Over the past decade, the global security landscape has become increasingly volatile, blurred, and unpredictable, marked by hybrid warfare, grey-zone tactics, and influence operations that unfold across cyberspace and global technology markets. The very nature of conflict is evolving as authoritarian powers recognize that information dominance has become a weapon. These powers are investing heavily in AI, 5G, and big data analytics to reshape the broader information environment that underpins political legitimacy and public trust.
Canada’s foreign policy and trade initiatives are increasingly exposed to new layers of security risk from cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns, to foreign interference by state-owned enterprises seeking strategic advantage. These challenges add to, rather than replace, long-standing threats such as terrorism and transnational organized crime. In this evolving context, intelligence cooperation becomes Canada’s most important line of defence.
Seen through this lens, the Five Eyes alliance, the world’s oldest and most comprehensive information-sharing partnership built on trust, intelligence sharing, and technological advantage, emerges as a strategic enabler for NATO’s future. As the security landscape evolves, closer cooperation with the Five Eyes community becomes increasingly important, providing a foundation for understanding, anticipating, and responding to emerging global threats.
The Logic of the Five Eyes
The Five Eyes alliance was born out of necessity and sustained by trust. Emerging from wartime cooperation between British and American codebreakers, it evolved into one of the most enduring and tightly integrated intelligence networks in modern history. What began as a bilateral arrangement to share intercepted communications, formalized in the 1946 UKUSA Agreement, expanded into a multilateral framework including Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. During the Cold War, this structure became a cornerstone of Western intelligence, focusing primarily on signals intelligence (SIGINT) and cryptology to counter Soviet military and political activity.
Five Eyes holds distinct advantages that make it an ideal platform for expanded security cooperation: a long history of personal trust among officials, shared democratic traditions and values, compatible legal systems, and interoperable military and security practices.
This foundation aligns directly with NATO’s own emphasis on interoperability and shared situational awareness. While NATO provides the military and operational architecture for deterrence and defence, the Five Eyes network supplies the intelligence depth, data, insights, and early warnings that inform NATO’s strategic and tactical decisions. Five Eyes’ integrated SIGINT and cyber capabilities already feed into NATO’s Joint Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (JISR) system, the backbone that connects intelligence collection, analysis, and dissemination across the Alliance.
The Alliance’s division of labour reflects distinct regional strengths: Australia focuses on the Indo-Pacific, the United Kingdom on Europe and Western Russia, and Canada on the Arctic and North Atlantic, each reinforcing NATO’s broader situational awareness within its region.
Canada’s Arctic territory, in particular, provides significant SIGINT advantages. Canadian Forces Station Alert, on the northern tip of Ellesmere Island, began as a weather station but took on SIGINT duties in 1958 to monitor Northern Soviet regions. Today, it continues to collect critical data from the interiors of Russia and China, complemented by other Canadian assets that extend across Latin America, the North Atlantic, and the North Pacific. The United States, with its vast surveillance and cyber infrastructure, acts as the integrator of this system. Together, this alignment gives NATO an extended horizon of intelligence coverage, enabling it to anticipate hybrid threats, disinformation campaigns, and technological espionage well beyond its traditional borders.
At its core, the Five Eyes community functions as a cooperative and adaptive network of autonomous intelligence agencies. Each agency operates under its own national mandate, yet they work with an affinity strengthened by shared values and complementary interests. Their collaboration spans a wide range of domains including defence research, maritime awareness, immigration, law enforcement, and intelligence oversight.
Since 2013, the Five Country Ministerial has served as the primary annual forum for coordinating this cooperation, bringing together the security ministers of all Five Eyes nations. This platform has enabled joint action on emerging challenges. For example, in September 2024, Five Eyes partners including Canada issued a joint statement pledging to work closely with victims and survivors of child sexual exploitation and abuse, using their experiences to shape stronger responses to this crime.
Similarly, in September 2025, the Five Country Ministers committed to enhancing the alliance’s joint response to the global production and flow of illegal drugs, including synthetic opioids and their chemical precursors trafficked by transnational organized crime groups.
Cooperation also extends into the justice sphere; the Attorneys General of all five countries convene under the Quintet framework to coordinate public safety and justice initiatives, with Canada represented by its Minister of Justice and Attorney General.
Why This Matters for NATO’s Future
Contemporary NATO strategy increasingly treats emerging technologies, cyber resilience, and information superiority as core pillars of deterrence, while the Five Eyes intelligence partnership provides the trusted insight that NATO relies on to anticipate threats. Aligning these two ecosystems more deliberately would strengthen both strategic foresight and operational agility
NATO’s Allied Command Transformation (ACT) already frames data interoperability and advanced analytics as foundational to future deterrence, emphasizing the need for a digitally connected Alliance.
Closer collaboration with Five Eyes, through shared AI-enabled data systems, joint cyber exercises, and harmonized intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) pipelines, would directly advance these priorities. This is especially urgent with the emerging use of dual-use technologies such as AI-driven cyber tools, quantum capabilities, and advanced information operations.
NATO’s Digital Backbone project and the Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic (DIANA) illustrate how the Alliance is already building the infrastructure for a more integrated, data-driven posture. The Canadian government proposed Halifax as the North American location for this venture. DIANA’s launch in 2023, with operational nodes in the UK and Canada, demonstrates a natural overlap between NATO’s innovation architecture and the Five Eyes’ long-standing strengths in technology security and intelligence integration.
Moreover, recent Five Eyes activity underscores this strategic convergence. In October 2023, the alliance’s intelligence leaders met in Silicon Valley for an Emerging Technology and Securing Innovation Summit chaired by the FBI, bringing together industry, academia, and government to counter nation-state threats to innovation. A year later, in October 2024, Five Eyes released its Secure Innovation guidance for technology companies, addressing dual-use risks and intellectual property protection. Canada, in parallel, has linked its National Quantum Strategy to both defence and climate sensing in the Arctic, prioritizing quantum-safe cryptography and supply-chain integrity, which are areas of direct strategic interest to both Five Eyes and NATO.
Reflections
It is reasonable to estimate that in the coming years, Canada will depend even more deeply on the Five Eyes community for early warning, shared analysis, and the technological depth and operational visibility that no country can generate on its own. At the same time, Canada’s partners will continue to rely on its unique regional insights, diplomatic reach, and domain expertise.
In an era where information has become the most contested terrain, NATO’s deterrence posture will increasingly hinge on its ability to sense, decide, and act faster than its adversaries. The Five Eyes alliance offers NATO precisely that strategic edge.
Looking ahead, deepening cooperation between Five Eyes and NATO will be essential. NATO should evolve toward a structured alignment between its operational frameworks and the intelligence and technological depth of the Five Eyes partners. Whether such integration between an alliance of thirty-two nations and a trust-based circle of five is truly achievable, or destined to remain an aspiration, remains a question for the future.
Photo: NATO steps up Alliance-wide secure data sharing. Source: NATO
Disclaimer: Any views or opinions expressed in articles are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the NATO Association of Canada.
