According to fastcoexist.com, the President’s broad trade agreement (reportedly bigger than NAFTA) in the Asia-Pacific region, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, has hit a number of roadblocks. “It has stumbled in the Senate and received opposition from medical professionals, environmental groups, and labor unions,” they write.
According to the British newspaper The Guardian, more than 250 tech companies have signed a letter demanding greater transparency from Congress and pointed out the broad regulatory language in leaked parts of the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership trade bill.
The TPP would create an environment hostile to journalists and whistleblowers, said policy directors for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Fight for the Future, co-authors of the letter. “TPP’s trade secrets provisions could make it a crime for people to reveal corporate wrongdoing ‘through a computer system’,” says the letter.
The group claims that the TPP “…enables signatory countries to enact rules that would ban reporting on timely, critical issues affecting the public.”
Among the signatories are activist, sci-fi author and Guardian tech columnist Cory Doctorow.
“Democracies make their laws in public, not in smoke-filled rooms,” Doctorow wrote. “If TPP’s backers truly believed that they were doing the people’s work, they’d have invited the people into the room. The fact that they went to extreme, unprecedented measures to stop anyone from finding out what was going on – even going so far as to threaten Congress with jail if they spoke about it – tells you that this is something being done *to* Americans, not *for* Americans.”
http://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/hundreds-tech-firms-rail-against/
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/may/20/hundreds-tech-companies-oppose-tpp-trade-agreement
OK, Fine. 