The
ACTA treaty (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) is actually
negotiated by around 40 countries including the USA and the EU. The
negotiations started in 2006 undercover and Wikileaks published a
first version of the text in May 2008. The official negotiations
started the same year and despite all the protesting the treaty was
signed in October 2011 by Australia, Canada, Japan, Morocco, New
Zealand, Singapore, South Korea, and the United States. In January
2012 by the European Union and 22 states of the UE, including France
and the UK however Germany did not sign, even though the European
Parliament was against it all along. Still no one has ratified the
text. The aim of the text is to completely change the laws on
copyrighted content. Basicaly we would not be allowed to exchange
copyrighted content anymore and a new international body would be
given the means to spy on each and every internet network and
organise massive censorship campaigns on the whole internet. With
this treaty, websites like Youtube could become empty shells but,
even worse, some words or sentences could be copyrighted and thus
deleted from the Internet. And knowing the power of this wonderful
tool to inform people on basically anything, this is a very
frightening threat...
AFP (Agence France Presse) is the biggest and oldest press agency in
the world. It was founded in 1835 in Paris. This agency gathers
information from around the world then sends articles to their
clients. However, we can consider it as the only source for major
information broadcasting in France especially TV. The agency claims
to be independent and to give truthful information. However, on the
board of this agency we can count, among the 15 members, 5 named by
the French Government: two representatives of the Government-owned
radio and television and three representatives of the Government
named by one by the Prime Minister, another by the Minister of
Finance, and a third by the Minister for Foreign Affairs. There have
been suspicions of favouritism or manipulation over the years and
there is one case of clear misinformation. On the 9th January 2012,
the Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez made a speech with the Iranian
dictator Ahmadinejad. During the speech Chavez made a joke saying:
"Vamos Ahmanidejad y yo casi que de
los sotanos de Miraflores a afinar la punteria rumbo a Washington y
que van a salir de aqui unos cañones muy grandes, y unos misiles,
porque vamos a atacar Washington!"
that is: "As if, from the cave of
Miraflores (Government House), Ahmanidejad and I were to come out
with big canons and missiles to target Washington!”
But the AFP translated it like this: “Ahmanidejad
et moi, depuis le perron du palais présidentiel viserons Washington
avec des canons et des missiles, parce que nous allons attaquer
Washington."
The final example is, in
my sense, the most worrying one: the Echelon Network. It was created
in the 60s to monitor diplomatic and military communication in the
Eastern Bloc. Since the end of the Cold War it has been recycled as a
means to research information on drug dealers and terrorists. The
USA, the UK, New Zealand, Australia and Canada have signed the
Echelon treaty. A French equivalent exists: Frenchlon. The Echelon
network is the surveillance of all commercial satellites that belong
to the countries in the said treaty. This means that all of the
Internet and GPS communications are already monitored plus most of
the Mobile phone communications. The recording system is triggered by
a list of words if detected and causes the whole data to be recorded
permanently and all of the data that goes through Echelon is kept for
24 hours...
