Wikileads

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.