Still think politics as usual will change under an Obama presidency? Here’s further indication it won’t. After promising openness and transparency, Obama is using George W. Bush’s worn out national security argument to obfuscate details about the highly controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (.pdf; 36Kb) (ACTA) currently being hammered out by the global copyright cartel. Earlier this week the Obama administration issued a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request denial (.pdf; 444Kb) to Knowledge Ecology International, declaring the contents of the proposed international treaty a national security secret. Shortly before Obama took office, George W. Bush’s administration similarly rejected an equivalent FOIA request (.pdf; 108Kb) from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).
A national security secret that’s been shared with Australia, Canada, the 27 member countries of the European Union, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, and Switzerland. How does that work? Oh, but wait, it gets better. Cory Doctorow writes in boingboing how members of the copyright cartel have been cleared to partake of the national security secret. “Of course, they’re allowed to know what’s in the treaty—but the public, activist groups, consumer rights groups, and the artists whom this treaty is supposed to protect are all forbidden from knowing what it says,” writes Doctorow.
According to leaked documents published on WikiLeaks and Public Knowledge’s aggregation of filed responsive comments that were filed by March 21, 2008, the purpose of ACTA is to internationally criminalize peer-to-peer file sharing (even for perfectly legal uses), prohibit region-free DVD players, permit internet service providers to monitor customer communications, and subject iPods to searches at borders.
Within days of assuming the presidency, Obama made very public (and carefully choreographed) gestures to instruct US government agencies to comply whenever possible with FOIA requests and to practice transparency wherever possible. Except, it would seem, when the copyright cartel and its congressional sock puppets are twisting your arm.
Worst of all, according to Public Knowledge‘s analysis, ACTA is “being designed as an ‘executive agreement,’ rather than as a ‘treaty.’ Executive agreements do not require Congressional approval before they may take effect. As a result, there is little to keep the signatories accountable to the public….”
This is a blatant move to circumvent the United Nations’ World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) whom public interest activists have been able to monitor.
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