Repression: Documents have emerged from the European Commission that give a glimpse of the planned crackdown on online freedoms of speech post-ACTA. We’re seeing entirely new mechanisms and means of squelching dissent, mechanisms and means against pretty much anything online.

A European Commissioner responsible for the governing of 500 million people who refers to his constituents as “consumers” and describes complying at legal gunpoint as “cooperation” is just a small taste of the newspeak in the documents we find here, documents that are intended for the post-ACTA timeframe. Oh, and he doesn’t rule out shutting down your income streams either. It is not hard to see where this particular mindset comes from – and no, it is certainly not Locke’s ideas of a constitutional government or anything similarly responsible. It’s filled to the brim with terms we would otherwise only see in reports from the copyright industry lobby.

The first document is named “Proposal for a Revision of the Directive of Intellectual Property [sic] Rights”, and the second document is named “Notice and Takedown procedures”, refering to eroding the common carrier status of the ISPs (the European mere conduit).

Repression is good, so more repression is better, says the European Commissar... eh, Commissioner.

Let’s take a look at what these documents say in more detail, and translate it from the dangerously newspeak legalese. Here’s what the first document outlines as policy roadmap in the post-ACTA timeframe:

The policy options being considered include: (a) rendering the rules on obtaining evidence from intermediaries more detailed thus making possible the identification of those infringing intellectual property rights on a commercial scale and of the financial circuits involved.

Yeah, this is a lock-in of what was voluntary in IPRED1: giving the copyright monopoly cartels the subscriber identities of IP addresses accused of infringing the monopolies, something the police can’t even legally get in most European countries (including Sweden).

Yes, this specifically means that the copyright industries get more far-reaching powers than the Police.

But do note the ACTA/TRIPS keyword “commercial scale” being used. Also, note that “financial circuits” are being mixed into the things that must be identified by an ISP. This can refer to any income stream.

This would be particularly important to fight IPR infringement in the on-line environment.

Yeah, the Net is a problem. Again. Everything was better the way it used to be.

This would also require a clearer definition of “commercial scale”, so as to make sure that professional counterfeiters rather than individual consumers are targeted;

Here, we note three things:

First, this small part sounds good in substance. Today, uploading of a single music track by a random teenager is deliberately seen as targetable and targeted (refer to the US Cables on the matter of IPRED1, for instance). At the end of the day, though, I would be careful to draw the conclusion that individual citizens wouldn’t be targeted – especially since the rest of this roadmap specifies the means and methods for doing exactly that (for instance, with the IP Address subscriber data we just read about).

Second, the ACTA keyword “commercial scale” is used. However, this might just as well refer to the old TRIPS definition of “commercial scale”. It is impossible to know if ACTA redefines “commercial scale” in any meaningful way, as the negotiation protocols are still secret.

Third, having said that, the overall thought pattern here is thoroughly alarming. The European Commissioner refers to his constitutents using the word consumers. That is not a mindset I want to see in any policymaking.

(b) fast-track lowcost civil procedures (including as regards the granting of injunctions, the award of damages, the use of corrective measures etc) for straightforward infringements of intellectual property rights

Whoah, whoah. A whole lot of bad things here.

Fast-track, low-cost civil procedures: Civil procedures means “lawsuits against ordinary people”. Fast-track means “without delays caused by due process of law and exercising of rights”. Low-cost means “preferably in bulk”.

Including…: Granting of injunctions means “cutting of net access before a trial takes place, one way or the other”. Award of damages, well, we know about that one all too well. Use of corrective measures can be many things, but specifically includes destroying goods used for infringement.

and (c) the possibility to act against webpages holding content that violates intellectual property rights (see in this regard the Roadmap regarding the initiative on procedures for notifying and acting on illegal online content).

Ah, so we’re talking about censoring entire websites as well. The roadmap referred is appropriately named “Notice and Takedown”.

These policy options would require the amendment of the existing directive.

Ah, so this is indeed a resurrection of the horrible but previously killed IPRED2 – only much worse than the original IPRED2.

Complementary measures in softlaw instruments designed at disrupting the business/value chain of counterfeiters and at increasing the cooperation between intellectual property rights holders and intermediaries (e.g. internet service providers, shippers and couriers, payment-service providers etc) could not be excluded

Whoah! Whoah! Hold your horses!

First, the newspeak here causes my bullshit bingo cards to spontaneously explode. To begin with, let’s highlight the word cooperation. In normal speak, cooperation is an action of mutual consent and mutual gain. Here, there is no such thing as mutual consent or reciprocity; the Commissar^H^Hioner tries to force “cooperation” where one part gains and the other loses massively at legal gunpoint – specifically, internet service providers are ordered to bend over for the copyright industry. All in the spirit of, eh, “cooperation”.

In other words, ISPs are going to be forced to police the net in some fashion, going against its users and customers – all spun in the language of the positive resulting worldview of the copyright monopoly cartel.

But there’s more. Did you notice “payment service providers”? This is the first time I’ve seen credit card companies and similar being threatened with “cooperation” with the copyright industry in a European context. If you’re thinking of SOPA, you’re drawing the right parallels here.

Other measures aiming at promoting the legal offer could also be envisaged.

“Other measures” have previously included sending political propaganda to schools promoting the copyright monopoly. It could be pretty much anything, it leaves the door open.

All in all, this is a completely horrible document that shows how the European Commission prepares to legislate post-ACTA. The proposals above have already entered the legislative process and will result in a real legislative proposal. We need to stay more vigilant than ever.

The second document, the one about Notice and Takedown procedures, doesn’t contain much of real substance (yet). However, it should be noted that it specifically mentions caching. Just like TPP, it may therefore try to regulate technical caching in the infrastructure with regards to the copyright monopoly, which would be… quite insane, frankly. But we don’t know yet; it just mentions caching in passing, which is cause enough for alarm.

See also La Quadrature du Net‘s press release on who’s who in this game.

Freedom of Speech – Andrew Norton: The US as an ‘idea’ is dying. The country that used to pride itself on free speech, democracy, and being ‘the last remaining superpower’, is now apparently drunk on its own power. With unchecked powers expanding at every turn, and terror laden missives booming out from government departments, the country seems to be taking a counterbalancing position from those who embraced freedom in the Arab Spring of last year, and is actively cracking down on freedoms previously embraced as a national advert.

The US likes to be known as the land of freedom and integrity; indeed the first verse of the US National Anthem – the Star Spangled Banner – ends:

O! say does that star-spangled banner yet wave,
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

Over the last ten years, the answer has turned into a resounding NO!

Over the last ten years there have been many laws passed ostensibly about ‘fighting terrorism’, but which boil down to naked fear. A fear from the populace that some nebulous ‘terrorist attack’ will kill them all (despite the fact you’re more than 70x more likely to be just plain ‘murdered’ and 150x more likely to die on America’s increasingly poor quality roads than be present at a terrorist attack) which has supported a government that is increasingly spineless and cowardly. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the many instances over the last few months involving the uses of the police, when it comes to the First Amendment.

There have been many well documented clashes between police and the various ‘Occupy’ camps around the country in the last few months. Police officers have on occasion responded with excessive violence and weapons that did not fit the situation. In those instances, video recordings have made it clear what has happened, and often contradicted police reports and claims. Yet, as was pointed out a few months ago, there’s usually very little in the way of repercussions when police officers break the law.

Take for instance Joe Arpaio. The self-described ‘toughest sheriff in America’ is no stranger to controversy. There have been a number of wrongful death cases which his department has lost, his central jail lost a lawsuit about unconstitutional conditions in 2008, and the verdict was reaffirmed in 2010 when he still hadn’t improved them. He was feeding inmates bad food (commonly known as ‘poisoning’) and was broadcasting video footage of in-processing after arrests to the web, prejudicing trials (otherwise known as perverting the course of justice) and because of general misconduct, his whole department had their ability to enforce Federal Immigration law stripped by the Department of Homeland Security (and I remind you, that’s the same department that has no problems with sexually abusing 6yo’s in the name of ‘security’, so you KNOW it’s bad) which was why Arizona passed SB 1070 – the ‘papers please’ law. He’s also under investigation for witness, voter and candidate intimidation, harassment of newspapers, and for ignoring serious sexual assault cases. So has he been punished in any way? No, of course not. As Sheriff, he is almost untouchable.

It seems that both police officers and politicians have an allergic reaction to video cameras being pointed at them by the public. A search on YouTube will return LOTS of videos of police officers reacting ‘badly’ to being videotaped. Often the argument put forward by the police is that people are interfering in their work by videoing them. In other states, with two-party consent for audio-recording where there’s an expectation of privacy, police officers going about their duty have arrested people for wiretapping, a felony which often carries 5-10 year prison terms just so you’re aware, recording video is ok, recording audio is the no-no. Generally when these cases are made public, some prosecutors back down, but some stick at it. Almost inevitably the courts decide that no law was broken, because there was no expectation of privacy at the time of filming.

Compounding this is that most police cars in the US have dash-cams recording both audio and video, even in those states. So while the police officer is free to record audio and video at all times, a person involved in an encounter with that same police officer can’t record their own copy, because the police officer has some expectation of privacy? It’s an amazing double-standard. (The pinnacle of such double-standards goes to the Claremore Police Department in Oklahoma, who do not consider the dash-cam recordings to be public records under the state’s Open Records Act, and amazingly, a court agreed. The Department of Public Safety, aka the State Police force, also lobbied successfully in 2005 that the state legislature exempt state patrol dash cams from that legislation.)

Thankfully MOST courts are standing behind citizens and saying clearly that recording police officers in the course of their duties is NOT wiretapping, or a felony, but is in fact a protected 1st Amendment Activity. Yet that doesn’t always stop the police. In Pennsylvania, despite rulings that it’s legal going back to 1989, police there will sometimes arrest for ‘wiretapping’, with documented cases as recently as 2007, and still no adequate recourse for the victims of officers acting outside the law.

The occupy movement has also brought another spotlight onto the First Amendment. The ability to petition the government and protest is the less well known side of it, but it’s there. However, the ability to do so has been severely curtailed in recent years, from the ‘free speech zones’ created during the Bush era (and later copied by the likes of China) to the storm-trooper raids on the Occupy camps. The arrests and intimidations of the police against media attempting to cover the camps, and the police actions against them are further attacks on the first amendment.

In fact, the US has dropped a significant number of places down the current Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Index, from 20^th to 47^th, because of this. NYPD’s Deputy Inspector Bologna, and UC Davis Police’s Lt. John Pike are now symbols on the net of excessive violence. And their punishment? Bologna has been reassigned to Staten Island, and Pike has been on ‘Administrative leave’ (with pay, which was $110,000/year in 2010).

Oakland, which also made a splash with video of a young ex-Marine getting shot in the head and then pelted with flash-bangs is already in trouble. They’ve been under court orders to improve their behavior for almost ten years now (after a gang of police officers called the Rough Riders were planting evidence, using excessive violence and falsifying police reports) and have been given a March ultimatum, or else the city will have control of its police force taken from it. It’s a step that should have been taken 5 years ago, when Oakland PD failed the original order, yet unlike any normal person that had failed a court order, they were not disciplined, but let slide for another 5 years.

Politicians are also getting in on the act. One of the more unusual stories this week was the arrest of a documentarian from a US Congress committee hearing. The hearing, on fracking, was going to be recorded by Josh Fox, (who has already produced one documentary on the topic, the Oscar Nominated Gasland) as well as credentialed ABC news reporters. The Republican chair of the House Subcommittee on Energy and Environment, Andy Harris (R-Md.), directed Capitol Police to arrest him for ‘unlawful entry’. The issue there was not so much one of ‘not wanting to be filmed’, as the cable-funded C-SPAN network was filming the hearing, but an attempt to deny Fox the ability to have his own high-quality shots for a follow-up documentary.

As far as violating the First Amendment, there can’t be a clearer example. Worse, the oath of office Rep Harris took on assuming office is as follows:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God.

In undertaking his actions on February 1^st, Rep. Harris violated his oath of office, by actively acting against the First Amendment. So what’s the consequence of that? The same consequences as when Joe Arparo violated the 4^th, 5^th, 6^th, and 8^th amendments, as when Pike and Bologna attacked protesters, using chemical weapons on people exercising their 1^st Amendment rights. Nothing.

The serious issue is, there’s no accountability – no respect for the law – by those whose job is to write the law or enforce it. This goes for former members of Congress who have turned into lobbyists as well, demonstrated by Chris Dodd’s blatant admission of bribery when SOPA lost its support.

One North Carolina State Rep, Larry G. Pittman, made news last week for suggesting public hanging should be brought back to increase the deterrence of murder (and he included abortionists there, making him part of the ironically named ‘pro-life movement, better characterised as anti-choice), and that appeals should be filed all at once. Given the often questionable nature of US Capital convictions, it’s rather disturbing. Especially as violations of what is deemed the country’s HIGHEST law, the Constitution, are rarely punished at all. Funnily enough, there are laws specifically to deal with it.

18 USC § 241
If two or more persons conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person in any State, Territory, Commonwealth, Possession, or District in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States, or because of his having so exercised the same; or…
… They shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both

and

18 USC § 242
Whoever, under color of any law, statute, ordinance, regulation, or custom, willfully subjects any person in any State, Territory, Commonwealth, Possession, or District to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States, or to different punishments, pains, or penalties, on account of such person being an alien, or by reason of his color, or race, than are prescribed for the punishment of citizens, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both; and if bodily injury results from the acts committed in violation of this section or if such acts include the use, attempted use, or threatened use of a dangerous weapon, explosives, or fire, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both;

Perhaps hanging, with only one appeal, would deter people from violating the country’s highest tenets, not that it will happen. Those that wield the power rarely feel the need to submit to the rules they lay on everyone else. And that’s the REAL problem. Until that problem is fixed, the Constitution is just a piece of paper.

Repression: In an inadvertent slip, the European Commission reveals that ACTA will indeed bring censorship to the Internet. As usual, they say this in the calmest soothing tone of voice.

The European Commission, which is sort of the Administration in the EU, published a rebuttal to “rumors on the net about ACTA” and tries to set the record straight. Note the two first points: “ACTA ensures people everywhere can continue to share non-pirated material and information on the web. ACTA does not restrict freedom of the internet. ACTA will not censor or shut down websites.”

There is one word on their web page that stands out and reveals so much more about the nature of ACTA:

“Non-pirated”. Everybody will be free to share “non-pirated” material. All of a sudden, there is a qualifier  to what information we are able to share on the net; this qualifier has never been there before. We have always been able to send whatever we like, and possibly answer for it afterwards.

This is very, very serious. For what it says here is that the net will only be usable for government-approved communications; the government takes itself the right to determine what the net is usable for and what it isn’t usable for. To 250 million Europeans who share culture and don’t see anything wrong with defying an immoral monopoly, this is an arrogant slap in the face, but it’s more  than that and worse  than that. Any qualifier  to what can be communicated — “non-pirated” in this case — always means “government-approved”, that only governmentally approved communications may take place.

And this is serious for the deepest of democratic reasons: Any communications technology must be compatible with dissent.

At the same time as the government takes itself the right to determine what can be communicated and what cannot, a communications technology stops being compatible with dissent.

Now, the prudent question here would be if it isn’t true that some information has never been free to share, and that you can get prosecuted for doing so? This would be a very relevant observation.

There are many things you’re not allowed to share in terms of information. Military secrets, medical journals, libel/slander, ongoing criminal investigations, just to name a few. All of these have always been possible to share on the net, but if caught doing so, you can be hauled off to court for it. After the fact.  The postal service has always still been usable  to share this information.

And yet, the one single thing listed as impossible to share over the net is violations of the copyright monopoly. If the Commission really was referring to things that you were legally  unable to share, you’d expect military secrets to come first, followed by governmental hush-hushy documents. But no.

This is an obvious slip trying to calm people into saying that everything will be as before, but the forced factual correctness of it reveals that we are indeed talking about censorship.

Another objection here would be that the language requiring ISPs to police the net was taken out of ACTA. That is… not quite so. The specific phrase requiring that was taken out in one revision, yes. But in the same revision, the same thing was re-inserted in another place. Specifically, this text was inserted:

Desiring to promote cooperation between service providers and rights holders to address relevant infringements in the digital environment;

It looks fairly innocent, like most legal text where you don’t have the full context. To fully appreciate the impact of this text, one needs to know the background leading up to it and the negotiations. Hax writes a bit about it here (in Swedish). The gist of it is that it’s enforcement of extrajudicial censorship, plain and simple, through threats of third-party liability.

UPDATE – seeing that this story is climbing on Reddit, and now hitting frontpage, I’m inserting the fuller explanation from the summary of today’s anti-ACTA rallies:

…there was a very clear recurring theme among the Members of European Parliament speaking, MEPs from three different parties. They all told the story of how software patents had been defeated in Europe, followed by the crucial “amendment 138″ in the Telecoms Package, which aimed to shut people off en masse from the Net. Well, thanks to diligent activists and people on the inside, we managed to get as strong safeguards in place as possible against shutting people off. But the monopoly lobbyists never quit. Now they’re at it again, this time saying that if authorities can’t shut people off en masse due to that “amendment 138″, maybe they can get private corporations – the ISPs – to do it instead through third-party liability forcing certain terms of service and wiretapping, shutting people off outside due process of law at the copyright industry’s fingerpointing as well as trying for live, realtime censorship. Hence, ACTA.

(original article continues)

ACTA will bring censorship. Extrajudicial censorship. At the request of a bloody entertainment  industry. That is shameful. 

Tomorrow, Saturday February 4, large-scale rallies against ACTA take place. I will be at the rally in Stockholm, Sweden at Plattan at noon.

Corruption: In what can only be described as an all-out declaration of war with the Internet, the Swedish Supreme Court has denied the final hearing in the trial of the original The Pirate Bay operators. This means that the Appeals Court verdict stands, unless appealed to the European Court of Justice.

This case and trial was political from day one. The astounding arrogance displayed by the establishment showed that it was nothing but theater; there was never a shred of justice involved, only a hellbent desire from the entire establishment to show who’s boss once and for all.

Let’s recap:

In a country where police is constantly in short supply and cases with the derogatory label everyday violence are routinely dropped, fifty (!) police raided a server hall and took all (!) servers — over 150 of them. Many entrepreneurs went out of business. The copyright monopoly lobby gleefully commented in media with “you have to be aware who your neighbor in the server hall is, or face the consequences” in the best and worst of mafia style.

In the raid, over a dozen violations of the constitution were committed; among others, the legal counsel of The Pirate Bay gets his DNA permanently registered with the State, and a constitutionally protected publisher is shut down (though restored a few days later).

The investigation was led by an openly bribed policeman, Jim Keyzer, who was bribed with a job with Warner Brothers, one of the plaintiffs (!) for six months and then went back to the police force.

In the District Court, the corrupt judge Tomas Norström was in the same interest group as the plaintiffs – the Swedish Association For Copyright – which argues politically against the defendants. That means he was meeting the copyright monopoly lobby regularly and on a personal basis, and sharing a personal interest in a guilty verdict. He was completely nonplussed as to the later accusations of bias and corruption, and was later cleared of such charges of bias, by a person in the Appeals Court who was also a member of the same interest group. Therefore, the District Court verdict was not declared a mistrial.

In the middle of everything, the unrelated Carl Lundström is dragged in as a defendant, a person who has had absolutely nothing to do with The Pirate Bay but who happens to know the people involved and also own a lot of money. The verdict determines damages to pretty much all of Lundström’s fortune, to be paid “in solidarity” – a legal term meaning that the person with the money pays, and the defendants get to sort it out between themselves later. This was a design just to rob one person of their fortune and scare everybody away from even talking to The Pirate Bay. (Of course, it didn’t work, but it shows the arrogance.)

The negotiations in the Appeals Court are placed just days after the 2010 General Elections, instead of before as expected, because that’s “the only days that the plaintiffs were able to attend the hearings”. If placed before the elections, The Pirate Bay trial had been an election issue and received tons of attention. The Appeals Court defends this decision as “standard procedure”. Nobody is surprised.

On the negotiations in the Appeals Court, a sign in the doorway showing today’s trials showed just how misplaced the entire theater was. The screen listed trials for aggravated assault, murder, rape, armed robbery… and in the middle of it all, there was an “aiding and abetting copyright violations”.

The judge in the Appeals Court had also been a member of the Swedish Association for Copyright, but “wasn’t any longer”. The damages were raised substantially in the Appeals Court and the prison sentences lowered somewhat, but nobody really cared about the Appeals Court negotiations, as the coming Supreme Court negotiations would be where the final and interesting battle would stand.

And so today, we are notified that the final battle has been cancelled, as the case isn’t interesting enough, which is such an outright display of arrogance from the establishment that it’s mind-boggling. They didn’t even care to consult the European Court of Justice on the immunity of a middleman. So while everybody was looking the other way, this is essentially a “haha, did you really think we’d allow this?”.

This complete arrogance from the establishment, essentially saying “we don’t give a fuck about justice or freedom of speech, we can do whatever we want and get away with it, and we like to show off that ability”, is nothing less than a declaration of war with the entire internet.

Today, the monopolist lobby is showing off in Swedish oldmedia, while also threatening Internet Service Providers that don’t bend to their will. This is not just unacceptable; this is an all-out declaration of war.

At this point, we need to bring everything decentralized. DNS, networking (wi-fi meshes), file storage, everything.

See also the TPB blog and TorrentFreak on the matter.

Yes, I’m pissed.

(As a side note, the Swedish Supreme Court is leaking like a sieve. I was fairly certain this would be coming, days in advance. Yet another sign of arrogance: they didn’t even care to guard the normal secrets of process of law.)

UPDATE: Also read BrokeP’s take on this: Maintain. Hardline. Kopimi.

Repression – Thijs Markus: A recent article by Rick Falkvinge posed the question: If ACTA doesn’t change anything, why are they pushing for its passage as if their life depended on it? Well, the answer is rather hilarious: it does, actually.

While this question is obviously a rhetorical device, its answer is none the less relevant to the discussion. And here, I would like to propose an answer to said question. You see, to understand the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, we need to go a little further back in time than the 00′s. We need to go back somewhere to the late 80′s, early 90′s.

During this time, a new fashion came over the industries of the day: as pioneered by Nike, large corporations decided to put all their factories overseas, the company would be only its brand. Anything that could be done cheaper at the gunpoint of this or that dictatorship would henceforth be done there. This means pretty much all the dumb labor is done overseas. Thus the trademark, as intended, as a means of identifying who produced what, pretty much ended there.

Why? Well, to take Nike for example, they figured that if they could produce and bring a shoe to a store for $5, and sell it for $150, they get a whooping $145 profit margin. This profit margin could then be spent on marketing, which is why you know the Nike logo with your eyes closed. The whole idea of the operation was exactly that: by making the shoe as cheaply as possible, the largest possible margin could be spent on marketing, thus ensuring the largest possible market share.

So here you have a company that takes in $5 shoes from third world countries, brands them, and sells them for $150. That’s pretty damn clever and profitable. However, there is one very minor loophole they overlooked in this manoeuvre. I could train a chimpanzee to take a logo and apply it on a product, and slightly more industrious primates all over the planet are doing as much. And now, some 20 years later, they begin to realize that in fact they have nothing to sell, their sole asset is the legal right to the logo they spent billions, even trillions to idolize.

Realizing that their scam is running thin, hanging only by the thread that people in fact respect their right to brand something, they swung into action the lobby apparatus to tell the rest of the world how very naughty they are when they don’t respect said right. And the result, amongst a long list of treaties-and-such, is ACTA.

Civil Liberties: Every time changes to the copyright monopoly are considered, the profits of major entertainment industry companies are at the center of the discussion. Even the people who fiercely defend the right to share information freely are going to extreme lengths to argue that this will not hurt the revenues of the copyright industry. But why are these profits even relevant? Why should we care about the profits of these companies?

It is almost apologetic. Apologetic for defending the civil rights that our ancestors fought, bled and died to give us, their children and grandchildren.

Thinking about what hurts and doesn’t hurt sales misses the point entirely. A corporation’s profits must never be at the center of policymaking, much less the center of determining what fundamental civil liberties we have as free citizens.

You remember Blackwater Security? The wet-jobs security firm that the US military hires for jobs abroad, jobs that violate the military’s own regulations to the moon and back?

When Blackwater Security was playing Grand Theft Auto among civilians in Iraq in retaliation for the 9/11 attacks, with which Iraq had nothing to do, how would you react if they had issued the following statement?

“Our profits are being hampered by the civilians’ rights. It is not fair. In all fairness, we demand that torture should be allowed preemptively to find suspects or people that we find interesting, or because it can boost our profit. Also, we demand the right to detain civilians at will and indefinitely, because we could charge Uncle Sam for that too, boosting our profits even further.”

How would you react to that?

Let’s take another scenario from Blackwater in Iraq:

“Our profits are being hampered by the rights of the people. It is not fair. Our profits are falling. In all fairness, we demand the introduction of wanton censorship, allowing us to discover and prevent people from talking about subjects we don’t like. Also, we demand to hold messengers responsible to some amount of punishment we determine if they carry sealed letters containing something we don’t like. That way, our profits could perhaps be restored to their former glory. After all, it’s only fair.”

Would this demand from Blackwater Security in Iraq perhaps seem reasonable? They’re asking for the dismantlement of rights on the same level as the right to not be tortured, not to be detained without due cause, and similar rights.

Well, this is exactly what the copyright industry is demanding. Exactly this.

The rational emotional reaction to this is an immediate desire to personally kick the living shit out of these pretentious bastards. After proper impulse control has been applied to this desire, the proper official poker-faced response – if any – is that the world owes them nothing, preferably coupled with sharp reductions in existing monopoly privileges.

If somebody had written a dystopic novel in the 1980s illustrating how some subjects had been forbidden, and if you would speak about them on the phone, a voice would pop in and say, “You have mentioned a forbidden subject. This has been noted. Please refrain from discussing forbidden subjects.” – if somebody had written this, people would have dismissed it out of hand as being too dystopic, too unrealistic. This could never possibly happen, people would have said, shaking their heads.

Try posting a link to a torrent on The Pirate Bay on your wall on Facebook and see what happens. People in the 1980s would have been horrified, people on both sides of the Iron Curtain. All in the name of protecting profits for a cartelized industry with monopoly benefits.

The job of any entrepreneur is to construct a use case and a business case that allow them to make money, given the current constraints of society and technology. They do not get to dismantle civil liberties, even if they can’t make money otherwise. That goes for Blackwater Security as well as the copyright industry as well as every other entrepreneur on the planet.

When our parents sent a letter in the mail, nobody was allowed to open it to check if it contained a copied poem, which would infringe on the copyright monopoly. When our parents sent a letter in the mail, they and they alone determined if they identified themselves as sender on the outside of the envelope, inside the envelope, or not at all. When our parents sent a letter in the mail, the mailman was never held responsible for the contents of that letter, regardless of if the contents infringed a particular copyright monopoly or were even downright illegal.

It is entirely reasonable to demand sternly that our children have the same rights as our parents and grandparents had. A particular corporation’s profitability does not factor into it.

Corruption: The ACTA awareness and debate has finally heated up. But in such a huge, convoluted and deliberately complex document, how can you determine for yourself whether it’s good or bad? It turns out that there’s a very straightforward way to tell.

The easiest way to determine the nature of ACTA comes not from the document itself, but from the behavior of the people advocating it.

Everybody involved in pushing and rushing through this agreement have insisted that it will mean no changes at all, won’t require any changes to law (or possibly minimal ones to trademark law, as in Sweden), and overall, insist that it’s no big deal.

At the same time, these players are throwing all their weight behind its passage. The key question that results stands out like a sore thumb:

If ACTA doesn’t change anything, why are they pushing for its passage as if their life depended on it?

And that contradiction, in itself, is enough to de-mask the entire ACTA and what it stands for. It was negotiated in secret by the copyright industry and other monopolists. Even now, as lawmakers come to a vote, they are not allowed to understand what the document says – for it defines many new terms, that are only understandable in terms of the negotiation protocols. But those are secret.

If the copyright industry is pushing for its life for something to pass, while pretending it’s not a change at all, and preventing lawmakers from understanding the concepts defined, what do you think it contains?

This is the industry that thinks it’s reasonable for legislators to give them the power to kill a legal competitor in a foreign country by killing their income, website, and advertising at the pointing of a finger.

This is the industry that thinks it’s reasonable that they should be legislated to the top of search results, and their free competitors downranked by law.

This is the industry that demands under threat of law – a private industry – to wiretap an entire population, just to see if they do something that industry doesn’t like, and if so, censor that population’s communications at will.

This is the industry that argues that citizens should be actively prevented from exercising their fundamental rights, such as freedom of speech and expression, if that may possibly interfere with that industry’s business.

This is the industry that thinks it’s reasonable to sue a small Karaoke manufacturer for 1.2 billion dollars. Oh, and a student for over 4 million. Oh, and a dead grandmother.

This is the industry that uses child pornography as a legal ram to pave the way for their own censorship, in ways that actually hurt children and promote child abuse.

This is the industry that planted rootkits on people’s music CDs and took complete control of their computers, millions of them – including web cameras, microphones, files on the hard drive, everything. They forced their way into people’s homes and got eyes and ears there.

This is the industry that, once you think they’ve sunk as low as morally and humanly possible, keeps coming up with new creative ways to surprise you.

If this industry wants this legislative package so incredibly badly that they’re fighting for their life to get it, while pretending it’s no big deal, all while not even telling lawmakers what it is, that should be enough for anybody to realize it’s a bag of the darkest bloody horrors. Expect it to codify the examples above. And more. Expect it to be much, much worse than SOPA.

Europe: This just in: the European Parliament’s rapporteur of the ACTA agreement, an agreement which is about as bad as SOPA and creates seriously repressive legislation – that rapporteur has just quit in disgust over how the whole process has been designed to keep citizens and lawmakers in the dark.

From the website of La Quadrature, which quotes and translates Numérama interviewing Kader Arif, former rapporteur for ACTA:

”I want to denounce in the strongest possible manner the entire process that led to the signature of this agreement: no inclusion of civil society organisations, a lack of transparency from the start of the negotiations, repeated postponing of the signature of the text without an explanation being ever given, exclusion of the EU Parliament’s demands that were expressed on several occasions in our assembly.”

“As rapporteur of this text, I have faced never-before-seen manoeuvres from the right wing of this Parliament to impose a rushed calendar before public opinion could be alerted, thus depriving the Parliament of its right to expression and of the tools at its disposal to convey citizens’ legitimate demands.”

“Everyone knows the ACTA agreement is problematic, whether it is its impact on civil liberties, the way it makes Internet access providers liable, its consequences on generic drugs manufacturing, or how little protection it gives to our geographical indications.”

“This agreement might have major consequences on citizens’ lives, and still, everything is being done to prevent the European Parliament from having its say in this matter. That is why today, as I release this report for which I was in charge, I want to send a strong signal and alert the public opinion about this unacceptable situation. I will not take part in this mascarade.”

I’ve never seen words this strong from a Member of European Parliament before. He’s essentially saying that parliament was deliberately kept in the dark – this description comes very close to describing a coup d’état.

Next Steps

It is important to know that today’s signing of the ACTA agreement by the EU member states accounts for absolutely nothing. It is for show. A ceremony. Theater. The legally binding action happens in votes in parliaments; the national parliaments across Europe, and notably the European Parliament. That’s the final line of defense, and that’s where we must win.

The vote in European Parliament is estimated to happen somewhere around June 10. On the road there, it needs to pass through three or four subcommittees of the European Parliament. I expect similar mechanisms to happen in the national parliaments.

Expect lies.

The Polish minister of digitization, Michal Boni, was lying through his teeth yesterday, saying that Poland “had no option” but to sign the agreement, and that Poland would submit “an addendum clarifying Poland’s conditions”. These are blatant lies. He also claimed that all other EU countries had already signed it, which as another blatant lie.

First, if no vote in parliament was needed, you can be damn sure it wouldn’t be held in the first place. If parliament says no, any parliament, then no it is. And the Members of Parliament push exactly the button they want to – there is no “must push yes”. Nobody holds a gun to their head.

Second, there are no addendums or appendixes which may appease the public. The ACTA text is closed. There is no more adding to it. What remains is a yes or a no to the text exactly as it is written.

Make Noise

This is where we come in. We must take everything we learned from defeating SOPA and apply it to national parliaments in Europe in general, and the European Parliament in particular.

Activism on the streets. Flood them with phone calls and emails. (Do not overload their servers, though: that will be seen as borderline terrorism and just make them more determined that more Internet control is the right thing to do.) Citizens of Poland have been exemplary here in taking to the streets.

SOPA is dead, and nobody in the US legislature wants to touch copyright monopoly issues. If we win ACTA – and we know that we can – then that may be the beginning of the end for the copyright industry and its attempts to kill our freedom of speech. Yes, really.

Process of Law – Zacqary Adam Green: Oh boy, another police state bill enters the US Congress! The Enemy Expatriation Act will allow citizens to be stripped of their nationality for “supporting hostilities” against the US. Conviction, of course, wouldn’t be necessary.

The Enemy Expatriation Act is a short amendment to USC 8 §1481, the law which spells out criteria for the revocation of US citizenship. Already listed are naturalization in or serving in the armed forces of another country, formally renouncing US citizenship, or being convicted of treason against the US. These are, arguably, perfectly understandable. But the EEA adds this new reason to revoke citizenship:

[E]ngaging in, or purposefully and materially supporting, hostilities against the United States.…For purposes of this section, the term ‘hostilities’ means any conflict subject to the laws of war.

One would think that would constitute treason, and thus such a section wouldn’t be necessary. But look at paragraph 7 of §1481, which describes treason:

(7) committing any act of treason against, or attempting by force to overthrow, or bearing arms against, the United States, violating or conspiring to violate any of the provisions of section 2383 of title 18, or willfully performing any act in violation of section 2385 of title 18, or violating section 2384 of title 18 by engaging in a conspiracy to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, if and when he is convicted thereof by a court martial or by a court of competent jurisdiction. [Emphasis mine]

There’s your problem. Under the current law, one has to be convicted of treason in order to be stripped of citizenship. This new section, added by the EEA, requires no such thing.

Now, the premise of the bill on its own gives me pause: does giving five bucks to Wikileaks count as “materially supporting hostilities”, or is that not a “conflict subject to the laws of war” yet? That’s ambiguous, though; the complete lack of a due process requirement — in contrast to the already-existing section regarding treason — is something else entirely.

The possibility of having one’s citizenship revoked without a trial is bad enough, but in concert with the recently-passed 2012 National Defense Authorization Act, it’s terrifying. The latest NDAA, of course, requires anyone accused of “terrorism” to be indefinitely detained by the executive branch of the government. In response to public outrage, an amendment was added which made US citizens exempt to this requirement (which doesn’t make them exempt to the possibility, but in practice, perhaps the law will be enforced in such a way). If, under the EEA, someone is stripped of their citizenship without a trial, then there is no longer any semantic ambiguity to keep them safe from the NDAA’s indefinite detention.

There seems to be an accelerating trend of dangerously broad-worded bills being proposed in the US Congress: the 2012 NDAA, SOPA/PIPA, and now this. Legislators are playing fast and loose with their constituents’ civil liberties, seemingly oblivious to the consequences. This is not a deliberate power-grab by a government gearing up to repress its population; this is gross negligence on the part of elected officials. It is not okay to accidentally endanger the people’s rights and liberties. The supporters of this absurd bill cannot be trusted with power.

Repression: News reached me this morning that authorities in the United States has decided to harass yet another of my colleagues. Australian activist Asher Wolf’s communications have been subpoenaed by a ridiculously entitled local police force in Boston.

In any normal part of the world, the police force in a city would swiftly conclude that their jurisdiction does not extend to another country on the other side of the planet. But no. Not United States authorities.

Asher Wolf has become one of the key activists across the world in coordinating news and information relating to breaking the old information hegemony. Perhaps it is therefore she is being targeted. The Boston police force demands to see her communications history and is demanding it from a company on US soil, Twitter.

This is the fourth valued colleague of mine that is being harassed extrajudicially and rightslessly. You’ve all heard of the previous three, I don’t have to name them.

I’m so damn tired, so utterly drainingly fatigued, of seeing this holier-than-thou attitude. Pretending the United States to be a shining beacon of freedom and due process, and yet, authorities there stand above not just their own law, but every other law on the planet, in the same instant it’s more convenient that way. The near-term examples are too legion to list.

(Not that a lot of other countries are much better. But they don’t pretend to be, either.)

Citizens of the United States, you know that I have many friends and colleagues in your country that I value dearly and hold in the highest respect, but your administration is a relentless psychopath. And your administration is acting in your name when it behaves like this against the world. Against my friends. Against my colleagues. Against me.

This has to end. It’s time for the United States dollar to collapse, already, to put an end to this arrogance.

So what’s our countermove?

Like I said, pretty much every friend and colleague I have with a United States passport agrees with the values I’m fighting for — the right to privacy, the transparency of government, the right to due process, the right to the same civil liberties online as our parents had offline. It’s not rocket science.

What the authorities are demanding in this case are communications logs. Logs that did not exist in the offline safeguarding of civil liberties. That’s the weak spot, right there. If there are no logs, the violence advantage of authorities cannot translate to the critical information advantage.

So, in my mind, we must make sure that the infrastructure does not keep logs of any kind when it comes to communications. Where telecoms companies – essentially the old national telephone monopolies – insist on keeping logs, we need to replace them with our own infrastructure. We know we can do that already.

We need to ask Twitter and the like to not have any logs. At all. And keep asking. Keep asking, and/or move to a different infrastructure for critical communications.

And above all, we need to explain to reporters that with communications logging and data retention, which politicians worldwide are trying to mandate, those reporters have neither the right nor the possibility to protect their sources anymore. That’s a right that should not be surrendered this lightly.

After all, Asher Wolf is a reporter and a journalist in the truest sense of the world, and a police force on the other side of the planet just asked for her sources. If that doesn’t ring alarm bells all over reporters’ heads, what will?