Wikileads

Business lobbyists and politicians will be meeting today to discuss the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, according to an internal memo released today by Wikileaks.

The proposed agreement would criminalize copyright and intellectual property offenses. Under ACTA, Internet service providers would be required to filter illegal transfers of content and help the government track down the people downloading it. Border patrols would gain the authority to seize and destroy copyrighted materials at the border.

Also, governments would be able to charge individuals with copyright-related crimes even if rights holders do not request that charges be pressed. For comparison, in the U.S., victims of robberies and domestic assaults must press charges against their assailants — the government can’t press charges without compliance from the victim.

The meeting on ACTA will take place in Washington, D.C. and run from today through Thursday.

The memo does not say who the participants in the meeting will be — it is addressed to “ACTA Negotiators” and is from “Concerned business groups operating in ACTA nations.”

According to the anonymous leaker, the document was leaked “To shed light on a very secretive treaty that is being rushed to conclusion for the end of the year.”

The whistle-blower continues:

There are good reasons to improve anti-counterfeiting measures, but this document suggests it has become broadened to favor and entrench rights holders to the exclusion of other civil rights such as privacy and fair judgment on relevant costs and fees normally determined by a competent judge.

Most of the online outcry appears to be originating in Canada. The Toronto Star yesterday ran an article about the secret meeting and ACTA’s implications. The article detailed plans by the Canadian government to create an “insider” group “comprised solely of government departments and industry lobby groups that would be provided with special access to treaty documentation and discussion.”

Membership would be restricted to lobbyists and government departments:

The initial plans for membership in the group were limited exclusively to 12 government departments and 14 industry lobby groups. These include the Canadian Recording Industry Association, the Canadian Motion Picture and Distributors Association, and the Entertainment Software Association of Canada.

The early membership lists omit several key industry representatives likely to be affected by ACTA, including telecommunications, technology, and Internet companies.

Internet service providers and other non-rights holders whose businesses will be impacted will not be included in the talks.

The 4,000 journalists covering the Group of 8 summit have scrutinized the contents of attendees’ meals. They’ve mocked the unjustifiable old-white-manishness of this and other global summits. They’ve even analyzed the global — if momentary — economic impact of George W. Bush’s speech.

But mainstream media coverage has not yet mentioned the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a sweeping anti-piracy deal supported by the U.S., Korea, New Zealand and the E.U., among others, and rumored to be on the docket at this week’s meeting in Japan.

Details of the deal remained shadowy until late May, when Wikileaks released a document related to ACTA. The document, a discussion paper that detailed the deal’s parameters, highlighted ACTA’s broad nature: If enacted, the proposal could, among other things, provide border officials the right to search personal computers for pirated files — really, they could search anything if they think it contains copyrighted material. The language is that vague.

ACTA would also safeguard Internet service providers who help rights holders remove copyrighted material from computers. According to the Electronic Freedom Foundation, this measure would do little to reduce illegal downloads — but it could marginalize online privacy. ACTA’s implementation would probably involve deep packet inspection, a form of filtering associated with data mining, eavesdropping and censorship.

Importantly, governments would have the authority to do all this without any requests from rights holders.

So why has the mainstream media forgotten about ACTA? In the past month, only six articles about the G8 have mentioned piracy, and just three more have mentioned ACTA. Bloggers have been much more vocal, but such a sweeping treaty seems worthy of the mainstreamers, too. Such a grandiose treaty should not pass through unnoticed by the citizens of impacted nations.

Hello, readers! I’m doing a bit of research to find out more about who visits Wikileads.net. Could you spare five minutes to respond to the following questions? Help a blogger out?

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Erin

An as yet unpublished screenplay written by Scientology’s founder, L. Ron Hubbard, is now available at Wikileaks.org.

It’s called Revolt in the Stars. I have not read the entire document, but it appears to be more of a novel than a screenplay. The story begins with some heavily armed marines dragging something big out of the ocean. The big thing: a spaceship. On it is Xenu, leader of the Galactic Confederacy, who, according to Scientology’s theology, brought millions of his people to earth in spaceships 75 million years ago and then killed them all with hydrogen bombs. See Wikipedia for more specifics.

Most targets of Wikileaked documents respond defensively when they find out about the sensitive, private material posted about them online.

The Church of Scientology and the Mormon Church sent cease-and-desist letters when Wikileaks published their secret theological documents, and a U.K. spokeswoman emailed Wikileaks to request that these early drawings of the atomic bomb be taken down.

When Wikileaks posted photos of the gory aftermath of the violent protests in Tibet, the Chinese government allegedly bombarded the site with so much fake traffic that it crashed.

Rather than address the problems brought to the surface by Wikileaked documents, accused parties have fought to have the documents removed from the public eye.

But one recent leak was different. One recent leak brought about a bit of change.

When the British public found out that professors at Kingston University had told students their degrees would be shit unless they lied on a national survey, hundreds of people contacted the BBC with similar stories. Fraud on the National Student Survey is widespread, the respondents said. Professors often encourage students to lie. The survey’s results could not be trusted.

This time, the government listened. In response to public outcry against fraud on the National Student Survey, the British government promised to issue stricter guidelines on how universities should administer the survey.

So now Wikileaks has influenced U.K. policy.

Why has this leak brought about change while others have not yet done so? A few reasons stand out:

1. People cared about the problem. Many British university students had had similar experiences, and like the person who sent the audio recording to Wikileaks, these other students believed they had been wronged.
2. The leaked material did not marginalize national security, question the British government’s motives, or threaten the British government’s power. It was a fairly straightforward allegation of fraud and misuse of power made in a country that sees fraud and misuse of power (at least by professors) as unacceptable.
3. Protesting, in this case, was unlikely to endanger the protesters. The British government was unlikely to punish the angry masses for speaking out against professors who threaten students.

In sum, the straightforward nature of the problem made it easier to solve.

But problems that are more entrenched and more controversial will be much more difficult to fight. Corruption in Kenya, human-rights abuses in China, military secrecy in the United States — these will be longer, harder battles.

Thousands of Koreans have taken to the streets to protest a free-trade agreement between South Korea and the U.S. that would reopen Korea to U.S. beef imports.

The protests turned violent over the weekend as riot police beat protesters and sprayed them with water cannons. Wikileaks released photos of the bloodshed.

Beef imports to Korea were cut off in 2003 because of fears of Mad Cow Disease after three cases of the disease were found in the U.S. Many Koreans fear that U.S. beef imports could endanger their health.

The U.S. will only agree to the free-trade agreement if the Korean government resumes the beef trade.

More coverage:
Associated Press
Agence France Press

Most of the recently published analyses on Wikileaks have been written by professional reporters, for professional news organizations.

The BBC tackled this leak, a recording of an official at Kingston University telling students their degrees “will be shit” if they don’t lie on a national survey that ranks higher education in the UK. The Times Online wrote an article on the topic, too.

Reuters and the Guardian handled this leak, about EU agricultural practices. New Europe also covered that story.

And UPI’s homeland and national security editor investigated a classified memo, written by US Marine Maj. Gen. John Kelly, confirming horrible conditions at a Fallujah jail.

So Wikileaks appears to be gaining momentum. A good number of mainstream journalists take Wikileaks documents seriously. This could give the site a lot of legitimacy with the general populace, which could encourage the general populace to give more money to Wikileaks, which could increase the scope of the Wikileaks project.

The more mainstream articles written about Wikileaks, the more successful Wikileaks will be. PR is a powerful tool.

The UK-based Resist Network interviewed Wikileaks director Julian Assange about the ethics, mission and purpose of Wikileaks and whistleblowing. Check out the videos on YouTube:

The ethical leaking of corporate secrets:

The ethical leaking of government plans:

Secrets will be exposed sooner or later:

Remove your coat. Take off your shoes. If your belt, earrings, watch or necklace are made of metal, take them off, too. Get your laptop out of your briefcase. Put all liquids in a small, clear plastic bag. Your skin is a bit too dark, your clothes a bit too shabby. Step over here and we will check you separately. We selected you randomly, of course.

As if airport security isn’t invasive enough, imagine adding to the list of annoyances random searches of files on your iPod and computer.

That’s what was proposed in a secret multilateral trade agreement recently released by Wikileaks. It’s called the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, and trade representatives were hoping to formalize it at the G-8 summit this July.

Its purpose: to ferret out illegal music downloads and other types of Internet piracy and impose fines on people caught trafficking media they did not pay for.

But this agreement, if enacted, would be useless. There is no difference between an mp3 file downloaded illegally and am mp3 file legally copied from a CD or DVD that you own. No difference at all.

So to defend yourself, all you would have to do is tell airport security that you have a huge CD collection. Rights holders should love you, you could say, because even though pirated music is free and convenient and easy to come by, you are the sucker who’s still paying $17 a pop for full albums. Unlike the unruly masses who flagrantly flaunt all standards of law and decency, you respect the Man. It matters not that the respect is far from mutual.

ACTA is another ill-conceived attempt to maintain a status quo that died when Internet file-sharing was born. Come on, politicians and rights holders. It’s time to face the facts. Evolve, already!

Check out this fascinating article about Wikileaks from the Toronto Globe and Mail. The article’s writer, Ivor Tossell, discusses Wikileaks in the grand sense — what the site means for governments, dissidents and the Internet, and how the group’s legal invincibility and pro-citizen moral code have allowed it to take full advantage of the Internet age.

Some of Tossell’s conclusions:

• Wikileaks is one of the first fully post-national organizations produced during the Internet age. Meaning Wikileaks operates outside the legal, geographical and technological constraints of any one country (or any group of countries). It makes its own rules, based on its own moral code, and it has set itself up so that no single nation can shut it down.
• Wikileaks is agnostic to law, or at least to the laws created by nations. To Wikileaks, what seems to matter is a higher moral code, based on individual rights and the idea that governments should belong to the governed.
• Individual privacy matters to Wikileaks. The privacy of corporations, governments and individuals committing criminal or immoral acts — acts that harm other individuals — does not deserve protection.
• Transparency trumps secrecy. There’s almost no such thing as a legitimate government secret, according to Wikileaks. Governments are in place to serve the people they govern. When citizens know what their governments are up to, governments are less likely to do hugely stupid things.

Interesting stuff. Definitely worth reading.