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Leaked TISA Documents Reveal Privacy Threat
schwit1 writes with some Wikileaks-enabled news at Forbes about the Trade in Services Agreement, a treaty currently under negotiation between the U.S., the European Union and nearly two dozen other parties. Wikileaks' release of 17 documents from the negotiating countries puts some bad light on some of the provisions being considered: From the Forbes report: Under the draft provisions of the latest trade deal to be leaked by Wikileaks, countries could be barred from trying to control where their citizens' personal data is held or whether it's accessible from outside the country. ... These negotiating texts are supposed to remain secret for five years after TISA is finalized and brought into force. Like TTIP and TPP, TISA could be sped through Congress using Trade Promotion Authority (TPA), also known as fast-track authority, which has been passed by the US Senate and may be taken up in the House this month. Under TPA, Congress is barred from making amendments to the trade deals, and most simply give yes-or-no approval.
"countries could be barred from trying to control where their citizens' personal data is held or whether it's accessible from outside the country"
The businesses pushing for this are the same businesses that are going to throw a fit when this affects them.
I don't have any trust in those agreements. What can I do about it in my "democracy"?
For the 'most transparent administration in history.' Mr. Obama wants to bring the US down and he is doing a damn good job of that.
How much do you want this is at the request of America so that a) their security spying can access everything, and b) so that companies like Microsoft can't be told what they can do.
I'm so sick and tired of government officials signing away our rights under the table.
It should be a criminal offense to have secret treaties which impact our rights.
This is to benefit US spying interests, and corporations. Neither of which is a sensible reason to sign away our fucking rights.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Well, the US has divided its authority into houses to maintain a balance of powers, so that no single authority can dominate the decision making process.
The executive is charged with being the head of state, namely a single person to negotiate treaties. The senate, or the "upper"/"elder" house, must ratify those treaties before they become law.
The congress, the "lower" or "junior" house, was meant to deal with day-to-day issues of the younger folk, those with a future.
In general it was originally decided that any two of the congress, senate, and executive are needed to make a law.
The judicial branch is intended to resolve disputes based on judicial principles. Except where there is a legal vacuum they cannot create law ("stare decisis" / "ratio decidendi").
It would that the balance of the division of powers is mulching of late, and I agree it is a problem â" not just on principle, but in sticking with the design choices of the founders of the United States.
Like the war powers act, it basically freed up congress from having to vote to go to war.
Whatever the content of the treaty the fact that TPA is just standard procedure.
You can't hammer out an agreement between multiple different countries only for a national legislature to take issue with a single concession that was won by another country and agreed to by the delegates. The negotiators are there to get the best possible deal for their country. Congress then gets to decide whether or not the deal is good enough, they can't unilaterally renegotiate it.
No, no, no.. Especialyl not when the negotiations are secret, if they were public, the parliaments and public could comment on the procedings, but when they are secret, they can only comment and correct "mistakes" afterwards. And if you can't make a treaty that everyone will agree on in the end, maybe you are negotiating someting unacceptable. Rejecting it piecemeal by national parliaments is exactly how this should be dealt with.
> You can't hammer out an agreement between multiple different countries only for a national legislature to take issue with a single concession that was won by another country and agreed to by the delegates.
Then cry us a fucking river. We're so sorry to hear sovereign states negotiate bilateral agreements happens to be so inconvenient for multinational corporations.
Except that many of the founders and our first president were very much against the idea of the USA engaging in treaties and entanglements with other nations. The fact that they designed a system that would nearly always fail to reach such agreements isn't a surprise.
What I think is sad is rather than deal with it, either by embracing their wisdom and not making so many damned agreements, or by having a serious debate about the subject an amending the Constitution rather than running around it with 'Fast Track" authority legislative bunk.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Whatever the content of the treaty the fact that TPA is just standard procedure.
You can't hammer out an agreement between multiple different countries only for a national legislature to take issue with a single concession that was won by another country and agreed to by the delegates. The negotiators are there to get the best possible deal for their country. Congress then gets to decide whether or not the deal is good enough, they can't unilaterally renegotiate it.
I think Article II of the US Constitution might disagree (requires super-majority of the Senate). But congress already voted away all their constitutional powers already anyway, so who really cares about the supreme law of the land.
And don't quote me justification using some Iran-Contra Reagan BS. That man was right on a lot of things, but not on everything.
6th Street Radio @ddombrowsky
Actually, I think Fast Track is beginning to be understood too well.
It appears to be another word for Railroaded.
As in we are going to quietly get this train moving and by the time you figure out it is going where we want and not where you want, it will be too late.
There are several countries that mandate personal information be stored within that country. Russia's recent rules for 2016 come to mind. These countries as a rule do not make up a list of the most liberal or free countries in the world. Mandating the servers be stored locally in that country ensures that governments access to them if they want. While I am a staunch libertarian and republican and I probably wouldn't be in favor of this rule I don't know that it is fair to paint the Obama administration as the villain because of this. Now, the entire secrecy thing and the fact that this isn't going to congress yeah they definitely in the wrong there.
Yes, but the deal that they will vote on is kept secret from the public and the vote on it will be held in private as well. That's not acceptable
Every single political science should have this subject in their curriculum. It just makes me wonder of the remaining, confidential arsenal most democratic states use to fight democracy in such efficient ways. Humanity really has a tendency for hypocrisy.
I am a European, and I'd like to keep my data within the EU, thank you very much.
US companies have proved, time and again, they cannot be trusted with such simple concepts as "personal privacy".
hey dumbass
"Special precautions need to be taken when personal data is transferred to countries outside the EEA that do not provide EU-standard data protection"
"Whereas the difference in levels of protection of the rights and freedoms of individuals, notably the right to privacy"
http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUr...
Did he demnd that everyone support TISA blindly?
Maybe not publicly, but there should be no reason to believe he doesn't feel the same way about this as he does about TPA and TPP, and there he is demanding blind support. It is a shame he will probably get it, and then next year all those bastards who voted for it will be reelected. Turn your complaints into votes and you all might be taken seriously.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Not true.
The EU has similar rules. Data cannot leave or be processed outside the country without SOMEONE in the EU taking the fall for allowing it to happen should something go wrong.
EU data protection is pretty hard. Google, Microsoft etc. provide guarantees to EU governments that school data on their apps (e.g. Google Apps for Education/Government etc.) are never stored nor transmitted to non-EU datacentres. I know, because as part of my job, I have a legal duty to check that this is the case of any company I hand our pupil's data off to.
Just because we don't want US noses in our data doesn't mean we're being malicious. It just means we have a set of rules and if you're not prepared to follow those rules, you can't have our data. Rules like "We have a right to see the data stored on ourselves", "We have the right to correct that information if it's incorrect", "We have a right to know what's happening to our data and who processes it and for what purpose" and so on.
There's a reason that I cannot allow use of Apple iCloud on-site. Apple refuse to provide such guarantees. Therefore their cloud service is dead to us (for many other reasons as well, but that's just Apple). There's a reason that I cannot use a software supplier from Sri Lanka who wants our business - because they can't provide the correct guarantees of our data and thus I personally, can be held *LEGALLY* liable if they take our data and some of it leaks out (for the purposes of the EU data protection laws, leak of any personally-identifiable information can result in fines and prosecution with personal liability - personally-identifiable information might be, say, one name with, say, one date-of-birth. Game over).
Sorry, but there's a reason that Dropbox, Twitter, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and everyone else has an Irish datacenter - they have to control and process UK and EU user's data within the EU, according to strict laws, or risk enormous fines. The US divisions "demanding" access to the EU data is the impetus of the last year to separate the companies geographically so they can legally comply with EU regulations and not have to give data to the overbearing demands of the US court system that has no such jurisdiction.
We protect our data. Just because you don't, that doesn't make us terrorists or police states. In fact, it skews towards the exact opposite.
How is the balance of the division of powers mulching? I don't see it. Sure, the legislative branch seems to have issues with special interests and partisan politics, but otherwise the powers seem pretty balanced.
weinersmith
This is about offshoring jobs. Changing these rules will mean millions of data center jobs can finally be move to India where the labor is cheap and benefits don't exist
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
seriously. NO.
+10, If I had mod points you'd get one.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
Forget about your privacy... this is bigger. A year or two ago, the UK decided against going to the Cloud, because they could not be guaranteed that UK government data would stay on UK soil. If I read that correctly... for Americans, how'd you feel about the Pentagon, or your doctor, having to use data services in, say, India or China, or eastern Europe?
mark
In the US, we have really crappy protection for our data in the first place, and I don't see that this treaty would affect that. It would affect many other countries, who shouldn't rely on the US Senate to protect themselves. The European Union should be getting those provisions removed, as they are clearly against many of the protections in EU member states, if not the the whole EU.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Under the draft provisions of the latest trade deal to be leaked by Wikileaks, countries could be barred from trying to control where their citizens' personal data is held or whether it's accessible from outside the country. ... These negotiating texts are supposed to remain secret for five years after TISA is finalized and brought into force (1). Like TTIP and TPP, TISA could be sped through Congress using Trade Promotion Authority (TPA), also known as fast-track authority, which has been passed by the US Senate and may be taken up in the House this month. Under TPA, Congress is barred from making amendments to the trade deals, and most simply give yes-or-no approval. (2)
1. How is that supposed to work if no one knows about it?
I assume that the companies doing business would be "business as usual", and the country's governments being bullied by the agreement just wouldn't be able to say they want their citizens' data store within borders. Which sounds ok for me, being in the US, but sounds pretty shitty for them...but that sounds like "business as usual" from what I hear.
2. Congress should always be barred from adding amendments that have nothing to do with the bill. Something related I'm good with, but an amendment to spend money studying ducks in Arkansas on a bill to build a bridge in Massachusetts is bologna.
I refuse to sign
The fact that they have some of the most favorable corporate tax laws allowing them to shield billions from US taxes by setting up a nexus there I'm sure has nothing to do with it.
You're absolutely right, it has nothing to do with it. You don't need to set up a datacenter in Ireland to take advantage of the tax laws there - one accountant is probably enough.
The Irish datacenter is to keep data in the EU, as required by EU law, and out of the grubby paws of the NSA. I wholeheartedly approve.
I was, actually, hoping for a couple of +1 Funnies, rather than Trolls. I guess, Illiberals aren't all that open-minded and mirthful either, when caustic humour is aimed at them... Please, don't hate.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
So is this the "Change we can believe in"?
And no, I'm not making fun on democrats. I'm making fun of anyone that thinks their party cares about them or their country at all.
You are looking for an All-Or-Nothing Transform. If you are technically inclined, it's not too hard to whip this up for yourself. OTOH, you are implementing a cryptographic protocol, so, you shouldn't be using it for anything more serious than entertainment and education. You would need a service in the US and a service in, say, Ireland, though.
You could also just use split on an encrypted archive, but that might take all the fun out of it.
He uses what he calls "caustic humor" to bash his political opponents, then tries to take the high road by reminding us not to hate.
Next, he'll claim that pointing this out is an ad hominem attack.
"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."
So my reasoning for not using your USA located computing facilities is not because the are in the USA, it is because you can not grantee the level of data security I require at that facility. The fact that this happens to be because the facility is located in a particular territory with stupid laws - relevant but NOT the end reason I'm refusing to deal with it. The reason is security requirements I have, not physical location. Not a problem?
But Fast Track still allows Congress to reject the treaty, doesn't it? Presumably, they can even say "we're rejecting it, but if you make these changes, we'll approve it." Then it needs to be renegotiated accordingly.
Without Fast Track, Congress can apparently accept the treaty but change the terms - which doesn't make sense, because if you change the terms it isn't the same treaty any more. It would still need to be renegotiated, and presumably taken back to Congress unless the resulting document happens to be exactly the same as the one Congress came up with, which is unlikely unless the changes were trivial.
So what's the difference? (Serious question. Apart from perhaps wasting less time in Congress - and it isn't as if they don't seem to have plenty of it to spare - I see neither a disadvantage nor a benefit to Fast Track.)