Google Removed Catalonian Referendum App Following Spanish Court Order

from the this-seems-problematic dept

Last month, we wrote about the crazy situation in Spain, where the government was so totally freaked out about a Catalonian referendum on independence that it shut down the operators of the .cat domain, arrested the company's head of IT for "sedition" and basically shut down a ton of websites about the referendum. The Washington Post now has an article with even more details about the digital attacks in both directions around the Catalonian independence referendum, including hack attacks and DDoS attacks. But one thing caught my eye. Apparently, the supporters of the referendum had created an app called "On Votar 1-Oct." The app had a bunch of the expected functions:

The app, available on Google Play until just before 7 p.m. on Friday, helps people to find their polling station via their address and shows the closest polling stations on Google Maps via GPS, the name of the town or keywords.

It also allows users to share links to polling station locations.

But the Spanish government was so freaked out by the referendum and anything related to it, that it ran and got a court order demanding Google take the app out of Google's app store:

The court order told Google Inc—at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View CA 94043 (USA)—to take down the app located at that URL and also to block or eliminate any future apps submitted by the user with e-mail address "onvotar1oct@gmail.com" or identifying as "Catalonia Voting Software".

The judge says in her ruling that the tweet with the app link is "only a continuation of the actions of the [Catalan government] to block" Constitutional Court and High Court orders "repeatedly".

In the Washington Post article, the CTO of the Catalonian government explains why this is so disappointing:

“I’m a tech guy,” says Jordi Puigneró, chief technology officer of the Catalonian government. “So I’ve always been a great fan of Google and its principles of respect for digital rights. But now I’m really disappointed with the company.” (Puigneró’s office was also occupied by police during the referendum, he says.)

And you can understand why he's disappointed. But, the real problem here, seems to be going back to the same problem we keep identifying over and over again: deep centralization of the digital world. Part of the very promise of Android was that it was supposed to be open, and people weren't supposed to be locked into just Google's app store. And, indeed, there are competing app stores -- but the general argument around them (with the possible exception of Amazon's competing Android app store) is that if you want to keep your device secure, you'll only download via Google's app store.

And then we're back to a problem where there's a centralized choke point for censorship -- one which the Spanish government is able to exploit to make that app much more difficult to access. Google, for its part, said it took the app down because it had received a valid court order. And, that's true, but it's also opening up yet another path to widespread censorship. Google has stood up against similar situations in the past, but the decision of whether or not a movement should be stifled should never come down to whether or not a giant company like Google decides its worth taking a moral stand against a legal court order. The problem is much more systemic, and its built into this world where we've started to build back up gatekeepers.

For nearly two decades, I've argued that the real power of the internet was not -- as many people initally argued -- that it got rid of "middlemen," but rather that the middlemen turned into enablers rather than gatekeepers. In the old world, when only some content could get released/published/sold/etc., you had to rely on gatekeepers to choose which tiny percentage would get blessed. The power of internet platforms was that they became enablers, allowing anyone to use those platforms and to publish/release/sell/distribute things themselves, often to a much wider audience. But there'a always a risk that over time, former enablers become gatekeepers. And it's a fear we should be very conscious about -- even if it's not done on purpose.

To be clear, I don't think Google wants to be a gatekeeper around things like apps. It would prefer not to be. But because the marketplace has become so important, and because Google's role is so central, it almost has no choice. And when governments start issuing court orders to take down apps, suddenly Google is left with few good options. Either it censors or it picks fights with a government. And even if many of us would probably support and cheer on the latter as a choice, we should be concerned that this is even an issue at all. The solution has to be less reliance on centralized platforms and centralized choke points. Catalonians shouldn't have to rely on Google to get a simple voting app out to the public. The next big breakthroughs need to be towards getting past such bottlenecks.

Filed Under: bottlenecks, catalonia, democracy, election, independence, play store, points of failure, referendum, spain
Companies: google

UN Independent Expert On Promotion Of Democracy Calls On Governments To Stop Persecuting Whistleblowers

from the take-that dept

Alfred de Zayas, who is the UN's "Independent Expert on the promotion of a democratic and international order" has put out quite a statement in support of President Obama's decision to commute Chelsea Manning's sentence. But de Zayas didn't stop there. He went on to point out that the US government and other governments have been persecuting many other whistleblowers around the world, including Ed Snowden and Julian Assange, and that should stop:

I welcome the commutation of sentence of Chelsea Manning and her forthcoming release in May. There are, however, many whistleblowers who have served the cause of human rights and who are still in prison in many countries throughout the world. It is time to recognize the contribution of whistleblowers to democracy and the rule of law and to stop persecuting them.

I call on Governments worldwide to put an end to multiple campaigns of defamation, mobbing and even prosecution of whistleblowers like Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, the Luxleakers Antoine Deltour and Raphael Halet and the tax corruption leaker Rafi Rotem, who have acted in good faith and who have given meaning to article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights on freedom of expression. Whistleblowers who are serving prison sentence in many countries should be pardoned.

Whistleblowers are human rights defenders whose contribution to democracy and the rule of law cannot be overestimated. They serve democracy and human rights by revealing information that all persons are entitled to receive. A culture of secrecy is frequently also a culture of impunity. Because the right to know proclaimed in article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights is absolutely crucial to every democracy, whistleblowers should be protected, not persecuted.

The statement goes on for a few more paragraphs and concludes:

It is time for this abnormal and inhuman situation to end.

Of course, this kind of statement will mostly be ignored by those in power -- and where not ignored, it will likely be mocked or attacked. But it is an important and useful statement. In the hype and buzz around these individuals, the underlying facts often get buried. But it remains the case that the individuals de Zayas named have focused on revealing to the public important information that powerful people have tried to keep secret, often exposing massive government overreach or outright lies.

Filed Under: alfred de zayas, chelsea manning, democracy, ed snowden, julian assange, un, whistleblowers

Alex Halderman Clarifies: Not Sure If Election Was Hacked, But, Uh, Shouldn't Someone Be Checking To Make Sure?

from the that's-a-good-point dept

So lots of people have been discussing the story claiming that some e-voting experts believe the Clinton campaign should be asking for a recount in certain battleground states, where it's possible there were some e-voting irregularities. As we noted in our post, the story would barely be worth mentioning if one of the people involved wasn't Alex Halderman, a computer science professor we've been talking about for nearly a decade and a half, going back to when he was a student. Halderman is basically the expert on e-voting security -- so when he says something, it's worth paying attention.

Halderman has now posted something of a follow-up to the NY Magazine article clarifying his views and what he's suggesting. He's not saying there's evidence of a hack, but basically saying that no one knows if there was a hack or not, and because of that, there should be a recount as a way to audit the results to see if there were any irregularities.

After the election, human beings can examine the paper to make sure the results from the voting machines accurately determined who won. Just as you want the brakes in your car to keep working even if the car’s computer goes haywire, accurate vote counts must remain available even if the machines are malfunctioning or attacked. In both cases, common sense tells us we need some kind of physical backup system. I and other election security experts have been advocating for paper ballots for years, and today, about 70% of American voters live in jurisdictions that keep a paper record of every vote.

There’s just one problem, and it might come as a surprise even to many security experts: no state is planning to actually check the paper in a way that would reliably detect that the computer-based outcome was wrong. About half the states have no laws that require a manual examination of paper ballots, and most other states perform only superficial spot checks. If nobody looks at the paper, it might as well not be there. A clever attacker would exploit this.

There’s still one way that some of this year’s paper ballots could be examined. In many states, candidates can petition for a recount.

So, in effect, Halderman isn't saying that he's got evidence of e-voting fraud, but is simply arguing that if no one checks, no one will ever know. So we should check in order to be sure that there wasn't hacking. That's... pretty sensible.

Examining the physical evidence in these states — even if it finds nothing amiss — will help allay doubt and give voters justified confidence that the results are accurate. It will also set a precedent for routinely examining paper ballots, which will provide an important deterrent against cyberattacks on future elections. Recounting the ballots now can only lead to strengthened electoral integrity, but the window for candidates to act is closing fast.

Basically, the only way we can actually get an effective audit to see if there were any voting irregularities is to ask for a recount. The problem, of course, is a political one. If the Clinton campaign does call for a recount, it will immediately be seen as a political play, and lead to a ton of negative publicity. My guess is that the campaign won't want to go there. If we lived in a time where people were intellectually honest, the campaign could present it exactly the way Halderman has framed it -- not as a claim that they believe fraud happened, but rather as a way to ensure that the e-voting machines were accurate and not manipulated -- but does anyone think that the press (either those that supported or those that opposed Clinton) would treat it that way? It would become a complete mess in about two-and-a-half seconds.

And, that's unfortunate. Because as Halderman points out (and, like us, has been pointing out for over a decade), it absolutely is possible to hack most e-voting machines. Especially if the attacker is determined enough to do so:

Here’s one possible scenario. First, the attackers would probe election offices well in advance in order to find ways to break into their computers. Closer to the election, when it was clear from polling data which states would have close electoral margins, the attackers might spread malware into voting machines in some of these states, rigging the machines to shift a few percent of the vote to favor their desired candidate. This malware would likely be designed to remain inactive during pre-election tests, do its dirty business during the election, then erase itself when the polls close. A skilled attacker’s work might leave no visible signs — though the country might be surprised when results in several close states were off from pre-election polls.

Could anyone be brazen enough to try such an attack? A few years ago, I might have said that sounds like science fiction, but 2016 has seen unprecedented cyberattacks aimed at interfering with the election. This summer, attackers broke into the email system of the Democratic National Committee and, separately, into the email account of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, and leaked private messages. Attackers infiltrated the voter registration systems of two states, Illinois and Arizona, and stole voter data. And there’s evidence that hackers attempted to breach election offices in several other states.

In all these cases, Federal agencies publicly asserted that senior officials in the Russian government commissioned these attacks. Russia has sophisticated cyber-offensive capabilities, and has shown a willingness to use them to hack elections. In 2014, during the presidential election in Ukraine, attackers linked to Russia sabotaged the country’s vote-counting infrastructure and, according to published reports, Ukrainian officials succeeded only at the last minute in defusing vote-stealing malware that was primed to cause the wrong winner to be announced. Russia is not the only country with the ability to pull off such an attack on American systems — most of the world’s military powers now have sophisticated cyberwarfare capabilities.

So, yes, it would be good if the votes here were reviewed, if only as an opportunity to explore the potential problems of e-voting machines, rather than as a political ploy. The only problem is that everyone would see it as a political ploy and with political ploys comes general dumpster fires of idiocy.

Filed Under: alex halderman, audits, democracy, donald trump, e-voting, hillary clinton, voting

If You're Blaming Facebook For The Election Results, You're An Idiot

from the there's-real-anger-at-the-status-quo dept

Yeah, okay, I know there are a million and one "hot takes" going on across the media about what happened yesterday and "what went wrong." I already wrote about what the election means for tech policy and civil liberties, but the trite setup of the blame game is getting really stupid, really fast. I had already started writing up a response to this silly Vox article about how "Facebook is harming our democracy" before the election (the story came out over the weekend), but now that I'm seeing more and more people (especially in the media) blaming Facebook and "algorithms" for the results of the election, I'm turning it into this post: if you're blaming Facebook for the results of this election, you're an idiot.

Facebook's algorithm and whatever "echo chamber" or "filter bubble" or whatever it may have created did not lead to this result. This was the result of a very large group of people who are quite clearly -- and reasonably -- pissed off at the status quo. Politics has been a really corrupt game for basically ever, and for the past few decades, lots of people have been trying to pretend it wasn't as corrupt as it really is. The fact that Trump is likely to be as corrupt -- if not more so -- than those who came before him didn't matter. People were upset and voted against a candidate who, to them, basically defined the status quo and the problems with the system. This was a "throw the bums out" vote, and many of the bums deserved to be thrown out. That they voted in someone likely to be worse (especially given who he's surrounded himself with so far) wasn't the point. Just as with Brexit, this was a vote of "what we have now ain't working, let's try something different."

It's no surprise many people argued that Clinton was the wrong candidate to go against Trump. She absolutely was. She was the status quo candidate in a time when lots and lots of people didn't want the status quo.

But that's not Facebook's fault. And the idea that a better or different algorithm on Facebook would have made the results any different is just as ridiculous as the idea that newspaper endorsements or "fact checking" mattered one bit. People are angry because the system has failed them in many, many ways, and it's not because they're idiots who believed all the fake news Facebook pushed on them (even if some of them did believe it). Many people don't think Trump will be any good, but they voted for him anyway, because the status quo is broken. The idea that people are just such suckers they believe whatever Facebook puts in front of them is silly. That's not how it works:

The fundamental problem here is that Facebook’s leadership is in denial about the kind of organization it has become. “We are a tech company, not a media company,” Zuckerberg has said repeatedly over the last few years. In the mind of the Facebook CEO, Facebook is just a “platform,” a neutral conduit for helping users share information with one another.

But that’s wrong. Facebook makes billions of editorial decisions every day. And often they are bad editorial decisions — steering people to sensational, one-sided, or just plain inaccurate stories. The fact that these decisions are being made by algorithms rather than human editors doesn’t make Facebook any less responsible for the harmful effect on its users and the broader society.

Yes, many people are falling for fake or bogus or sensationalized news -- and the Trump campaign expertly took a kernel of truth (that many mainstream media sources didn't want him to win) and spun it into the idea that no media story highlighting his flaws, lies or corruption (no matter how carefully and factually reported) could be believed. But people are believing those stories because they match with their real world experience of seeing how the system has worked (or not worked) for too long.

I've already expressed my concerns about what a Trump presidency will do for the issues that I spend my days focused on -- and it's not good. But as loyal readers here at Techdirt should know well, we've never been particularly supportive of the way things have been running in the government all along -- and that's through 10 years under Democratic presidencies and 8 years under GOP presidencies. The federal government has a long history of doing bad stuff: stomping on free speech and expanding surveillance (who cares about the 1st or 4th Amendments?), pushing policies that will harm innovators in favor of legacy industries (including in both the copyright and patent spaces) and generally disregarding what's best for the public. I fear that Trump will make things significantly worse, but I certainly recognize the need to change the status quo overall. And not because of Facebook's stupid algorithm.

Filed Under: algorithms, anger, democracy, donald trump, echo chamber, filter bubble, politics, status quo
Companies: facebook

Washington Post Columnist: If This Democracy Is Going To Stay Healthy, We Need To Start Trusting The FBI More

from the buy-into-the-system,-people! dept

Trust and respect aren't things someone (or something) holds in an infinite, uninterrupted supply. They're gained and lost due to the actions of the entity holding this extremely liquid supply of trust. Oddly, some people -- like Washington Post's Chris Cillizza -- seem to believe trust and respect should be given to certain "venerated institutions," because to do otherwise is to surrender to something approaching nihilism.

Cillizza starts out with an obvious conclusion:

The FBI has long been an iconic institution in American life. After last week's announcement by FBI Director James Comey that the investigation into Hillary Clinton's private email server continues, it's hard to see it staying that way.

The problem is more Comey's than the FBI as a whole, but neither have done much over their histories to raise their levels of trust and respect. Cillizza notes that several other venerated institutions -- from the Supreme Court to the presidency to public schools have all seen steady declines in public trust, according to polls.

This is to be expected. Trust is easy to lose, but much harder to earn. Our government institutions have done very little to maintain the level of trust and plenty to squander it. If that had been the end of it -- an examination of continually-diminishing trust levels, it would have been fine.

But Cillizza somehow feels that failing to hand over trust and respect these institutions haven't earned -- or haven't protected -- is damaging to the fabric of society… and democracy itself.

Nothing has cropped up to replace these fallen idols. The foundational pieces of society — the things we always knew we could rely on — are no longer foundational. But, with nothing to replace them, we are left rootless, casting about for a new set of institutions on which we can rely. That casting around causes fear and anxiety — and sometimes even anger.

None of those emotions are conducive to a functioning, healthy democracy.

This is far more conducive to a functioning democracy than Cillizza thinks. This democracy (although actually a Constitutional republic, but pedantry) rose from the ashes of venerated, foundational pieces of society. The system was burned to the ground and rebuilt to better serve the constituents, rather than those governing them. What's not conducive to a functioning, healthy democracy are government institutions continually and casually destroying the trust they once had. Venerated institutions shouldn't always remain venerated. They should be questioned aggressively and held accountable for their actions.

Seriously, there's a long list of "venerated institutions" once present in this "healthy, functioning democracy" that almost no one agrees should be granted the respect they once were. Like slavery. Or voting being limited to white males. Or aggressive land-grabs that displaced the native population when we weren't actually just straight up killing them. Or how about the draft? It was once respected as well, but back-to-back failures in wars fought more against ideals than enemies turned it into a sick joke that further proved the notion that a supposed nation of equals was just more of the same old multi-tiered favoritism.

If the FBI doesn't have our trust anymore, it's because it threw it all away. Decades of shady, if not downright abusive, behavior preceded Comey's "lone gunslinger" approach to heading the agency's unofficial political warfare operations.

The decline in veneration for other institutions roughly tracks the increase in transparency and accountability. Freedom of information laws. Citizens with cellphones. A worldwide platform for instant dissemination of information. If trust is at an all-time low, it's because more people are better informed than they ever have been in the history of this nation. And that's exactly the sort of thing that keeps a democracy functioning and healthy.

[Final note: the original version of Cillizza's post contained some rather hilarious inaccuracies about the FBI to buttress his arguments about the agency's venerability. They've since been excised, but the supposed paragons of Bureau virtue included a fictional character and US Treasury agent who never worked for the FBI.]

Filed Under: chris cillizza, democracy, fbi, trust

Cuba's Telecom Monopoly Banning Text Messages Containing Words Like 'Democracy'

from the that'll-work dept

The door to modernizing Cuba's communications networks opened slightly wider recently after the FCC removed the country from the agency's banned nation list. That allows fixed and wireless companies alike to begin doing business in Cuba as part of an overall attempt to ease tensions between the States and the island nation. And while Cuba has been justly concerned about opening the door to NSA bosom buddies like AT&T and Verizon, it's still apparently not quite ready to give up some of its own, decidedly ham-fisted attempts to crack down on free speech over telecom networks.

A recent investigative report by blogger Yoani Sanchez and journalist Reinaldo Escobar found that the nation has been banning certain words sent via text message with the help of state-owned telecom monopoly ETECSA. The report, confirmed in an additional investigation by Reuters, found that roughly 30 different keywords are being banned by Cuba's government, including "democracy," "human rights," and the name of several activists and human rights groups. Words containing such keywords simply aren't delivered, with no indication given to the sender of the delivery failure.

Initially, the researchers thought this was just incompetence on the part of ETECSA:

"Eliecer Avila, head of opposition youth group Somos Mas, which participated in the investigation, said 30 key words that triggered the blocking had been identified but there could be more.

"We always thought texts were vanishing because the provider is so incompetent, then we decided to check using words that bothered the government," he said. "We discovered not just us but the entire country is being censored," he said. "It just shows how insecure and paranoid the government is."

You can understand some degree of paranoia when you've got the United States and Russia battling over who gets to bone graft surveillance technology into your fledgling communications networks, but the clumsy censorship also isn't too surprising for a nation that still bans advertising across the island.

That said, the real problem for most Cubans remains that broadband and wireless communications is a luxury commodity well out of reach of most residents. Only between 5 and 25% of Cubans even have access to the internet, and while many can access Wi-Fi via hotspots opened just last year, the cost of connection is roughly $2 an hour, or around a tenth of the average monthly Cuban salary. As such, Cubans are "fortunate" in that they can't yet even afford to be comprehensively spied on.

Filed Under: censorship, cuba, democracy, internet, mobile, text messages

TPP's Corporate Sovereignty Chapter A 'Threat To Democracy And Regulation'

from the wrong-direction dept

When the negotiations for the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) between the EU and Canada were concluded in September 2014, the text was finally released after years of secrecy. At the time, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives put together what remains the best overall analysis of the main text's 1598 pages, in a series of studies collectively called "Making Sense of CETA." The same organization has now published a set of analyses looking at key aspects of TPP, entitled "What’s the big deal? Understanding the Trans-Pacific Partnership".

They are all worth looking at, but Techdirt readers will probably be particularly interested in one called "Foreign investor protections in the Trans-Pacific Partnership." It's by Gus Van Harten, a professor at Osgoode Hall Law School of York University in Toronto, Canada, and a well-known commentator on trade law and policy. The first part of his analysis provides a good summary of the world of corporate sovereignty, or investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) as it is more formally known. The later section looks at some new research that provides additional insight into just how bad corporate sovereignty is for those of us who are not insanely rich.

For example, Van Harten quotes some recent work showing that 90% of ISDS fines against countries went to corporations with over $1 billion in annual revenue or to individuals with over $100 million in net wealth. Similarly, the success rate among the largest multinationals -- those with turnovers of at least $10 billion -- was 71% in the 48 cases they initiated, compared with a success rate for everyone else of 42%. So any claim that ISDS is equally useful to all companies, including small and medium-sized businesses, is not borne out by the facts.

Van Harten also mentions some interesting figures for the financial winners and losers across all known corporate sovereignty cases. The largest corporations ended up with gains of around $6 billion; the thriving ISDS legal industry took home $2 billion; very wealthy individuals received around $1 billion; and large companies picked up another $500 million. As for the countries that were sued by these groups, their losses totaled some $10 billion. That's an important reminder that nations cannot win ISDS cases: the best they can ever hope for is not to lose. And they often do lose, as the high cumulative fines indicate.

Another fascinating insight comes from looking at the percentage of foreign-owned assets (that is, inward foreign direct investment) in the US economy that are covered by ISDS in trade and investment agreements. Currently, it is only around 10%, which is probably why corporate sovereignty is not a big deal for the US public today. If TPP is ratified, another 10% of foreign investments will be covered. But if the TAFTA/TTIP deal with the EU goes through, it would add another 60% to the total -- a huge jump. That would mean that TPP and TTIP together would make nearly all foreign investments in the US subject to corporate sovereignty.

Van Harten highlights another key aspect of TPP that has not received much attention. He points out that TPP goes beyond the older North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which is between the US, Canada and Mexico, but does not solve its serious problems, despite claims to the contrary:

anything that is apparently better in the TPP compared to NAFTA will very likely be lost in practice because a U.S. investor can bring a claim under NAFTA instead of the TPP. Also, anything worse in the TPP would not be displaced by NAFTA because a foreign investor could choose to bring a claim under the TPP. If a foreign investor was unsure which agreement offered the best chance to win compensation, it could bring a claim under the TPP and NAFTA, making a different argument under each and getting compensation if it won under either.

In other words, TPP has been written in such a way that the public always gets the worst of both worlds. Van Harten's chilling summary of the corporate sovereignty provisions in TPP is worth quoting in full:

The TPP would take us in the wrong direction and be very difficult to reverse. It would expand the transfer of power to ISDS arbitrators from legislatures, governments, and courts. The arbitrators would not be accountable like a legislature. They would not be capable of regulating like a government. They would not be independent or fair like a court.

At the core of the TPP's threat to democracy and regulation is the uncertain and potentially huge price tag that its ISDS process would put on any law or regulation that is opposed by a large multinational company or a billionaire investor. The problem is not that foreign investors would be too big to fail; it is that the TPP would make the biggest and richest ones too risky to regulate.

The TPP was an opportunity for countries to step back from and reform the flawed system of foreign investor rights and ISDS. Instead, the TPP would expand the system massively. That decision is reason enough to reject the TPP in order to protect the established institutions of democracy, sovereignty, and the rule of law in TPP countries.

Anyone who has any lingering illusions that it might be worth signing up to TPP should read this new analysis, which will dispel them rapidly.

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Filed Under: ceta, corporate sovereignty, democracy, gus van harten, isds, predictions, tpp

New Zealand Government Trying To Streamroller TPP Through Ratification Without Proper Scrutiny Or Public Input

from the so-much-for-that-'don't-worry,-you-can-debate-it-when-it's-finished& dept

Back in February, we noted that the TPP has been officially signed, and that the focus now moves on to ratification by each of the 12 participating countries. On this score, there's been plenty of sound and fury in the US, including bizarre demands to re-negotiate TPP, but less coverage of what is happening elsewhere. As we noted, Canada's ratification has ground to a halt as the new government there launches "widespread consultations." Japan, too, won't be ratifying TPP for a while, for reasons explained by The Mainichi site:

The government and ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP)-Komeito coalition decided to put off attempting to ratify the treaty and enact related bills as they determined that a combination of opposition party resistance and the Kyushu earthquake disaster response leaves insufficient time to deliberate the legislation. The administration of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is not planning to extend the current Diet session, which is scheduled to end on June 1. The government will instead carry the ratification and bills over to an extraordinary Diet session to be convened this autumn, to discuss them again in the House of Representatives for final approval and enactment.

The government in New Zealand, by contrast, seems to be doing everything in its power to ram through TPP as quickly as possible, with little time being given for that full public debate so frequently promised. Even the country's MPs are being stampeded, as Radio New Zealand News reports:

MPs have been given just five days to consider hundreds of submissions on the controversial TPP trade deal after the timeframe was drastically cut from four weeks.

The select committee was originally give a month to write its report and present it back to Parliament.

According to the news item, the committee was due to hear from hundreds of people who were keen finally to make their voices heard. But the government has apparently decided that it just doesn't care what the public thinks:

The tight deadline meant the [MPs'] draft report would be written before the committee had finished hearing all the submissions.

Apparently, the New Zealand government isn't interested in democracy, only timetables:

Opposition members on the committee say they were told yesterday the government wanted to cut down the time they had to analyse the submissions, so the legislation could get through by the end of the year.

Nor are MPs and the public the only ones being treated in a shabby way. So is the Waitangi Tribunal, which is an important commission charged with investigating and making recommendations on claims brought by the indigenous Māori people relating to actions by the New Zealand government. Because the select committee of MPs examining TPP will produce its report earlier than expected, the Waitangi Tribunal also finds itself with little time to consider the issue properly. An article on the Scoop site suggests that might be intentional:

"Why the government suddenly announced it is fast-tracking the report date for the select committee considering the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) from the end of May to 4 May is now clear.

It gives the Waitangi Tribunal three rather than seven weeks to produce its urgent report on the claim brought by prominent Maori that the Agreement violates the Crown's obligations under the Treaty of Waitangi", says Professor Jane Kelsey who has been advising the claimants.

What makes the situation even more worrying for New Zealanders is something Techdirt wrote about a couple of months ago: the fact that even if TPP fails, it seems that laws brought in to comply with the terms of the treaty would not be rolled back by the New Zealand government. That's an extremely good reason to take things slowly and carefully -- not to rush ahead recklessly as is currently happening.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

Filed Under: democracy, new zealand, public input, ratification, tpp