[Infowarrior] - Obama: IP Treaty docs are state secrets

[Richard Forno]

Obama Administration Rules Texts of New IPR Agreement are State Secrets

We have been seeking access to documents relating to negotiations on  
an important new intellectual property enforcement treaty. The  
agreement, misleadingly named the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement,  
or ACTA, is thought to cover a wide range of intellectual property  
enforcement issues -- including standards for granting injunctions for  
alleged infringement of patents or copyrights, damages, seizures of  
goods in transit, surveillance of Internet digital file transfers,  
searches of personal property, and a dozen other topics.

There are number of outstanding Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)  
requests for key documents, by groups like EFF, Public Knowledge, and  
KEI. In one of our FOIA requests, we asked for 7 specific documents,  
referenced by the exact title and date of the documents. These  
documents are the proposals for the text of the agreement.

The texts are available to the Japanese government. They are available  
to the 27 member states of the European Union. They are available to  
the governments of Canada, Mexico, New Zealand, Australia. They are  
available to Morocco, and many other countries. They are available to  
"cleared" advisers (mostly well connected lobbyists) for the  
pharmaceutical, software, entertainment and publishing industries. But  
they are a secret from you, the public.

Today we received this letter from the White House, Office of the  
United States Trade Representative. Our FOIA request was denied on the  
grounds that the documents are "information that is properly  
classified in the interest of national security pursuant to Executive  
Order 12958."

< - >

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-love/obama-administration-rule_b_174450.html