While I was in the process of removing what little ads remained on any of my domains, I was given an update about ACTA.

For those who don't know, ACTA is the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement ACTA. Basically, this is an international anti-piracy/counterfeiting law. It is designed to protect "intellectual property" such as copyrights, patents, etc. on a more or less global level. Why it has not been given as drastic of a show as SOPA and PIPA were, I can only guess.

The international "trade agreement" has been signed by the following:
Oct. 11, 2011: United States, Australia, Canada, Japan, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore, and South Korea
Jan. 26, 2011: European Union and 22 Member States (without Cyprus, Estonia, Germany, Netherlands and Slovakia which are expected to sign later)

It remains open for new signatures until March 31, 2013. Regardless of what might be thought about any of a long list of nasty things the agreement is supposed to help stop, the method through which it has been written and signed is reprehensible.

Kader Arif Wrote: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.

Source

Regardless of what the agreement is actually intended to do, the methods being used and the statement above seem to show that there is a total disregard for the public and their wishes throughout the governments of the world.

Looks like there trying it again.

I wish that was just an instance of trying it again. Unfortunately it has been being negotiated for years. Initially it was kept secret, and to be honest I had no idea about it until after the United States had signed it. I have known about it for a couple weeks, trying to better my understanding instead of jumping to conclusions...but they seem determined to prevent there from being time to get all the facts and put in opinions. They seem to be determined to pass something like this no matter what the people have to say. It'd disgraceful.

That will take our rights away.

Rights? What rights? What freedom?

"War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Strength"
~ George Orwell, 1984

That is the truth.

*sigh* and to continue trampling on freedom, rights, privacy, etc... the FBI is trying to step-up their motoring of social networking sites. OK, technically it's not really a privacy issue and freedom/rights only come into play if they do something stupid...they're only monitoring what is already public (if you set it to friends only they wouldn't see it, for example...or that's the claim).

Oh, and Twitter has announced plans to cooperate with authorities in certain countries and censor certain tweets.

How long will it be before they begin motoring our cell phones. If They have not already.

Good thing you added "If they have not already" as I'd suspect they have to some degree in the past. I'm not aware of any evidence that they do this at present on any serious scale, but I'd imagine it's no less common than wiretapping in general...

But on a slightly unrelated note, since that was mentioned: Another recent cause for concern among some people is Google's privacy policy (and TOS) change. In reality, they are simplifying what they have already given themselves permission to do (including collect information from all platforms - including search, gmail, android OS, adsense, and more). While in the past there has been very little merging of the information used, the fact of the matter is they have announced an intent to merge all of the information collected about an individual and use it to "improve their experience" across all products. That could be anything from better ad targeting (a big part of the reason for what they're doing) to taking GPS data from an android and the mention of a meeting in an email and using it with the traffic conditions to tell someone they're going to be late. Not necessarily evil (as has been thrown out about them recently), but certainly spooky and has a potential for some rather chilling effects.

Google seems to know almost everything about us.