Image: Wired

Oh, Bushama. What a disappointment you are.

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Just last week, I wrote about Obama’s defense of Bush’s warrantless wiretap program. Well, allow me to sound the death knell for civil liberties reform coming out of the White House. Obama has declared the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA (PDF), to be a national security secret and therefore out of reach with the Freedom of Information Act. This piece of legislation seeks to criminalize peer-to-peer file sharing and subject mp3 players, flash drives, laptops and any other digital storage device to border searches and allow internet service providers to monitor their customers’ communications.

Since this is a treaty still being negotiated, there isn’t really anything “actionable” I can point you at to try to right this heinous policy. Still, I strongly encourage you to contact your representatives (using the handy links above) and let them know that you don’t want your iPod, laptop or digital camera seized and copied every time you try to leave the country. Bastille-time, anyone? So much for the new era of openness. Check out a RussiaToday video on ACTA after the jump.

If ratified, leaked documents posted on WikiLeaks and other comments suggest the proposed trade accord would criminalize peer-to-peer file sharing, subject iPods to border searches and allow internet service providers to monitor their customers’ communications.David Kravets
Wired.com – Threat Level

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Tags: ACTA, Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, Barrack Obama, big brother, bill of rights, change is the same, civil liberties, constitutional violations, copyfight, copyright criminalization, copyright law, copyright reform, culture of surveillance, fifth amendment, First Amendment, fourth amendment, George W. Bush, intellectual property, Joe Biden, obama = bush, p2p, p2p legality, p2p made illegal, privacy, Question Copyright, second amendment, unconstitutional, warrantless wiretaps