For more on our campaign to stop the Trans Pacific Partnership and other trade agreements visit our campaign site: Flush The TPP. For compilation of articles on trade agreements visit here.
Excerpts:
“We know there is an e-commerce chapter and the general understanding is that the U.S. is pressing for a provision that would bar the ability to require localization of data,” says University of Ottawa professor Michael Geist, who is also the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law. “That has big implications.”
The Americans aren’t even making secret their insistence on the matter. On the American website for the trade deal, it clearly states there’s a priority for the TPP to include: “requirements that support a single, global Internet, including ensuring cross-border data flows, consistent with governments’ legitimate interest in regulating for purposes of privacy protection.”
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“It’s undoing privacy laws through the back door,” said the analyst, who was not authorized to comment publicly. “British Columbia and Nova Scotia are in the U.S. Government’s sights.”
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For TiSA, there’s no doubt that the data flow provisions have been stuck in. We only know this, again, because of Wikileaks.
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Ultimately, keeping data within reach of the NSA puts it under the jurisdiction of the secretive United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Courts—spoken in hushed tones among privacy activists as the all-powerful FISA courts that hand over blank cheques to the American spies for warrants and the like.