Profits over People: the Trans Pacific Partnership

As Julian Assange’s final appeal of extradition proceeds today, we’d
like to take a moment to reflect on the lessons of Wikileaks.
Wikileaks and its supporters have been relentlessly harassed - both
through the legal system, but more often by the abusive exercise of
raw power. Their alleged ‘crime’? Attempting to bring to light the
conspiracies and deceptions that underly the modern corporate
nation-state.


Transparency is essential to the effective functioning of democracy.
Our votes mean nothing if our elected officials and unelected
bureaucrats can make back room deals without our knowledge. And far
too often, the mainstream media has played along, rather than
fulfilling its civic duty to report truth and hold the powerful
accountable.

Our institutions having failed us, the task is left up to us. The past
year has demonstrated the Internet to be a powerful force for freedom.
While we don’t subscribe to a naive “just add Twitter and water and
watch your democracy grow” theory, the evidence is overwhelming. The
peaceful revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, the ongoing struggle in
Syria and the global Occupy movement - all have demonstrated the power
of the Net to effective positive change in the real world lives of
millions. To say nothing of the smaller revolutions, closer to our
hearts and homes- the creation of online communities where we can
explore and express ourselves in a world that’s grown ever-more
conformist and standardized; the planting of seeds of local
reconnection with our neighbors.

New communications technologies have always been a threat to people
and institutions in power; they have responded with repression and
restriction. It took 100 years for kings to clamp down on the printing
press; 30 years from the invention of radio to the creation of the FCC
at the behest of the US Navy and commercial broadcasters. We forget
how young the Internet is - most of us have only had access for the
last 15 years. We believe that because it’s always been open, it
always will be.

The SOPA blackout was an amazing and beautiful show of solidarity in
response to further attempts at censorship. The government’s response?
To take Megaupload offline the very next day. There may have been
piracy going on, but millions of legitimate files were lost. The
add-on effects were powerful - half a dozen of the largest file
hosting sites disabled their sharing functionality in the next few
days. We are losing our ability to communicate, yet again.
Only a few days later, Poland erupted in protests over the ACTA treaty
- an attempt at further Net regulation via policy laundering (sneaking
in changes to domestic law in the form of an international treaty).
ACTA has been characterized by an astounding lack of transparency -
negotiated in secret while excluding civil society and NGOs. For many
years, we only knew what was in the ACTA text because of leaks. The
protests have spread all over Europe, and expanded to include
opposition to versions of SOPA in Ireland and Canada (bill C-11). The
European Parliament’s chief analyst for ACTA resigned, calling the
process a ‘charade’. The Slovenian ambassador apologized for not
listening to her conscience and refusing to sign; she has called for
people to protest ACTA in her name.

In light of this history, we’d like to bring your attention to the
latest back room deal - the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP). TPP is a
“free trade agreement” that will cover the Pacific Rim - US, Canada,
Australia, New Zealand, Chile, Malaysia, Peru, Singapore, Brunei,
Mexico, Vietnam and eventually others - nearly half the world’s
population. It’s being negotiated in a luxury hotel in West Hollywood
(where else?) RIGHT NOW. It’s been called the Son of ACTA - though as
you’ll see, that description doesn’t go far enough. This treaty is
almost comically, unbelievably evil - it’s still true. We’ll be
tweeting links and updating this post throughout the day; we’ve
consulted the experts and done the best research we can - accurate
information about TPP is hard to find due to the secrecy that
surrounds it. Given the urgency, we believed it was necessary to
publish as soon as possible.

TPP is completely secret and non-transparent. Our only source of
information about it has been leaks - NGOs have been left out in the
cold. Even worse than ACTA, the very meetings themselves have been
kept secret. And the memo declaring them secret? Yup, that’s secret
too. All records from negotiation would be kept hidden for FOUR YEARS
after adoption.

It gets worse though. NGOs got wind of this weeks’ meeting four days
before. At previous rounds, they were at least able to mingle with
negotiators during coffee breaks. Totally excluded for this round,
they booked space in the conference hotel in an attempt to give civil
society a voice - only to have the US Trade Representative call the
hotel and kick them out. Scandalous.

TPP is bad for the Internet and innovation. It would require countries
to criminalize non-commercial copyright violation, a provision aimed
squarely at Bittorrent users - imagine being arrested for sharing MP3s
(or even playing them in public without permission). TPP globalizes
the US DMCA’s provisions on circumventing digital locks (goodbye
jailbreaks) and tries to sneak SOPA’s domain seizure in the back door.
It further extends copyright terms and gives rightsholders total
control over imports of legally acquired, genuine goods - so no
bringing home that Mickey Mouse stuff animal you bought on your
overseas trip without Disney’s permission.

TPP would treat temporary copies as copyright infringement, a
provision rejected during the 1996 WIPO discussions. If enforced, this
would literally destroy the web - a browser simply cannot function
without copying the necessary bits to your local machine for display.
Lest we be accused of exagerating, this provision would also apply to
caches run by mobile phone providers, which are technically necessary
for effective browsing on a phone.

But TPP isn’t just bad for the Internet - it’s bad for everyone. Our
personal favorite: the roll back of the humanitarian exemption for
drug patents (generics). People are literally going to die of AIDS &
tuberculosis to protect Big Pharma’s profits. There’s a similar
situation for seeds and other crops- with patent enforcement at the
borders, Monsanto would be able to order customs agents to seize a
grain shipment on mere suspicion of violating its GMO patents, no
judicial review needed. The US lumber industry is trying to use TPP to
force Canada to sell off its provincial-owned forests - and allow it
to bring clear cutting to our northern neighbor. Other clauses attempt
to roll back global financial regulation put in place after mortgage
crisis. Finally, corporations would be empowered to appeal to
unaccountable global institutions (World Bank, WTO, etc.) to force
governments to compensate them for the loss of expected future profits
due to environmental, health and other regulations. This is nothing
less than a corporate takeover of national sovereignty, plain and
simple.

The US Trade Representative Ron Kirk is being “advised” in these
negotiations by a who’s who of the corporate elite (we’ll be
publishing a list later today). At this point, you may be wondering
how the US is going to get other countries to agree to such clearly
unfavorable terms. The USTR uses trade policy as a stick to beat other
countries into line - most favored nation status, the 301 watch list,
tariffs and border controls. Think: “if you want to sell rice, you’ll
implement DRM and drug patents”. We have no objections to tough
bargaining on behalf of Americans, but using this power for the
benefit of a few corporations is outrageous and unacceptable. Don’t be
fooled by arguments about lost jobs - if TPP goes through, the money
will go straight the wealthy elite. This treaty is the very definition
of putting profits over people.

We must act to end the Trans Pacific Partnership NOW. The negotiations
conclude on Friday. We’ll be publishing and tweeting steps you can
take in the next few hours. But we must take action - this cannot be
another round of whining on Twitter and Facebook. If our only outlet
is online, we’re shouting in vain. If you care about freedom,
democracy or the very lives of the people on this planet, you’ll join
us to stop TPP before it’s too late.

We are all Anonymous.
Expect us.

References:

Digital Sit-ins: DDOS is legitimate civil disobedience

Distributed denial of service (DDOS) is a favorite tactic of Anonymous. While the media likes to call DDOS a form of ‘hacking’, this is at best a technical misunderstanding. DDOS does no permanent damage and doesn’t involve breaking into servers or stealing data. Rather, it simply overwhelms a server with UDP traffic - the online equivalent of fans at a football game yelling so loud that the offensive line can’t hear the quarterback. This XKCD comic explains it best:

In the US, DDOS has been treated as a felony under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act punishable by a mandatory 10 years in prison. Given its similarity to long-accepted civil disobdience tactics such as sit-ins and blocking building entrances, this harsh penalty is outrageous and unfair.

Anonymous is not unanimous, and opinion on DDOS is perhaps more divided than any other tactic. Indeed, this very faction, in consultation with anti-ACTA NGOs, has been calling for a halt to DDOS for the last several days.

But after this photo of Polish politicians protesting ACTA went viral yesterday, it’s time we all re-evaluate the role & legitimacy of DDOS. These Parlimentarians were wearing Anonymous Guy Fawkes mask while the Parliament’s website was down due to DDOS by Anonymous. We can’t emphasize that point enough - this is a game-changer.

DDOS has been a remarkably effective tactic for bringing the world’s attention to injustice, from repression in Tunisia and Egypt to censorship by SOPA and ACTA. A symbolically rich response, DDOS says “If you silence us, we will silence you”. In that respect, it works.

But DDOS is a single tool in our arsenal of protest, not the only one. We need to engage in the mainstream political process as well - and for many of us, deeply frustrated by decades of corruption and unresponsiveness, this will require holding our nose. As events in Poland have shown, we have allies in unexpected places. There comes a time when we must use words to articulate our demands and desires, instead of UDP packets. There are still many lulz to be had- in the form of mass emails, fax blasts and overloaded telephone switchboards. We therefore call on Anonymous and all freedom loving Internauts to contact your politicians directly; we demand “No SOPA, No ACTA! Hands off the Internet!”

We’ll be publishing more actions you can take in coming days.

Europe

United States

Global

Bright, and Clear: The Future of Free Speech

Bright, and Clear: The Future of Free Speech

===============================================

A rallying cry on the occassion of the Web’s first mass blackout

As we watch the web go dark today in protest against the SOPA/PIPA censorship bills, let’s take a moment and reflect on why this fight is so important. We may have learned that free speech is what makes America great, or instinctively resist attempts at silencing our voices. But these are abstract principles, divorced from the real world and our daily lives.

Free speech is the foundation of a free society. We can have the vote all we want. We can donate money wherever we want. But unless we’re able to talk to each other and figure out collectively _what_ we want, those things don’t matter.

We believe a healthy society doesn’t allow its artists, musicians and other creators to starve. The copyright industry has been justly criticized for abusing the political process in a desperate attempt to maintain its role as a cultural gatekeeper, a business model made obsolete by a digital age of free copies. But the RIAA, MPAA & IFPI deserve our opprobrium for making enormous profits while often leaving the very artists it claims to represent *poorer* than they would be as independents (http://www.negativland.com/albini.html). While the public may have greater access to the few artists deemed sufficiently marketable to gain mass media promotion, fewer and fewer of us are making art and music in our own lives.

It’s time we make a stand for a better world - not merely take rearguard actions to preserve a status quo that is _already_ failing us. Accordingly, we present the following list of demands:

 * We call on national legislatures to not only reject ACTA efforts to globalize the American intellectual property regime, but to abolish the WIPO.

 * We demand the elimination of the DMCA’s registration requirement for qualification under the “safe harbor” provision. It’s absurd that a website owner needs to mail in a form and pay a $100+ fee to the government to register a contact for copyright violations. A web page at a standard location (a la robots.txt) should suffice.

 * We expect courts to apply penalties just as severe to rightsholders who issue abusive takedown notices as those applied to copyright violators.

 * No more Jammie Thomases. Any penalties for copyright infringement must be sane and reasonable and not based unsubstantiated, outlandish claims of harm.

 * No more Dajaz1’s. DHS/ICE’s seizure of over 350 domains without court review is an affront to due process and the basic principles of our legal system.

 * No more Megauploads. Any penalties must be narrowly focused, with remedies specifically tailored to individual instances of infringement. Broad reaching site shutdowns harm innocent legitimate users and break the web.

 * The Department of Justice must begin an anti-trust investigation into the copyright industry, with a specific focus on collusion between rightsholders and ISPs in monitoring Internet users, and payola and cross ownership with mass media.

 * We demand an end to sales of radio frequencies into private hands. We hold that spectrum is a form of speech - it rightly belongs to the people and is not the government’s to auction off to begin with.

 * We demand that ISPs stop interfering with file sharing via BitTorrent or any other protocol.

 * We recognize a right of total ownership, not merely licensing, of products we have purchased and a right to tinker and modify them as we see fit. The Library of Congress should not be determining the acceptable boundaries of technology.

 * We reject the principle of contributory infringement entirely. While there may be bad uses, there is no bad code.

 * We expect legislators and judges to make efforts to educate themselves about the technologies they oversee, and to call on and respect the opinions of technical experts when necessary. The Internet makes nerds of us all.

 * All research receiving any public funding, directly or indirectly, must be placed in the public domain upon publication.

 * For the sake of innovation and competitiveness, the US Patent & Trade Office must immediately cease issuing software and business method patents, and declare all such existing patents null and void. We unequivocally reject any patents on mathematical formulas and genes or other naturally-occurring substances (human or otherwise).

 * Copyright and patent terms must be reduced to reasonable lengths (two and five years from the time of creation, respectively). Works should only be eligible for the length of protection in the effect when created - the continuing extension of terms to protect Disney’s ownership of Mickey Mouse must cease.

 * We recognize a broad right of “fair use” as essential to a vibrant and creative culture. We will remix, sample, mash up, translate, perform, parody and otherwise create derivative works as we see fit.

 * Courts must accord bloggers the same rights as mainstream reporters. The right to a free press originally meant a literal, physical printing press - not membership in some government sanctioned elite. Blogs are the modern day digital equivalent.

We call upon all freedom loving Internauts to join us. We further call upon our legislators, bureaucrats and the media & telecommunications industries to immediately begin implementing our demands. The future of free speech is bright, and clear - either stand with us or get out of the way.

—Anonymous

Originally posted at http://pastebay.com/303193