Trans-Pacific Partnership Suicide

EFF Demands US Trade Negotiators Publish Their Public Records, Posted on December 10, 2014 Written by eff.org

It’s no secret that the US Trade Rep­re­sen­ta­tive (USTR) has approached the Trans-Pacific Part­ner­ship (TPP) nego­ti­a­tions with a dis­ap­point­ing lack of trans­parency. For years now, leaks have been an inad­e­quate sub­sti­tute to rea­son­able pub­lic pol­icy, and non-corporate groups have resorted to read­ing between the lines of press state­ments even as the stated time­line of the agree­ment has blown by.

There’s another tool that mem­bers of the pub­lic can use to pry infor­ma­tion out of agen­cies like the USTR: the Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion Act (FOIA). Through FOIA, groups like EFF can demand cer­tain kinds of infor­ma­tion, and the agency has a legal oblig­a­tion to pro­vide it. To that end, we’ve filed a FOIA request for cor­re­spon­dence records between USTR nego­tia­tors and cor­po­rate lob­by­ists about the TPP. When we receive respon­sive documents—likely sometime in the new year—we’ll go through them and release what we’ve found.

This isn’t the first time a pub­lic inter­est group has used FOIA request to uncover this sort of infor­ma­tion. In fact, our request builds specif­i­cally on ear­lier requests from IP-Watch and Knowl­edge Ecol­ogy Inter­na­tional, which helped the pub­lic under­stand the cozy rela­tion­ship between lob­by­ists and nego­tia­tors up to that point, in 2013. Our new request seeks to expand on the infor­ma­tion dis­cov­ered through that request and bring it up to date.

It’s nice that free­dom of infor­ma­tion laws make it pos­si­ble for the pub­lic to pull that infor­ma­tion from agencies—but really, these agen­cies owe it to the pub­lic to sim­ply make it avail­able, with­out being asked. As pow­er­ful as FOIA can be, it gen­er­ally comes with a wait of weeks or months for records; and though it is avail­able to the pub­lic at large, many peo­ple are intim­i­dated by the process of mak­ing demands of fed­eral agencies.

The idea that the USTR should be mak­ing infor­ma­tion more avail­able and acces­si­ble as a default is not a rad­i­cal one. In fact, if you look through the agency’s web site you’ll see, as is typ­i­cal on many gov­ern­ment agency sites, an “Elec­tronic Read­ing Room” of pub­lic infor­ma­tion. The USTR’s read­ing room bears this descrip­tion: “This page con­tains infor­ma­tion rou­tinely avail­able to the pub­lic as well as doc­u­ments fre­quently requested under the Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion Act.” An empty page greets vis­i­tors seek­ing “Cor­re­spon­dence Logs.” Under that, it’s blank.

But the nav­i­ga­tion menu on the left sug­gests cat­e­gories, like “Advi­sory Com­mit­tee Meet­ings.” But the page that one pulls up is also blank. “Cor­re­spon­dence Logs” also leads to a blank page, despite the 127 pages released in response to the afore­men­tioned IP-Watch request. “Vis­i­tor Logs,” another cat­e­gory that might poten­tially reveal embar­rass­ing prox­im­ity to lob­by­ists, is also empty.

Finally, in the main nav­i­ga­tion sec­tion of the site, there’s a cat­e­gory called “FOIA releases.” It’s not empty, but it hasn’t been updated since 2012—before the head of the USTR, Michael Fro­man, even stepped into his cur­rent role.

The fact that there are empty pages where that infor­ma­tion ought to be is a pretty clear indi­ca­tor that the calls from EFF and oth­ers for more trans­parency are not extreme. These are basic requests, encoded into the archi­tec­ture of fed­eral agency sites, and they’re requests that the USTR is repeat­edly and con­tin­u­ously ignoring.

We’ll report back when we get the results of the FOIA request we’ve filed. We encour­age the USTR to post the respon­sive doc­u­ments pub­licly as well. Look to the exam­ple of the Euro­pean Commission’s release of Transat­lantic Trade and Invest­ment Part­ner­ship meet­ing details and nego­ti­at­ing texts: At a time when gov­ern­ments around the world are responding—slowly—to pub­lic calls for trans­parency, it’s a stark and dis­ap­point­ing real­ity that the USTR won’t even pub­lish its pub­lic records.

Related Posts

• Trans-Pacific Part­ner­ship, Agenda 21 and Redis­tri­b­u­tion of Wealth via EO and Cap & Trade
• Secret trade agree­ment cov­er­ing 68 per­cent of world ser­vices pub­lished by WikiLeaks
• The Next Phase of North Amer­i­can Inte­gra­tion. NAFTA to be Swal­lowed up by the Trans-Pacific Part­ner­ship (TPP)?
• EU-US Trade Nego­ti­a­tions Con­tinue Shut­ting out the Public—When Will They Learn?
• Press Release — Updated Secret Trans-Pacific Part­ner­ship Agree­ment (TPP) — IP Chap­ter (sec­ond publication)
• Cyber-Espionage and Trade Agree­ments: An Ill-Fitting and Dan­ger­ous Combination
• The TPP may endan­ger world health, newly leaked chap­ter shows
• The Free Trade Decep­tion Almost No One Understands
• Obama’s Secret Treaty Would Be The Most Impor­tant Step Toward A One World Eco­nomic System
• When the Time Comes We’ll Need to Step Up the Fight Against TPP’s Secret, Anti-User Agenda
  Source:http://agenda21news.com/2014/12/eff-demands-us-trade-negotiators-publish-public-records/#more-4069
  EFF.org is the Electronic Frontier Foundation
  Comments
  The TPP includes the establishment of an international court to resolve disputes. The problem is that US companies would not longer be protected by US law and US sovereignty would be breached.  This is another Agenda 21 move toward one-world government under the UN-front puppet-masters.
  Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader