ACTA: the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement.

Also known as the big, evil, scary copyright treaty which is so damn important that you’re not allowed to know about it. 

We really need some kind of definition of the term National Security which doesn’t mean “whatever the Hell we want to do and not talk to you about”.

It’s not clear to me at the moment what ACTA actually is intended to do, beyond that it’s an attempt by the media giants to claw back some of what they’re losing to digital sharing and so on. (NB it seems to offend them almost as much if you rip your DVDs to your AppleTV as if you download a movie you don’t own.) Is ACTA about searching your computer at border posts, constraining your ISP to snoop on your usage, making non-commercial P2P file-sharing of copyright material a criminal offence? What’s the deal here?

But look: aside from the main argument about copyright, which I still feel I don’t know enough about, there’s a side issue which might be even more important. Everything ACTA might be seems to allow snooping. It seems to give a lot of new people permission to get into your stuff and poke around. It means watching your bandwidth, examining what you download, checking your files, basically going through your digital laundry. One possible provision in ACTA

would allow countries to bring criminal penalties against those who commit “willful infringements without motivation for financial gain to an extent as to prejudicially affect the copyright owner (e.g., Internet piracy).” [link]

And while they’d ‘probably’ only go after hubs, it would provide for the possibility of bringing suits against individuals. Now if, in the course of ransacking your laptop for all those evil pirated episodes of Dollhouse, they should trip over material which might be of use in the commission of an act of terrorism, such as a picture of a policeman or a naval vessel or a primary school, well – that would theoretically open the door to more vigourous interrogation of your life.

I’m not saying this is a murky conspiracy. I’m just seeing it as part of an increasing tendency to award commercial interests access to information which is private, and to assert ownership over information stored in digital form in a way which would be considered outrageous if it were on paper. Breaking into your house to examine your hand-written diary is a dramatic idea. Reading your Word documents is apparently not.

This is all unformed and wiffly in my mad little head. I’m just feeling increasingly that the overlapping legislation creates a situation where everything is potentially criminal or unlawful and nothing is private. And at the same time, government is arrogating to itself the right to conceal from us its own decisions – often because those decisions are shameful.