What is the ACTA?

To most people it’s just the word ACT in all caps with an extra A at the end. That’s a problem, considering that the Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement is a international treaty that will affect everyone.

The verbiage and lingo that makes up the text of the treaty itself is full of legal jargon. There were some paragraphs I couldn’t wrap my brain around until I sat down with a pen and highlighter — this coming from a guy who read “Moby Dick” in the second grade.

After slogging through the 39-page document I felt drained. It’s not that I can’t believe the trade agreement grants governments sweeping and invasive powers. Given the current state of the thought process some of the authorities in this country have — it being made illegal to record law enforcement officers in some places — being surprised that people in the government think that they can stomp on your civil rights is getting to be a little cliched.

The ACTA will allow the “authorities” to search your iPod to see if it has any stolen content. Never mind how there will be no way to tell if you paid for that music or not. It will allow your computer, modem and all attached hard drives to be seized if you are even accused of downloading copyrighted content. Then the servers of whatever website you happened to download said content off of will be seized, and they will come down on your service provider for not keeping a closer eye on your activities.

Speaking of service providers, they will be required to hand over your IP and a log of all your activities on request. The amount of power that will wrestled from your hands and be given over to mega corporations is mind boggling to think about.

The old days of expecting privacy will be gone, like a dried up oasis. The corporations will have won, the little guy will be hung out to dry.

The ACTA also allows for information to be stripped from the Internet. In effect it allows for the censorship of the greatest informational resource available to man, and all in the name of commerce. Since the tech-savvy hackers have out-smarted the authorities, the authorities will throw a giant wet blanket over the fire fueling freedom of thought that the Internet represents.

Looking to President Obama to somehow fix or stop this is like digging for fools gold. The agenda from the white house is big government, and a government that is anything but transparent. This proposed expansion of governmental power is one I can’t even begin to stomach.

The ACTA will effectively sever the social contract that binds me to this place. I have never agreed to live under the thumb of big business. Under no circumstances should the government be given such powers outlined in the trade agreement.

God forbid the ACTA becomes law. If it does I will have no choice but to succeed from the union. Walking away from the country I love will be hard. I’ve gone to war for it, tried to educate those in it with my writing and contributed to it in other ways that if I mentioned would just be tooting my own horn.

Mario Savio said it best, “There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.”