The ACTA stands for the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. This bill is in essence similar to the disastrous First Amendment encroaching SOPA and PIPA bills, only globally encompassing. This treaty is the brainchild of the EU and its 22 members, which sadly includes the United States. The Anti-Counterfeiting Treaty is so secret that when a human rights activist in Canada tried to retrieve documents relating to the ACTA documents, they received them and only the title was legible with everything else censored. This action implies that we are not allowed to know the law in which we could be breaking. Still, doesn’t the old saying go, “Ignorance of the law is no excuse?” There has never been a bill created in complete secrecy that benefited mankind one bit and this bill is a screaming example.

When documents were leaked about the ACTA, they showed that the single major goal of the treaty was to force those countries that sign it to enact anti-file sharing policies. The treaty makes it mandatory and legal for your ISP to boot you off the Internet if you are even accused of content piracy. The problem is that there is no warning, no trial and no recourse to take if you want to dispute the claims against you. After you are “lawfully” kicked off the Internet your name and IP address is blacklisted and you are banned from the Internet for the rest of your life, no proof needed. This bill allows ISP providers to be private copyright police and impose harsh and unfair penalties on users and consumers. Eva Galperin of the Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote in a blog last fall that “ACTA contains new potential obligations for Internet intermediaries, requiring them to police the Internet and their users, which in turn pose significant concerns for citizens’ privacy, freedom of expression, and fair use rights.”

Now this bill isn’t merely enforced in Europe. Do not forget, America has signed this treaty as well; this treaty is going to go global. This new measure will allow the Internet Secret Police to monitor every avenue of the Internet you use, for their corporate influenced security of course. They will inform the government if you do anything that is against any government policy or law. They are also lawfully obligated to track and store everything you do online, which will effectively eradicate online privacy permanently. Any article, webpage or product that large media or corporations deem copyright infringement can be taken off the Internet at their request, which gives them enormous powers, all this without any court hearing, warrant or proper investigation.

Another problem with this is that the government has flagged some news websites, so with this treaty in place, visiting this site will flag you as well. The treaty will also mandate that ISP disclose personal user information to the copyright holder, this provides border patrol authorities from other countries broader powers to search laptops and Internet-capable devices at border checkpoints.

The fact that pirated movies and music is a problem is clearly not the debate here. What is the debate here is quite obviously the attempt to label everything else this treaty will control. It was written in such loose wording that it makes the National Defense Authorization Act seem stringent in comparison. People who clearly do not like freedom being used by the sheeple are choking the last vestige of freedom we have. The sad fact is this treaty, along with SOPA and PIPA, completely bypass the Magna Carta, the 1215 charter in which most of the western laws are based including the most important one, the U.S. Constitution.

The ACTA is an unconstitutional and illegal treaty that completely dissolves “due process” and allows you to be guilty until proven innocent. But the US adoption of ACTA also violates Article II, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution, which provides that the president “shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two-thirds of the Senators present concur.” Sadly, not one senator ever had the chance of voting on this treaty. It appears that the U.S. government is no longer listening to the people that it once served, it is now listening to foreign share holders and debt holders in the E.U. and as always the masses are led to believe that this will not impact them in any way.

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