Once again we see one administration taking away our rights and the next expanding upon it. This time it is the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. Bush started it in 2007 and classified it because of National Security reasons. While the trade agreement is not finalized what we know about the treaty is frightening.

It would allow border searches of laptops, phones, mp3 players; agents could even go through your luggage looking for illegal cds. Unfortunately they always could and did as we found out in August, 2008 when the Homeland Security revealed that Federal agents can search laptop computers or any other electronic device like cell phones or mp3 players. And they could take them somewhere else for however long they wanted. For no other reason but that it was their policy. The best part? The ‘policy’ was upheld by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit in San Francisco. The Washington Post

They’re saying they can rifle through all the information in a traveler’s laptop without having a smidgen of evidence that the traveler is breaking the law,” said Greg Nojeim, senior counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology. Notably, he said, the policies “don’t establish any criteria for whose computer can be searched.”

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement goes further yet in diminishing our rights.
From Ingram 2.0:
According to a leaked document (available at Wikileaks and also at IP Justice), Canada and a number of other countries are planning to create a NAFTA-style body that would police copyright, and would be empowered to seize and/or destroy property without a court order.

This agency — whose creation wouldn’t have to be approved by the legislature, according to some reports, because it deals with international trade matters — would also have the power to force Internet service providers to divulge information about their customers without requiring a warrant.

Once again big government and bigger business team up to strip of us our rights and liberty. The point of this article however is to show there is no difference between Democrat and Republican, liberal or conservative, right or left; there is only us and them. And they appear to be winning. A conservative republican president starts a trade agreement in secrecy and the liberal democratic president continues the agreement and the secrecy.

From Politics and Law:

Last September, the Bush administration defended the unusual secrecy over an anti-counterfeiting treaty being negotiated by the U.S. government, which some liberal groups worry could criminalize some peer-to-peer file sharing that infringes copyrights.

Now President Obama’s White House has tightened the cloak of government secrecy still further, saying in a letter this week that a discussion draft of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement and related materials are “classified in the interest of national security pursuant to Executive Order 12958.”

Believing Obama is the saviour is just as deluded as thinking Bush was good for America. Whey you root for a particular political party you are missing the point. The political parties (doesn’t matter which one) are not here for you they exsist for themselves and the people who fund them.