Peet wrote:I really don't understand why they consider it acceptable for an international law that will affect millions of consumers to be developed secretly.
Because these days voters are less important than corporate lobbies. Sure, voters elect you (when they can be bothered voting at all) but lobbies are your meal ticket and 6 figure "consulting" job when you retire.
So the short answer is: It's a secret because the parties involved know it's unpopular but since they're almost certainly getting kickbacks from the multinationals supporting the process they didn't want anyone to notice until it was too late.
Also, the reason other countries keep it secret is exactly the same reason Australia went to war in Afghanistan. Because the US govt is inherently corrupt and they begin all foreign negotiations with threats to go along or face US trade sanctions.
Many people don't know this, but the first the Australian public knew about the war in Afganistan was when our PM went on a "holiday" to the US and came back, less than 3 days after 9/11, saying we'll do whatever Bush wants because Afganistan attacked America. I think that's an important point because what it means is that not only was our PM in the right place at the right time to be inducted to the "coalition of the willing" but he was also party to war negotiations during a period where Bush was supposed to be conducting a "9/11 investigation", organizing the cleanup, informing the public, consoling victims families and numerous other things that would seem to the public to be more important than negotiating on ANZUS treaty obligations.
In short, it's highly unlikely the timing of the trip was a coincidence. Our PM was on hand to be ushered into a secretly planned war prior to or during the events that supposedly initiated it and people wonder why I think the official 9/11 fairytale about evil cave dwellers is a load of crap.
Anyway, the point of bringing that up is that politicians seem perfectly comfortable with secretly planning and maintaining the unpopular slaughter of foreigners based on unverified and dubious claims. Therefore secretly planning to confiscate your iPod and Internet access based on discredited piracy statistics is probably not even a blip on their collective lack of conscience.
