Posted on 03/13/2009 12:26:08 PM PDT by BGHater
Last September, the Bush administration defended the unusual secrecy over an anti-counterfeiting treaty being negotiated by the U.S. government, which some liberal groups worry could criminalize some peer-to-peer file sharing that infringes copyrights.
Now President Obama's White House has tightened the cloak of government secrecy still further, saying in a letter this week that a discussion draft of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement and related materials are "classified in the interest of national security pursuant to Executive Order 12958."
The 1995 Executive Order 12958 allows material to be classified only if disclosure would do "damage to the national security and the original classification authority is able to identify or describe the damage."
Jamie Love, director of the nonprofit group Knowledge Ecology International, filed the Freedom of Information Act request that resulted in this week's denial from the White House. The denial letter (PDF) was sent to Love on Tuesday by Carmen Suro-Bredie, chief FOIA officer in the White House's Office of the U.S. Trade Representative.
Love had written in his original request on January 31--submitted soon after Obama's inauguration--that the documents "are being widely circulated to corporate lobbyists in Europe, Japan, and the U.S. There is no reason for them to be secret from the American public."
The White House appears to be continuing the secretive policy of the Bush administration, which wrote to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (PDF) on January 16 that out of 806 pages related to the treaty, all but 10 were "classified in the interest of national security pursuant to Executive Order 12958."
In one of his first acts as president, Obama signed a memo saying FOIA "should be administered with a clear presumption: In the face of doubt, openness prevails. The government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure."
Love's group believes that the U.S. and Japan want the treaty to say that willful trademark and copyright infringement on a commercial scale must be subject to criminal sanctions, including infringement that has "no direct or indirect motivation of financial gain."
A June 2008 memo (PDF) from the International Chamber of Commerce, signed by pro-copyright groups, says: "intellectual property theft is no less a crime than physical property theft. An effective ACTA should therefore establish clear and transparent standards for the calculation and imposition of effective criminal penalties for IP theft that...apply to both online and off-line IP transactions." Similarly, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has called for "criminal penalties for IP crimes, including online infringements."
Last fall, two senators--Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Arlen Specter (R-Penn.)--known for their support of stringent intellectual property laws, expressed concern that the ACTA could be too far-reaching.
If we can classify this treaty, we should be able to classify any agreements regarding rendition or torture.
It is less important whether we are actually allowed to torture terrorists, and more important whether they THINK we’re allowed to torture. Fear of pain is often more useful than actual pain.
SnakeDoc
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Last September, the Bush administration defended the unusual secrecy over an anti-counterfeiting treaty being negotiated by the U.S. government, which some liberal groups worry could criminalize some peer-to-peer file sharing that infringes copyrights. Now President Obama’s White House has tightened the cloak of government secrecy still further, saying in a letter this week that a discussion draft of the Anti-
HUH? Obama is taking more rights fromus then even that evil war mongering Bush did??? Who saw that coming....
Oh I am sure the liberals know that this is all just a big mistake....
Like you said before...it’s rarely a good thing when you ping both of us to the same thread! :(
I would like to post my response to this matter, however, it is classified.
Hmmm, i seem to recall that a treaty needs to be ratified by 2/3 of the Senate for it to be valid. i don’t recall this ever coming up for a vote.
So this...thing...whatever it is, has NO force of law.
Yeah, it sucks.... :^(
I believe we are living in the equivalent of the 'Wild West of the Internet, and sadly the freedom of it is nearing an end. In the future, with regard to the internet, we will look back on these times with affinity. It will be fun telling my grandchildren about p2p networks and FR, ect...
As with all things, innovation will begin to slow as regulations become greater, and that's unfortunate considering how we have come so far in such a short period of time with computers and networking technology in general.
Now, I'm going to go have a drink.
It’s being negotiated in secret so it can be presented as a fait accompli to the legislatures of all of the involved nations. Each will have the international version of peer pressure put on it — everybody else is doing it so you do it or the rest of the countries won’t like you.
So much for Obama’s new transparency.
How to override our constitutional system of copyright through treaties.
Let’s see on Lessig:
Principles: At the time we knew Hillary had none, operating purely on expedience, and there wasn’t enough evidence to know whether Obama had any. Lessig basically just had naive hope.
Integrity: We know Hillary uses the same attack dog squad as her husband, and in the primary Obama ran a relatively clean campaign.
Change: Hillary was more of the same, Obama promised change.
Of course that’s what Obama presented of himself at the time. Basically, Lessig got suckered like millions of other wide-eyed idealists. I wonder what he’s thinking about this now. He’s not letting it reflect in his blog.
out of 806 pages related to the treaty, all but 10 were "classified in the interest of national security....
Incredible.
The one good thing about the depression that is coming is that the rest of the world is about to find out how little America needs them.
It is going to be a painful discovery, but one that needs to be made.
We have a strong resource base (if the libtards would let us go after it), and we ARE the people that the rest of the world tries to sell their goods to. If we don't buy, they're screwed.
Right now, we don't have enough "discressionary" income to be buying products from the rest of the world (and recent Chinese product problems have put a damper on that). It follows that the rest of the world is about to learn a painful lesson.
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