First Report From Inside Germany's New TAFTA/TTIP Reading Room Reveals Text's Dirty Secret
from the 24-seconds-a-page dept
Last week we wrote about the only place that German politicians are currently allowed to view the latest texts of TAFTA/TTIP: a tiny room, guarded at all times, and involving all kinds of humiliating restrictions for visitors. Katja Kipping was one of the first to enter, and she has written up her experiences for lesser mortals like you and me, who are not permitted to besmirch this sacred place with our unworthy presence. Even though she is -- of course -- forbidden from speaking about what she read there, a translation of her account, made by War on Want, nonetheless contains some interesting new details:Once I'd registered, I was sent the instructions on how to use the room. The first thing that I noticed was that the terms and conditions had already been the subject of negotiations between the European Commission and the USA. Get your head round that: TTIP isn't even signed yet, and already individual countries have lost the right to decide who gets to read the texts, and on what terms.Here's how the actual visit went:
A guard took me in through security and asked me to lock away my jacket and my bag. He checked that I wasn't taking any camera or mobile phone into the reading room, and then knocked on a door. The heightened level of secrecy made me all the more excited as to what I was going to find, but the room itself was nothing special. There were eight computer work stations, and I was only allowed to sit at the one designated for me. A friendly woman sat in the room. She got me to sign the visitor rules -- if you don't sign, you don’t get in, so I signed. There was a thermos of coffee and a plate of biscuits in the corner. Yet no amount of caffeine or blood sugar would have made it possible to get through the 300 or so pages of text in the two hours I had available to me.Even though this reading room for German politicians has finally been opened -- two and a half years after the TAFTA/TTIP negotiations began -- numerous obstacles are placed in their way to make that opportunity as inconvenient as possible. First, the texts are only available in English -- imagine if US politicians were only allowed to read the French version of the negotiating texts. Moreover, the German visitors to the room are completely on their own: they cannot take even security-cleared specialists with them in order to decode the highly-abstruse wording of the documents. Finally, as Kipping notes above, she had just two hours to get through 300 pages -- roughly 24 seconds per page.
Even racing through the pages made available to her, Kipping says that she was unable to find anything that allayed her concerns about the proposed agreement. And despite the blanket prohibition on giving things away, she does reveal one dirty secret about the TAFTA/TTIP texts:
the documents are simply crawling with typos. The word 'and' is regularly written 'andd' and 'the' often appears as 'teh'. Either the negotiators are really shoddy workers or this is one of those famous security measures we've heard about.
She is doubtless right that these errors are fairly unsubtle attempts to create unique copies so that any leaks can be traced back to their source, since visitors to the reading room are directed to a particular computer when reading the text. And she is also correct in her conclusion:
Anyone who was going into these negotiations to enhance environmental protection, consumer protection and labour standards would have nothing to fear from transparency. Anyone who's engaged in selling out democracy, on the other hand, is obviously going to want to avoid public scrutiny. If [Germany's Minister for Economic Affairs] Sigmar Gabriel and the negotiators are really so convinced of the benefits of TTIP, why don't they just make the text available to everyone online?
It will be interesting to see what other snippets of information escape from the little room as the negotiations proceed, and as more German politicians visit it -- and whether they, too, still encounter texts that are crawling with highly-suspicious typos.
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Filed Under: eu, eu commission, katja kipping, secrecy, tafta, transparency, ttip, ustr
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Rhetorical questions, german politician style
If it has a high likelihood of affecting you, and you're not allowed to see it before it comes into affect... yeah, odds are good it's because it's not going to help you. Other than giving medicine to kids(and if those involved see the public like that, there's yet another reason they're not suitable for their positions and authority) you don't need to trick someone into accepting something clearly beneficial to them.
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Re: Rhetorical questions, german politician style
I am not convinced of that.
However, things like "age of consent" and "democracy" are there with all their consequences, including some bad ones, because the alternatives are worse and lead provably to systematic abuse of power.
The controlling mechanism of democracy, for better or worse, is scrutiny by the masses. Whether or not they are best-suited for that, people in a democracy are responsible for the choices governing them, and the constitutions that their representatives are sworn to heed are quite explicit in that respect.
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Re: Re: Rhetorical questions, german politician style
True enough.
Now explain to me why are the "masses" not allowed to "scrutiny"?
How can we pretend we're a democracy when the only point that actually makes a democracy had been removed?
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Re: Re: Re: Rhetorical questions, german politician style
Why is the "sovereign" not allowed to "scrutiny"?
And now it does sound like the conspiracy it is.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Rhetorical questions, german politician style
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hegemony
All that voting and stuff provides the illusion of democracy but since most people don't engage in the democratic system, "the masses" have little say in the decisions being made for them unless a pressure group campaign gains momentum.
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There is nothing a politician looks more for than power, as that power offers extra opportunities for choices.
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Re: Really?
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When that is said, the security through obscurity used in this case should be enough for politicians to see the ghost of ACTA reappearing. Keep in mind that a part of why many politicians voted no to ACTA was the secrecy of questionable legality surrounding it (most of the EU parliament condemned that part of ACTA). TAFTA/TTIP basically seems like a twin of ACTA on that account and it is probably even more aggrevating for politicians to go through this humiliation and then turn around and praise it. Talk about being a sellout!
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Re:
So: what on earth is it supposed to be distracting us from? What under the table deal is going on that we don't know about? I'm sure there must be one, or so much time and energy wouldn't be being spent on distracting us with a process that has known flaws and has almost been designed to fail beneath the weight of controversy.
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Re: Re:
--
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Re: Re: What is the handling of TTIP supposed to be distracting us from?
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Re: Re:
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This makes me sick
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Re: This makes me sick
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And teh
Hmmmm, and only 300 pages. I would have thought them much more long winded than that.
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Re: And teh
Single spaced? Font sized? You can get a lot of words on a page with 8 point font; in my area legal contracts have to be 10 point minimum for acceptance.
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Re: Re: And teh
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Re: Re: Re: And teh
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Re: And teh
throwing in the andd and teh here and there would just make everything appear to be legitimately low-quality so someone would ignore the more nefarious (and key) misspellings for what they are.
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Convincing proof...
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Re: Convincing proof...
In fact, I'm not sure ANY of the presidential candidates in this upcoming election are going to make a difference, as the problem is primarily with congress.
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Re: Convincing proof...
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Re: Convincing proof...
What makes you so sure?
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Re: Re: Convincing proof...
But the second time AFTER his betrayal.
What makes you think people still want to elect somebody to "fix things"? Because, apparently, now they elect the ones that fight whistleblowers, have people assassinated with drones, snoop on everyone and generally behave like fascist assholes.
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