Snowden documents confirmed the long-suspected arrangement where Five Eyes alliance members (US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) share intelligence to bypass their own domestic surveillance restrictions. GCHQ collects data on Americans and shares it with the NSA, while the NSA does the same for British citizens — allowing each to claim they are not spying on their own people. The UKUSA Agreement formalized this arrangement, and the Tempora and MUSCULAR programs demonstrated the data-sharing pipeline in practice.