
A digital devil’s playground
“The fact that the Five-Eyes have chosen youth radicalisation for our first public research collaboration indicates how concerning, escalating and pressing this challenge is,” intoned ASIO Director-General Mike Burgess.
His Australian Federal Police (AFP) colleague Commissioner Reece Kershaw noted “Since 1 January 2020, the AFP alongside its JCTT partners, has investigated and conducted operational activity against 35 individuals aged 17 years or younger, with the youngest aged 12 years old, and 57 per cent have been charged with either Commonwealth or state-based offences.’’
Oh, the irony that none of those youngsters bore the surname Haneef. Dr. Mohamed Haneef—remember him? Likely not. Time has a way of misplacing people like him, filed away in the overcrowded cabinets of collective amnesia.
Back in 2007, this unfortunate Indian doctor became a pawn in the great farce of Australian counterterrorism, detained for 12 humiliating days before being unceremoniously booted from the country. The government insists he left willingly, but let’s not split hairs over what passes for free will these days.
His crime? Being tangentially related to someone distantly connected to a London bombing. Not involved, mind you. Just adjacent in the cosmic lottery of family trees.
And yet, while Dr. Haneef sat bewildered in detention, ASIO quietly whispered the truth: there wasn’t a shred of evidence against him. They shared this nugget with the government a mere 48 hours after his arrest. Did anyone listen? Of course not. The color of his skin proved far louder than any whisper of innocence.
So, the wheels of injustice turned. Haneef was maligned, locked up, and dragged through the mud—all to save face for the Australian Federal Police and its political overlords. Having dug themselves into a chasm of incompetence, they heroically chose to keep digging. The aftermath? A damning inquiry led by John Clarke QC, which labeled the entire investigation "completely deficient." A polite euphemism, really, for what amounted to bureaucratic malpractice.
These are the people watching our children.
It’s a simple touch of context, the kind that ought to bubble up whenever the drumbeat starts for handing spooks and cops a little more institutional muscle. All this, of course, in a country that considers 10 year olds criminally liable, that cheerfully jails whistleblowers for the crime of honesty—a Sunburnt Country so allergic to sunlight that The New York Times has christened us The World's Most Secretive Democracy.
As to the new report itself, it draws us into the digital playgrounds of our era, where those digital native children, are more at home than many of us would care to admit.
The realm is vast, their vernacular slippery, and their interactions kaleidoscopic. Here, play bleeds into peril with alarming ease. Memes can morph into manifestos; a joke becomes a justification. And all the while, the algorithms hum their quiet approval, optimising for engagement and offering little by way of conscience.
Discord, Instagram, TikTok, Roblox—these aren’t just platforms; they are ecosystems, pulsating with life, laughter, and, alarmingly, latent dangers. Extremist groups have woven themselves into these digital spaces, camouflaging their intent within memes, messages, and seemingly benign interactions. The report underscores that these platforms, where adolescents flock for entertainment and belonging, have become the first point of contact for nefarious actors seeking to radicalise the vulnerable.
If you can't trust the police...
And so, we’re expected to pin our hopes on the guardians of our safety—institutions with a track record that could generously be called patchy, and a culture so reliably flawed it could be mistaken for tradition.
The Australian Federal Police, for example, could easily pen a cautionary tale or two about itself—though whether they'd see the irony is another matter entirely. Consider, if you will, the case of a 13-year-old boy with autism, ensnared in the blundering machinery of counterterrorism earlier this year. A Victorian court, displaying the kind of candor one wishes law enforcement shared, called the AFP's handling of the situation "profoundly short of the minimum standards expected." Translation: they botched it so badly that the proceedings against the child were tossed out entirely, like yesterday’s crumpled newspaper.
Yet, when the Five Eyes rolled out their latest manifesto on youth extremism, the child had become an unperson, an image scratched out of a photograph. The journalists in attendance, with the honourable exception of SBS, dutifully jotted down the alliance’s carefully curated soundbites, barely noticing the absence of this inconvenient anecdote.
There are the secrets they keep from us, and the secrets we keep from ourselves. We avert our gaze, perhaps out of discomfort, or perhaps out of the quiet fear that to question too much is to challenge the very scaffolding of safety we cling to. But safety, unexamined, is little more than a mirage.
Trust can not be demanded—it is earned.
