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I spy: Obama White House seeks law to see what is on your hard drive
By Bob Kemp
RTNews (RussiaToday News) reported March 26 that the Obama Administration is seeking the power through legal channels to have the right to see just what is on your computer hard drive. Funny how the mainstream media has not given this story any coverage. The way in which the Obama Administration intends to carry out this flagrant violation of privacy will be under the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). Below is a definition of the ACTA courtesy of Wikipedia.
The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is a proposed plurilateral trade agreement which is alleged by its proponents to be in response "to the increase in global trade of counterfeit goods and pirated copyright protected works."[1] The scope of ACTA is broad, including counterfeit physical goods, as well as "internet distribution and information technology."[2]
In October 2007 the United States, the European Community, Switzerland and Japan announced that they would negotiate ACTA. Furthermore the following countries have joined the negotiations: Australia, the Republic of Korea, New Zealand, Mexico, Jordan, Morocco, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates and Canada.[3][4][5] The ACTA negotiations have been conducted in secrecy until on 22 May 2008 a discussion paper about the proposed agreement was uploaded to Wikileaks, and newspaper reports about the secret negotiations quickly followed.[
Here is the YouTube and the RTNEWS links so you may watch the RTNEWS report yourself. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yPmtQDWZ1s
http://www.russiatoday.com/Top_News/2009-03-26/A_not-so-private_PC.html
The ACTA sounds innocent enough on the surface, which is why you have to look below the surface to where Big Brother and big government are hiding. The Obama Administration has been negotiating the terms of the ACTA with the nations mentioned in the Wikipedia definition above in extreme secrecy from the public, hammering out the details so as to not leave any loopholes.
On the surface, this is a law that will make it legal for the agreeing member governments to, without the permission of the owner, go into a computer hard drive and detect any pirated material. If such material is located, then the owner of said computer can be charged with copyright violations under international piracy laws and arrested. One of the things the treaty is said to be aimed at is peer-to-peer file sharing, meaning passing on software from one user to another. The government defines it as a means to catch those in possession of pirated material. Up until now, such copyright infringements have been seen as civil matters. So I have to ask why the Obama Administration wants to turn a civil matter into a criminal act. It will also give border guards and customs inspector's unprecedented powers to search a travelers laptop, MP3, and any other digital recording device without warning, copy and confiscate any digital material a traveler may have. The ACTA will mandate that your ISP search your hard drive whenever you are online, and report to the government in detail what they find there, legal or otherwise. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out the gross invasion of privacy the ACTA will enable the government to legally enact on us, the citizen's of the United States. Big Brother will be able to literally watch everything we do on the Internet.
And what about private information that may be stored on your hard drive such as account numbers, social security numbers, birthdates, etc.? I go on-line several times a week to check my bank accounts, to make certain nothing unauthorized has taken place. This is a habit I got into after someone got a hold of my debit card information and used it to make some purchases. I also pay 95% of my bills on-line through my bank. I'm sure many of you do the same thing. Will we want to continue in these habits if ACTA becomes law? All this and more will be vulnerable and exposed. You may want to consider investing in a removable hard drive to protect such valuable and private information from Big Brother.
Some will argue that if you have nothing to hide, then you should not be worried about the government snooping around on your hard drive. This argument is weak and avoids the bigger issue at hand and that is the government probing deeper into our private lives, stripping away another level of privacy from us. Also, this new policy, which the government is staying extremely tight-lipped about, which is raising concerns among liberty activists, goes completely against the policies which Mr. Obama ran for office on; transparency and accountability. I searched today on the White House web site and there is no mention of the ACTA there at all. Funny how Wikipedia and the Russian News seem to know more about the ACTA than our own "transparent" government wants to say. I also find it ironic that the Russian media is warning us about privacy invasion from the United States government!
