The New Freedom

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There is an imminent threat to all internet users in westernized countries! If two pieces of proposed legislation go through, which they likely will unless we really, really fight against them, file-sharing copyright infringement will essentially change from being a civil offense to a criminal offense and will create a body to enforce those laws. As in, 40% of young people become criminals and will be punished for it every time they cross an international border. As in, downloading a Led Zeppelin album means that authorities can come into your home, seize your computer and throw you in cage. Not only that, but certain aspects of the proposal aim to criminalize the use of legitimate privacy tools, justified by the fact that supposedly they could be used to hide from the copyright authorities.

The recently leaked proposal for the ACTA trade agreement to be created at this year’s G8 summit in July outlines exactly this. The agreement will give border authorities the right to search through your laptops and MP3 players for possible infringement and to seize the devices, fine, and imprison you. This means that for young people who want to cross an international border are in danger of being imprisoned, unless they can prove to a 9$/hr TSA rent-a-cop that their files aren’t infringing on anybody else’s copyright.

Not only that, the proposal seeks to punish infringers even if the copyright holder doesn’t want to pursue them. It also seeks to criminalize the use of tools which protect individual privacy. The language is still vague, but presumably this means Tor or at least P2P over Tor, and almost certainly Anomos.

The world-governerning forces are openly admitting to seeking to criminalize those of us who seek to protect our own privacy. Everything is backwards. Whereas we should have a Privacy Bill of Rights as Bruce Shneiner recently suggested, people who refuse to willingly turn over all of their personal data are in fact about to become criminals. This could be the worst violation of privacy in the history of mankind. At least the Statsi in East Berlin had to do some legwork. If this comes to pass, we will literally be forced to send all of our personal details straight to an assortment of corporate/government authorities under the guise of IP protection and anybody who doesn’t will be an outlaw.

Here in the US, the PRO-IP Act, which has now passed the House, seeks to do domestically essentially the same thing as ACTA, using federal Department of Justice agents (think: the DEA) to fight IP infringement.

There are definitely corrupt forces at work here. The existence of the ACTA document only surfaced illegally through Wikileaks, and only a month and a half before it will be formalized by the G8 nations at this year’s summit in Japan. There was obviously no public debate or discussion about whether or not this should be pressed for. Of course, as this does not benefit the American people, this is surely being pushed for exclusively by corporate trade associations behind the closed doors.

Please, if you have come here through a social bookmarking site or something like that, please don’t just read about this and not do anything. This affects you and it isn’t going to stop unless you take a stand against it. This is the most pressing digital rights issue yet. This is an extremely important threat to the future of open access to information. It is ageist legislation pushed by a corporate-backed, corrupt government which explicitly criminalizes young people because we know how to use the open network in a way they haven’t accounted for. We must fight this not just for ourselves, but for generations to come. Imagine the future implications of this. In fact, think back two years when the Linux/SCO case was going on. Under this legislation, anybody using the Linux operating system could have had their laptop confiscated at the border.

This is what we need to do to stop it, and how you can help:

1) Contact your Representatives in Opposition. Do this right now. Here is the link: EFF Contacting Congress . It will take two minutes of your time and IS an affective tactic. Ask to speak to the highest-up person you can. Let them know how extremely serious you are about this. You are smarter than your representative about this sort of thing, so let them know why this is so serious and why it matters to you. Talk about the future implications. Contact the people on the relevant committees. If you have time, write them a letter and post it to them. They will likely actually read it and send you a reply. If you do get a reply, send it to me. Let’s build a database of who stands on which side of the line.

This applies especially so if you are able to contact:

- Rep. Mary Bono (R-CA)
- Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA)
- Rep. Howard Berman (D-CA)
- Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA)
- Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN)

As these are the representatives who are responsible for the PRO-IP, and presumably (Berman at least) helped to frame the leaked ACTA draft.

2) Support Net Neutrality Although we should be gunning for rights so that authorities may not search our machines or our data streams, in the mean time we must secure our data using cryptographic measures. However, without net neutrality, there is nothing to stop data carriers and governments from automatically dropping encrypted data streams. If you want to continue having secure data and transmissions, you must to everything in your power to support a neutral internet.

3)Contact the Media - The media cares about ratings. If enough people tell them what they want reporting on, they will respond accordingly. As much as we don’t like the mainstream media, they still reach the largest audience and they should be covering this story. So far, all of the coverage about this has been Canadian or blog-based. I can’t find any from the other G8 countries, but I don’t speak the language or know where to look.

4) Change-Congress.
This type of legislation only could have arisen because certain wanted it to. It does not benefit the people, in fact, it deliberately criminalizes them. It would not have come to pass if Washington was devoid of corporate interest. For this reason, we need to support the Change-Congress movement to remove corporate influence in Washington.

5) Ensure the 5th Amendment at the US Border
This one is going to be a bigger issue in the next few years. Right now, the law says that US border patrol agents can look through your laptop. In the UK, they can force you to give up a password. In the US, there is no ruling about this. Theoretically, it seems that the 5th Amendment should protect against this as a form of self incrimination. However, this is less clear at the border, where it suddenly becomes an issue of “national security,” and as we know, civil rights need not apply for such matters. We need to fight dearly for this right. Anybody know a good lawyer or anybody at the ACLU? This is right up their alley.

6) Work to Create a Digital/Privacy Bill of Rights
Yes, the tech-savvy amongst us will probably always be able to hide our data using cryptographic or obfuscating techniques. However, this is not the type of culture I want to live in. I don’t want to have to enter a fake password to prove to authorities that I don’t have infringing files; I don’t want the authorities to have any access to my data without a warrant. I don’t want ISPs or the NSA to monitor my browsing habits. I don’t want Google to permanently keep a history of my searching habits. And I don’t want companies to be able to sell my data. See the above link to Bruce Schneiner’s article in Wired.

So how do we do this? We need a politician who understands our plight. We need to align ourselves with consumer rights and identity fraud prevention groups. Roughly 1 in 4 people are victims of identity fraud, and this is a direct consequence of data being sold off and then sold off again until it reaches untrustworthy hands.

The internet needs to become a powerful lobby! Why can’t geeks come together with geeks to ensure the rights what we need?! We should be organizing, dammit, to ensure net neutrality, to decriminalize non-commercial filesharing, to repeal parts of the DMCA and to protect our digital privacy.

7) Anything you can think of.
We’re going to need to be smart to win this. They are too big and too powerful, so we can’t always play nicely. We’re going to need to be clever. The Chaos Computer Club in Germany acquired and distributed the fingerprints of the Home Secretary to protest the use of biometrics in security. Is anybody close enough to the people writing this legislation to find out what’s on their iPods or harddrives? Hell, what’s in their email? Don’t forget that even Bush was violating the DMCA on his by having Beatles songs when they weren’t for digital sale.

If you have any other good ideas, get in touch with me and we’ll figure something out!

Also, where is the EFF’s statement about this? I’m writing to them about this now. What about Google? Do people just not know about this yet? It’s getting bloody close to the deadline!

More as it comes..
Rich

Some more sources:
Wikipedia: ACTA, PRO-IP
IP-Justice: Anti-ACTA Campaign
The Vancouver Sun
Wikileaks

Update from the EFF
I sent an email to the EFF and they got back to me with this pretty quickly:

Rich,

Thank you for contacting the Electronic Frontier Foundation.We’re certainly working on ACTA, and are very concerned. We have submitted comments to the US trade representative in March (below), spoken with government officials from Europe and the US on the topic in Washington in April as part of the Transatlantic Consumer Dialogue, and are working with other groups to monitor and, where necessary, intervene in the process.

You can read the text of our comment here:
http://www.eff.org/issues/acta/acta-submission-032108.pdf

If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact me.

Regards,

Eva Galperin

Hooray EFF!

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