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unixronin: Galen the technomage, from Babylon 5: Crusade (Default)
Unixronin

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March 29th, 2009

unixronin: Rodin's Thinker (Thinker)
Sunday, March 29th, 2009 06:50 pm

This PCWorld article gives some additional information regarding the current controversy over the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, the intellectual-property treaty that I mentioned the other day.  (Thanks to [livejournal.com profile] smandal for the link.)

There are several relevant points here.  First:

The [Office of the U.S. Trade Representative] this week denied a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from Knowledge Ecology International, an intellectual-property research and advocacy group, even though Obama, in one of his first presidential memos, directed that agencies be more forthcoming with information requested by the public.

The USTR, in a letter to Knowledge Ecology International’s director James Love, said information in ACTA, an anticounterfeiting and antipiracy pact being negotiated among the U.S. and several other nations, is “properly classified in the interest of national security.”

When we look at the dates of various documents mentioned, we find that this latest brouhaha seems to have taken place shortly before Obama appointed former Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk as US Trade Representative.  It was the Bush administration that dropped the “national security” veil over this one; but the Obama Administration is, thus far, maintaining it.

Of course, the treaty isn’t secret from EVERYONE.  Second item:

Love asked for seven documents in his FOIA request.

“The texts are available to the Japanese government,” he wrote in a column on HuffingtonPost.com.  “They are available to the 27 member states of the European Union. They are available to the governments of Canada, Mexico, New Zealand, Australia.  They are available to Morocco, and many other countries.  They are available to ‘cleared’ advisers (mostly well connected lobbyists) for the pharmaceutical, software, entertainment and publishing industries.  But they are a secret from you, the public.”

Nope.  Not secret from everyone.  Just secret from anyone who doesn’t stand to benefit from it.  This is the classic case of two wolves and a sheep meeting to decide what to have for supper.  Except that the wolves are keeping their deliberations secret from the sheep.

Among the supporters of ACTA are the Business Software Alliance and the Recording Industry Association of America.

Why doesn’t this come as any surprise?  (Pop quiz:  Which current Vice-President of the United States was widely known during his term in the Senate as “the Senator from the RIAA”?)

Now, we can sit here and argue about whether there’s been time for the openness doctrine to “trickle down” yet.  I’ll grant the possibility of a reversal on that secrecy with regard to this treaty at a future date.

But there’s a larger question here.  That question, simply put, is this:  Should ANY administration, or ANY portion of the US government, EVER be empowered to negotiate treaties — and particularly non-military trade treaties possessing no plausible significance to national security — behind the back of the citizens of the United States as a whole?