The secret corporate takeover of nations continues:
For example, the question of data flows—specifically the flow of
European citizens’ personal data to the US—is at the heart of disputes
over the EU’s proposed Data Retention rules, the Safe Harbour agreement, and TTIP.
Here’s what Article 2.1 of TISA’s e-commerce annexe would impose upon
its signatories: “No Party may prevent a service supplier of another
Party from transferring, [accessing, processing or storing] information,
including personal information, within or outside the Party’s
territory, where such activity is carried out in connection with the
conduct of the service supplier’s business.”
What that means in practice, is that the EU would be forbidden from
requiring that US companies like Google or Facebook keep the personal
data of European citizens within the EU—one of the ideas currently being
floated in Germany.
Article 9.1 imposes a more general ban on requiring companies to locate
some of their computing facilities in a territory: “No Party may
require a service supplier, as a condition for supplying a service or
investing in its territory, to: (a) use computing facilities located in
the Party’s territory.”
Article 6 of the leaked text seems to ban any country from using free
software mandates: “No Party may require the transfer of, or access to,
source code of software owned by a person of another Party, as a
condition of providing services related to such software in its
territory.” The text goes on to specify that this only applies to
“mass-market software,” and does not apply to software used for critical
infrastructure. It would still prevent a European government from
specifying that its civil servants should use only open-source code for
word processing—a sensible requirement given what we know about the
deployment of backdoors in commercial software by the NSA and GCHQ.
Without WikiLeaks, the presence of these far-reaching proposals would
not have been revealed until after the agreement had been finalised—at
which point, nothing could be done about them, since the text would be
fixed. With the publication of these documents, civil society has an
opportunity to find out what is being discussed behind those closed
doors, and to analyse and discuss the implications. Whether the
negotiators will take account of what ordinary people think is another
matter.
