Imagine you’re passing into the country and the border guard asks to look at your iPod. The border guard scans it and notices that it contains music that was not bought off of the iTunes store. Or, imagine that cheaper generic drugs are no longer available anywhere in the world because drug companies, acting through the U.S. Trade Representative, have forced intellectual property laws on everybody. These may or may not be the consequences of a new trade agreement being developed in secret. Governments, including those of the United States, Australia, and Canada, and large corporations, including Pfizer and Monsanto, are in negotiations to develop the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA for short. According to New Zealand’s Ministry of Economic Development, the purpose of ACTA is “to set a new, higher benchmark for intellectual property rights enforcement that countries can join on a voluntary basis.”

Although the name of the agreement implies that it only covers counterfeit goods, generic medicines and Internet piracy are also covered by the agreement. Negotiations are being held behind closed doors, but corporations such as Time Warner, Pfizer, Verizon, and Monsanto are all on advisory committees that have access to classified documents.

Barack Obama ran for president on a platform of transparency and government accountability. However, his administration has declared the text of the agreement to be a “national security” secret. He has also voiced support for the agreement, saying that the U.S. Trade Representative “is using the full arsenal of tools available to crack down on practices that blatantly harm our businesses . including the proposed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement.”

What we do know about the agreement comes from whistle-blowers leaking parts of the proposed agreement and discussions from the negotiators. According to the Vancouver Sun, discussions leaked to WikiLeaks, a web site that lets whistle-blowers post classified information without fear of having their identity known, propose expanding the role of border guards. The guards would act as copyright police who look through computers and MP3 players to ensure that there is no copyright-infringing material.

A leaked document proposes that Internet Service Providers provide information about people who are suspected of copyright infringement without a warrant. That means record companies will not need to provide any evidence of illegal downloading in order to get your personal information.

Activist groups from Australia, Canada, the EU, New Zealand, and the United States have all requested information related to ACTA. In Canada, the University of Ottawa’s Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic requested the contents of the agreement and received papers with the title of the agreement and everything else blacked out. Here in the United States, Knowledge Ecology International submitted a Freedom of Information Act request that was rejected, according to the U.S. Trade Representative’s FOIA office, because it was “properly classified in the interest of national security.”

So, if you believe that this negotiation is undemocratic and undermines our rights as citizens, the question remains: what can we do? I don’t have an answer. ACTA is being negotiated in secret so that we as citizens are unable react to it. The law is not always what is right, and, for those in-the-know (and unfortunately, only for those in-the-know), information technology will continue to provide ways around unjust surveillance and copyright.

ACTA is clearly a new plot twist in the story of globalism, “free trade,” and neo-liberalism. International agreements are being used to pass legislation that could never pass if it was to be voted on by citizens of the countries it affects, all to protect the interests of big business while dissolving the rights of citizens.