Time To Rethink Democracy In A Digital Age

from the how-might-it-work dept

True democracy is not just about casting a vote every five years. It means citizens being fully involved in the proposal, development and creation of laws. The Commission on Digital Democracy currently being established will consider what part technology can play in helping people to take an active part in the way the country is run.

The commission is setting its sights on "Parliament 2.0", a vision of the future in which citizens participate in online elections, electronic referendums and richer relationships with their political representatives.

In recent years, we've seen technology help people become more involved in debate about all aspects of society. So it is clear that it can play a much greater role in political participation too. As the Commission gets started, it's a good time to think about what we want our digital democracy to look like. There is inspiration to be found all over the web.

Wikipolitics

Technology can enable direct participation in the democratic process, without relying on representatives and without the citizen even needing to leave the comfort of their home.

One particularly useful tool in the quest for a digitally engaged electorate will be online forums. These can be built to manage discussions about proposed legislation in a structured way, making it easy for citizens to participate meaningfully.

Politicians and policymakers can use online forums to crowd-source expertise and the views of citizens on their plans – and to refine their proposals based on what they get back. This "direct democracy" would allow for laws to be based on genuine citizen deliberation rather than merely aggregating the preferences of citizens into a single vote at the beginning of each electoral cycle.

Wikipedia is an example of how this system might work, but it also shows some of the problems that can arise when technology and democracy mix.

Wikipedia has relatively little mechanism for coordinating edits, instead allowing editors to work on their own. Despite this decentralized approach, the quality of articles is generally very high. On the down side, edit wars and sock puppetry – when individuals use multiple user identities to create the impression that their views are shared by others – are an enduring concern.

To help make Wikipedia a trustworthy source, editors can build their reputation by establishing a track record of constructive behavior. Wikipedia has a hierarchy of users for administrative purposes, based on community approval, but all users are considered to have equally valid opinions regarding Wikipedia content. The emphasis is on building consensus; an arbitration committee deals with disputes that remain unresolved.

Reddit, rate it, vote it

More formal mechanisms are to be found elsewhere online that could help provide the kind of format and structure that might be needed to produce good legislation. In Yahoo! Answers, for example, readers can vote up and vote down contributions made by others. Writers who are voted up gain points that indicate their good reputation. Other question-and-answer forums, such as Reddit and Stack Overflow, use similar mechanisms. This kind of collaboration can be further improved using the kind of real-time, simultaneous editing provided by Google docs.

But again, there are perils. Time wasters, product pushers and disruptive trolls are bad news in online forums and can disrupt the way they operate. In the context of digital democracy, the potential for damage is even higher.

We will need to develop mechanisms that would make it possible for everyone to get involved in Parliament 2.0 in a fair and transparent way. This includes preventing abuse by lobbyists, special-interest groups, and extremists, who may try to thwart the mechanisms for non-democratic purposes. Unlike in traditional voting, which provides each person with one vote, we can't assume that everyone will participate in digital democracy equally. That makes it quite difficult to define fairness. It is also difficult to balance accountability (needed to prevent trolling) and privacy (needed to allow free expression).

Online voting

Computer scientists have made great progress in figuring out how online elections could be made secure. One important idea is to design systems that enable outcome verifiability. This would allow citizens to check that the outcome of an election really does match the votes cast.

To ensure free and fair elections, we also need a property called incoercibility. This means voters cannot sell their vote, or be forced to vote in a particular way. Online voting systems with these features are being developed by researchers around the world and this will soon change the way we participate in elections.

The hope is that, if well-designed and implemented, mechanisms for digital democracy could be built that would greatly increase societal inclusiveness and cohesion, as well as lowering the costs of making democracy work.

Mark Ryan is a Professor of Computer Security at University of Birmingham. Gurchetan Grewal is a PhD student in Computer Security at the University of Birmingham. Both receive funding from EPSRC for computer security research, including the security of online voting mechanisms. Grewal works on the project "Trustworthy voting systems" funded by EPSRC.

This article was originally published at The Conversation. Read the original article.

Filed Under: democracy, politics, technology, voting

USTR Says TPP Must Be Kept Secret, Because The Public Is Too Stupid To Understand It

from the democracy-in-action! dept

While TPP negotiators had hoped to finish off the negotiations in Singapore over the past few days, it appears that did not happen, though they claim to have made substantial progress and will meet again next month. From the reports of people there, the negotiators made sure that public interest groups were excluded from even the press briefing about the negotiations, which should tell you all you need to know about what the negotiators think of the public. But, in case you weren't sure, the USTR, Michael Froman, has finally explained why the TPP negotiating positions must be kept secret. Apparently, all of us in the public, are too fucking stupid to understand the important work that he's doing, and we might "misunderstand" it. Therefore, we peons must be kept in the dark, while important people like himself negotiate on our behalf. According to Jamie Love:

Froman said if the text was public, people would misunderstand "negotiating positions."

In other words, the USTR is not a fan of democracy.

If you think the public is too stupid to understand the public policy positions you're negotiating for, then you shouldn't be in that job.

Filed Under: democracy, michael froman, secrecy, tpp, transparency, ustr

NSA Defender Argues That Too Much Transparency Defeats The Purpose Of Democracy

from the oh-really? dept

Paul Rosenzweig, the former Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy at Homeland Security, was supposed to testify for the House Intelligence Committee about NSA surveillance. The hearing was postponed and Rosenzweig can't make the new date, but he's posted the testimony he intended to give, in which he makes this incredible claim:

Transparency is good. Too much transparency defeats the very purpose of democracy.

The details of this claim are, obviously, a lot more nuanced, but it seems like it's built on a false premise: that people are seeking absolute and complete transparency in everything that the government does. While that may be true in some cases, it's a very extreme minority. Most people are merely arguing that there are specific things that the government does in our name, which (often by law or Constitution) require significantly more transparency. But, Rosenzweig sets up this strawman to suggest that those arguing for greater transparency don't recognize that there can be any secrecy.

Madison understood that transparency was not a supreme value that trumped all other concerns. He also participated in the U.S. Constitutional Convention of 1787, the secrecy of whose proceedings was the key to its success. While governments may hide behind closed doors, U.S. democracy was also born behind them.

Right, but at the end of that process, it was made very, very public. Not so with NSA surveillance. So this is a total red herring. Imagine if the US Constitution were not just written in secret, but then kept that way? Furthermore, in retrospect, it's difficult to see why it even made sense for the Constitutional Convention to have been secret in the first place. There's really no reason why the negotiations and debates couldn't have been done publicly.

In the new domain of dataveillance, the form of oversight should vary depending upon the extent to which transparency and opacity are necessary to the new powers authorized. Allowing some form of surveillance is vital to assure the protection of American interests. Conversely, allowing full public disclosure of our sources and methods is dangerous – identifying publicly how we conduct surveillance risks use of that information by terrorists and, in turn, draws a roadmap of which threats are not known. Thus, complete transparency will defeat the very purpose of disclosure and may even make us less secure.

This is the only place where Rosenzweig seems to come close to actually defending his initial statement that "too much transparency defeats the very purpose of democracy," and it's a very, very weak sell. If his initial premise is true, then he appears to be arguing that "the purpose of democracy" is to "protect us from terrorists." That's not true. It's a fundamental error in his analysis. In fact, it can be very strongly argued that the opposite is true: we've long agreed that trading lives for freedom is part of the American Way. Patrick Henry argued "give me liberty or give me death." He didn't argue that we needed to give up liberties to protect him from death.

Furthermore, it's patently and obviously false that public disclosure of how surveillance is conducted makes those surveillance methods useless. For decades it has been public knowledge that law enforcement can wiretap phone lines. And yet it remains a useful surveillance tool. Yes, some terrorists will figure out ways around it, but (as many people noted), most terrorists were already well aware that any electronic communication could and would be tracked, and they were careful to use other means when possible. Furthermore, the goal of a free society should not be to stop terrorists from any possible way of communicating in secret, but to recognize that this is going to happen no matter what, and to focus on alternative means of policing, intelligence and law enforcement to do our best to protect against it.

In the end, I have to think that Patrick Henry's rallying cry of "give me liberty or give me death" is a hell of a lot more American that Rosenzweig's surveillance state apologism of "too much transparency undermines democracy." We should be living in a country that stands behind the first statement and rejects, wholeheartedly, the cowardice and shamefulness of the latter.

Filed Under: democracy, nsa, nsa surveillance, paul rosenzweig, transparency

Snowden: DOJ Won't Prosecute Official For Lying, But Will Stop At Nothing To Persecute Someone For Telling The Truth

from the unfortunately-revealing dept

As you hopefully have heard by now, a group of US intelligence community whistleblowers traveled to Moscow last week to present Ed Snowden with the Integrity Award from the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence. As I saw mentioned (and repeated) on Twitter, this image of all of them together is like the Justice League of Whistleblowers. Wikileaks has now released some short video clips from the dinner they all had together. A few of them are quite interesting. Here's the one I thought most on point: If you can't watch it, this is the key quote:

It's led us to a point in our relationship with the government, where we have an executive -- a Department of Justice -- that's unwilling to prosecute high officials who lied to Congress and the country on camera, but they'll stop at nothing to persecute someone who told them the truth. And that's a fundamentally dangerous thing to democracy.

That encapsulates so much of what the problem is with everything that's happened in the past few months. It's a point well worth repeating. The other video I really liked was the one where Snowden talked about the problem of secret laws and secret programs and the idea that the government is supposed to be in power with the consent of the governed, but how that's impossible without oversight. The key statement:

This is not about any particular program. This is about a trend in the relationship between the governing and the governed in Amercia, that is coming increasingly into conflict with what we expect as a free and democratic society. If we can't understand the policies and programs of our government, we cannot grant our consent in regulating them....

Snowden has mostly stayed hidden away from the public eye since all of this began. He's turned down basically all interview requests, so there's been very little shown of him actually speaking, other than the initial video he recorded with Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald. Once again, these videos show someone who appears to have thought deeply about what he is doing and why he did it.

Filed Under: democracy, doj, ed snowden, lies, nsa, nsa surveillance, sam adams award, truth

Why The NSA Must Be Reined In -- For Democracy's Sake

from the mission-creep dept

In the wake of the continuing leaks about the NSA's activities, most commentators are understandably still trying to get to grips with the enormity of what has been happening. But John Naughton, professor of the public understanding of technology at the UK's Open University, tackles a very different question on his blog: what is likely to happen in the future, if things carry on as they are?

Naughton notes that the NSA's mission statement includes the following phrase: "to gain a decision advantage for the Nation and our allies under all circumstances." "Under all circumstances" means that as the Internet grows -- and as we know, it is currently growing rapidly -- so the NSA will naturally ask for resources to allow it to do tomorrow what it is doing today: monitoring more or less everything that happens online. Naughton then asks where that might lead if the political climate in the US remains sufficiently favorable to the NSA that it does, indeed, get those resources:

The obvious conclusion therefore, is that unless some constraints on its growth materialise, the NSA will continue to expand. It currently has 35,000 employees. How many will it have in ten years' time? Who can say: 50,000, maybe? Maybe even more? So we're confronted with the likelihood of the growth of a bureaucratic monster.

How will such a body be subjected to democratic oversight and control? Let me rephrase that: can such a monster be subjected to democratic control?

Although optimists might answer 'yes', Naughton points to the FBI as an example of what has already happened in this area:

those with long memories recall the fear and loathing that J. Edgar Hoover, the founder -- and long-term (48 years) Director -- of the FBI aroused in important segments of the American polity. The relatively restrained Wikipedia entry for him claims that even US presidents feared him and quotes Harry Truman as saying that "Hoover transformed the FBI into his private secret police force". "We want no Gestapo or secret police", Truman is reported as saying. "FBI is tending in that direction. They are dabbling in sex-life scandals and plain blackmail. J. Edgar Hoover would give his right eye to take over, and all congressmen and senators are afraid of him."

He then goes on to draw the obvious parallel with a possible tomorrow:

Now spool forward a decade or so and imagine a Director of the NSA, a charismatic 'securocrat' imbued with a mission to protect the United States from terrorists and whatever other threats happen to be current at the time. He (or she) has 50,000+ operatives who have access to every email, clickstream log, text message, phone call and social-networking post that every legislator has ever made. S/he is a keystroke away from summoning up cellphone location logs showing every trip a lawmaker has made, from teenager-hood onwards, every credit- and debit-card payment. Everything.

And then tell me that lawmakers will not be as scared of that person as their predecessors were of Hoover.

Think that could never happen? Are we sure...?

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Filed Under: abuse, corruption, democracy, nsa, nsa surveillance, power, surveillance

Jimmy Carter Says NSA Scandal Shows America Has No Functioning Democracy

from the strong-words dept

Former President Jimmy Carter apparently is not impressed by the excuses the government has made about the NSA surveillance scandals, stating that America has no functioning democracy at a meeting in Atlanta, attended by a reporter from the German newspaper Der Spiegel. This follows on some of Carter's earlier statements, which argued that "the invasion of human rights and American privacy has gone too far," and also that, "this invasion of privacy has been excessive, so I think that the bringing of it to the public notice has probably been, in the long term, beneficial." When even former Presidents are saying this sort of thing, isn't it time for our existing President to recognize that the surveillance state has gone too far?

Filed Under: democracy, ed snowden, jimmy carter, nsa, surveillance

A Secret Court Making Secret Laws? That's No Democracy

from the get-rid-of-the-fisa-court dept

Last December, well before the Ed Snowden leaks revealed some information about the FISA court (FISC) and its rulings, we had already noted that the court itself was almost certainly unconstitutional. More recently, we talked about how the fact that all the court's judges are appointed by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court means that the court has turned into a rubber stamp made in the image of some of the most "law and order"-minded Chief Justices from the past few decades. Ezra Klein has since expanded on that to discuss the oddity of how current Chief Justice John Roberts is basically the Chief Justice of the Surveillance State, answerable to absolutely no one: "You have exclusive, unaccountable, lifetime power to shape the surveillance state."

Over the weekend, the NY Times put out a powerful piece discussing how FISC has basically become a shadow Supreme Court, doling out all sorts of important rulings in total secrecy. It rules on cases where it only hears one side, and where there are no appeals, no guarantee that the full story is presented, and involves a bunch of judges who tend to have law enforcement backgrounds before being appointed to the court. In the end, you have a secret court issuing secret rulings by ex-law enforcement officials, allowing their former colleagues ever greater power to spy on everyone.

The 11-member Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, known as the FISA court, was once mostly focused on approving case-by-case wiretapping orders. But since major changes in legislation and greater judicial oversight of intelligence operations were instituted six years ago, it has quietly become almost a parallel Supreme Court, serving as the ultimate arbiter on surveillance issues and delivering opinions that will most likely shape intelligence practices for years to come, the officials said.

[....] Unlike the Supreme Court, the FISA court hears from only one side in the case — the government — and its findings are almost never made public. A Court of Review is empaneled to hear appeals, but that is known to have happened only a handful of times in the court’s history, and no case has ever been taken to the Supreme Court. In fact, it is not clear in all circumstances whether Internet and phone companies that are turning over the reams of data even have the right to appear before the FISA court.

As an example of how FISC has basically completely overturned the rules of surveillance in secret, the NY Times reveals the details of some of its thinking, taking a extremely narrow ruling meant to apply in special cases, and turning it into a general rule that has allowed the vast capture of information:

In one of the court’s most important decisions, the judges have expanded the use in terrorism cases of a legal principle known as the “special needs” doctrine and carved out an exception to the Fourth Amendment’s requirement of a warrant for searches and seizures, the officials said.

The special needs doctrine was originally established in 1989 by the Supreme Court in a ruling allowing the drug testing of railway workers, finding that a minimal intrusion on privacy was justified by the government’s need to combat an overriding public danger. Applying that concept more broadly, the FISA judges have ruled that the N.S.A.’s collection and examination of Americans’ communications data to track possible terrorists does not run afoul of the Fourth Amendment, the officials said.

That legal interpretation is significant, several outside legal experts said, because it uses a relatively narrow area of the law — used to justify airport screenings, for instance, or drunken-driving checkpoints — and applies it much more broadly, in secret, to the wholesale collection of communications in pursuit of terrorism suspects. “It seems like a legal stretch,” William C. Banks, a national security law expert at Syracuse University, said in response to a description of the decision. “It’s another way of tilting the scales toward the government in its access to all this data.”

I don't care where you come down on the importance of widespread surveillance -- I just don't see how you can possibly square the above interpretation of the law with the 4th Amendment. If "special needs" can be used to justify mass collection of data on just about everyone "just in case" it might stop some sort of terrorist attack, then you no longer have a 4th Amendment. At all.

But, the bigger issue here is just the fact that we have a secret court issuing secret interpretations of the law that have a massive impact on our privacy. This is supposed to be an open democracy. An open democracy doesn't involve secret courts and secret laws. We have laws that everyone knows, and which the public can discuss and weigh in on through their elected officials. When you set up a secret court, making secret rules with no oversight, and with all of the judges appointed by a single Supreme Court Justice with a particular bias, you no longer have a functioning democracy at all. And that's downright scary.

This is a point that some Senators have been making for years now, but the leaks from Ed Snowden have really made it that much clearer just how insane the situation is. Earlier, it had seemed like perhaps there was one or two rulings from FISC that had some oddities in the interpretation, and which should probably be revealed to the public. However, the various revelations so far suggest that the issue is much, much bigger, and we have a secret "shadow court" system that is systematically obliterating the 4th Amendment and helping to create and then "legitimize" the vast surveillance state.

The Snowden leaks have shone a number of lights on various bad things within our government, but one thing that they have made abundantly clear is that the FISC needs to go. Whether that means it needs to be opened up, or to have greater oversight, or just be done away with completely, could be up for discussion. But if it remains the way it is, it's clear that we've thrown away our basic democratic principles, and moved towards the same sorts of autocratic regimes with secret courts that the US has always presented itself as being against.

Filed Under: democracy, fisa, fisa court, fisc, rulings, secret law, secret rulings

Senator Warren: If TPP Transparency Would Lead To Public Opposition, Then TPP Is Wrong

from the nicely-stated dept

It would appear that new Senator Elizabeth Warren is on the side of transparency when it comes the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement. Sometimes it feels like Senator Wyden is the only one who cares about this issue, so it would be nice to have someone else step in as well. Following USTR nominee Michael Froman's Senate hearings, Warren has sent a letter to the White House asking for its negotiating position on the TPP. The key point, which should be repeated over and over again is the following:

I have heard the argument that transparency would undermine the Administration's policy to complete the trade agreement because public opposition would be significant. If transparency would lead to widespread public opposition to a trade agreement, then that trade agreement should not be the policy of the United States. I believe in transparency and democracy and I think the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) should too.

This is actually in direct response to claims from the former USTR, Ron Kirk, who pointed to a failed trade agreement -- the Free Trade Area of the Americas -- which was handled in a much more open fashion as support for why the TPP must remain secret. But the reasoning there, as Senator Warren correctly notes, is ridiculous. If the trade agreement failed because the public opposed it, that should be seen as a good thing, because the government was stopped from going against the will of the people.

Warren's overall letter is great. Here's another snippet and the full text is embedded below.

President Obama made transparency and inclusion a centerpiece of his election, and in many areas, he has opened the doors of government to ensure that the product of governing can withstand public scrutiny and is not the product of back-room deal making.

While I have no doubt that the President's commitment to openness is genuine, I am concerned about the Administration's record of transparency regarding the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Specifically, I am troubled by the Administration's unwillingness to provide to the public the composite bracketed text relating to the negotiations. As you know, the composite bracketed text includes not only proposed language from the United States but also proposed language from other countries. These different proposals are brought together in one text, and negotiations focus on ironing out the various proposals and getting to agreement on common language. The lack of transparency in this area is troubling because, as you know, the bracketed text serves as the focal point for actual negotiations. I appreciate the willingness of the USTR to make various documents available for review by members of Congress, but I do not believe that is a substitute for more robust public transparency.

Filed Under: democracy, elizabeth warren, michael froman, public opposition, secrecy, tpp, transparency, ustr

Canadian Politician Removed From Provincial Assembly For Threats She Didn't Make On Facebook Group She Didn't Join

from the wut? dept

We've heard stories in the past about people being blamed for the comments of others on Facebook groups, such as an attempt to hold parents responsible for the groups their children join. While my position is that such blaming is reactionary and silly, there is at least a modicum of a tangential relationship between the parties. So what should the response be if such a relationship doesn't exist? What if someone is added to a group without their knowledge and members of that group advocate violence? What should be done then?

Well, if you're a member of the Newfoundland House of Assembly in Canada, apparently you are removed from the house of assembly proceedings entirely. Such was the case with Gerry Rogers.

Earlier Tuesday, Justice Minister Darin King said Rogers was a member of the Facebook group Kathy Dunderdale must GO!!! in which users had posted comments containing death threats against the premier.

"What kind of message is that sending to the people of the province, to our children in the province, when we talk about bullying and harassment and intimidation?" said King.

Bullying? Well, the definition of the verb is "to treat abusively; to affect by means of force or coercion." Call me crazy, but it seems to me that forcing someone out of the duties of their elected office as a means for coercing them to apologize for something she had absolutely nothing to do with sort of meets the criteria, doesn't it? That's exactly what happened here, as Rogers aptly contends.

"I did not join this Facebook group," Rogers told reporters during the recess. Rogers said that she thinks that the government does not understand how Facebook groups work. "I was added to this group without my knowledge, without permission, and by somebody that I do not know," said Rogers.

Premier Kathy Dunderdale, against whom the threats were made, responded specifically to that point, insisting that the government did indeed understand how Facebook groups operate, but it's up to each member of government to monitor all the comments on all the groups they belong to, whether they had chosen to belong to them or not. She also said:

"I'm not going to be bullied or intimidated into doing something that I don't think is in the best interests of the people in this province," said Dunderdale.

No, Madame Premier, that privilege appears to be reserved for Gerry Rogers, and the people she represents, I might add, unless your government wants to rethink its concepts over whether to blame people for the actions of others.

Filed Under: canada, democracy
Companies: facebook groups

How Multilateral Free Trade Agreements Are Bypassing Democratic Decision-Making Around The World

from the behind-closed-doors dept

One of the most worrying aspects of ACTA -- which began life as a "simple" treaty about combatting counterfeit goods -- was how it morphed into a new approach to global policy making. This had two key aspects. First, the treaty would be negotiated in secret, with minimal input from the public, but plenty from lobbyists, who were given access to key documents and to negotiators. Secondly, the results of those secret negotiations were designed to constrain the participating governments in important ways that nullified ordinary democratic decision-making. If at all, representative bodies were presented with a take-it-or-leave it choice; changing individual details was not an option.

That, in its turn, meant that public in those countries had very little chance to fight harmful provisions in a treaty, since the only way to do that was to persuade their government to reject it completely, which was extremely difficult after the years of negotiation. The European Parliament's dramatic refusal to agree to ACTA was largely because of the unusual division of power in the European Union.

TPP has adopted exactly the same process: negotiations behind closed doors, but this time, without even the occasional official release of drafts as happened with ACTA (luckily, there have been leaks.) And assuming the negotiations are concluded successfully, it is likely that national legislatures will be presented with the same take-it-or-leave-it offer, with huge pressure to accept.

More recently, the newly-announced transatlantic free trade agreement (TAFTA) between the US and the EU is gaining momentum, not least in terms of the countries that may ask to join. At the last count, these included Mexico, Canada and Turkey. The US has also started talking to West African states about a free trade agreement, and it's easy to see that being rolled into TAFTA at some point.

TPP is also expanding rapidly. Mexico and Canada have already joined, under pretty humiliating terms, while Japan has signalled that it wishes to do so. Recently we learned that South Korea and Taiwan are considering applying.

As we've noted before, putting together TPP and TAFTA, it's striking how they include all of the world's biggest economies outside the so-called BRICS group of emerging countries -- Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. The natural response to being locked out of the two US-centric trade areas would be to form their own, and in fact India has begun talks with the Customs Union of Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan about a free trade agreement. Significantly, enlarging that to including other nearby countries is already being mooted:

Kazakhstan's neighbour Kyrgyzstan is likely to be the fourth entrant and Tajikistan could over time be the fifth country to joint the Customs Union. Ukraine, Armenia and Moldovia would also be moving close to the Customs Union but for some time they are likely to be the first three countries outside the core.

Meanwhile, China is keen to form a major trade bloc with South Korea and Japan:

"China's intention is to first form a Northeast Asian economic cooperation that excludes the U.S. while Japan can't sit still as South Korea advances to the Chinese market with Korea-China free trade talks," said Heo Yoon, a professor at Sogang University Graduate School of International Studies.

It's easy to imagine other countries that are part of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Free Trade Area joining the group if and when formal negotiations get underway, not least because ASEAN already has free trade agreements with China, Japan and South Korea.

Although bilateral trade agreements are hardly new -- Wikipedia lists dozens of them, some going back to the 1980s -- there has definitely been a step-change recently. Increasingly, the emphasis is on joining multilateral free trade agreements like TPP and TAFTA, involving significant numbers of countries. On the part of smaller nations, their interest is probably driven by a fear of getting shut out of key markets. But for the bigger players -- notably the US and EU -- it's a convenient way of imposing unpalatable policies not just on the citizens of other countries, but on their own, too.

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Filed Under: acta, democracy, free trade agreements, policy making, tafta, tpp