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.

"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.

"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.

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.

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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It's also striking that the image chosen by the Daily Express to illustrate the story is the classic perplexed child staring at a screen whose contents we cannot see -- the implication being that there is something bad there, but that we are powerless to protect the innocence of the young viewer. That, too, is something of a cliché in articles about pornography, and it's disconcerting to see it being wheeled out here for an article about promoting democratic principles.

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Such a meta-law that allows other laws to be changed without full scrutiny is potentially a dangerous thing, but it does cut both ways. It's true that it would permit the UK government to make copyright law even more unbalanced, but it might also allow it to move in the other direction, something already raised during discussions about this new power:

representatives from the creative industries had expressed "real concern" about plans to further liberalise the use of copyrighted material.

Although that would be a welcome result in terms of updating copyright, its benefit is probably outweighed by the long-term risk of such a Henry VIII clause being used by a future UK government to make copyright worse. On balance, it's preferable to have laws discussed and debated in the normal democratic way, rather than simply trusting governments to use their absolute powers wisely.

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Over the past two weeks, we have seen coordinated attacks on democratic institutions such as the European Parliament and national governments over ACTA. The signatories to this letter and their members stand against such attempts to silence the democratic process. Instead, we call for a calm and reasoned assessment of the facts rather than the misinformation circulating.

The Swedish prosecutor sent out a memo in 2006 saying that TPB wasn't guilty of "main" crimes -- at best it aids and abets (he also mentioned that the people running TPB were very clever). But Hollywood was not happy with this and forced the Swedish Minister of Justice to visit the White House and talk about it. The United States told Sweden that if they didn't get rid of the site, they would not be allowed to trade with the US!

The minister (illegally) told the prosecutor what had happened which forced him to raid TPB -- only a few weeks after sending out that memo about how legal it was.

Evidently, Warner Brothers felt that the investigation was taking too long. The studio contacted the police officer in charge of the investigation (one person that worked mostly by himself) and before I had even been questioned by him, he interviewed for a job with Warner Brothers.

When we found out he'd been hired (by him changing his employer from "Polisen" to "Warner Bros" on Facebook) the reply we got was that it was proof that Swedish IT police are of such high caliber that even the big US companies would hire them.

I got promoted from "witness" to "suspect" a week after the job was promised.

During the trial it turned out that the judge was the chairman for the Swedish pro-copyright society, one lay judge ran a record company, another one was formerly the chairman for the songwriter lobby organisation. I could go on.

The conference's most intriguing result was a platform for crowdsourcing the new Egyptian constitution. The platform, which appears to have drawn inspiration from a similar project in Tunisia, allows users to simultaneously browse constitutional texts from multiple countries, propose articles and ideas online and to collaborate on compiling the ideas into a workable text. Owing to Egypt's special circumstances, the platform also contains extensive provisions for off-computer use--many Egyptians simply don't have regular access to either a computer or the Internet.

In a recent YouGov survey, we gave respondents a hypothetical scenario. "Suppose that you alone could determine whether a Democrat or a Republican represents your Congressional district by paying a specific dollar amount? How much would you be willing to pay to ensure that a Congressman from your preferred party will win the office?" We expected that most Americans would place a high value on the party of their Congressmen. Shockingly, 55% of respondents said "ZERO" -- they would not pay even $1 to place their preferred party in power.

One can care deeply about politics and still be unwilling to pay for an electoral outcome on the grounds that it would undermine democracy.

The United States is nominally a democracy, but it's sadly ridiculous to think this means very much. To get at the value of WikiLeaks, I think it's important to distinguish between the government--the temporary, elected authors of national policy--and the state--the permanent bureaucratic and military apparatus superficially but not fully controlled by the reigning government. The careerists scattered about the world in America's intelligence agencies, military, and consular offices largely operate behind a veil of secrecy executing policy which is itself largely secret. American citizens mostly have no idea what they are doing, or whether what they are doing is working out well. The actually-existing structure and strategy of the American empire remains a near-total mystery to those who foot the bill and whose children fight its wars. And that is the way the elite of America's unelected permanent state, perhaps the most powerful class of people on Earth, like it.

As Scott Shane, the New York Times' national security reporter, puts it: "American taxpayers, American citizens pay for all these diplomatic operations overseas and you know, it is not a bad thing when Americans actually have a better understanding of those negotiations".

...

I'd say providing that information certainly would have been a socially worthy activity, even if it came as part of a more-or-less indiscriminate dump of illegally obtained documents. I'm glad to see that the quality of discussion over possible US efforts to stymie Iran's nuclear ambitions has already become more sophisticated and, well, better-informed due to the information provided by WikiLeaks.

• This version is not final, and despite suggestions to the press to the contrary, there are still some pretty substantial differences between negotiating parties. Some of those differences are pretty big deals, as they could require changes to laws (if the countries want to be seen as complying) from countries who have insisted, repeatedly and publicly, that ACTA will require no such law changes.
• While much of the worst of the document has been removed, the process by which this happened was hardly reasonable and open. Instead, it involved secrecy, misleading statements, ignoring important stakeholders until copies were leaked and concerned stakeholders shouted loud enough to be heard. As La Quadrature Du Net points out, this whole process was a counterfeit of democracy. Furthermore, this shows why all of the ACTA supporters, who insisted that people were making too big a deal about this, were flat-out wrong. There were some really, really bad things in ACTA initially, that appear to have only been removed due to loud protests from people who, otherwise, weren't supposed to even know what was in ACTA.
• The document still has many, many problems. It's way too broad at points. It still would require changes to US law (contrary to claims by the negotiators). It also includes exports enforcement without consumer rights or protections and some troubling language with no legal basis. It's better than what was in the initial documents, but it's still pretty bad in some places, as detailed below.

The ACTA does not permit the elimination of injunctive relief in cases where there is no remuneration paid. This is contrary to the provisions in U.S. law eliminating injunctions and damages against certain health care workers, or for manufacturers of biosimiliar drugs, in cases involving patents not previously disclosed by the incumbent drug company. ACTA seems to eliminate the limitation on the TRIPS, which concerns injunctions in cases where a person does not have prior "reasonable grounds to know that dealing in such subject matter would entail the infringement of an intellectual property right." This makes the ACTA contrary to current U.S. laws concerning infringement of trademarks by newspapers and online publications, among other things.

In determining the amount of damages for infringement of intellectual property rights, its judicial authorities shall have the authority to consider, inter alia, any legitimate measure of value submitted by the right holder, which may include the lost profits, the value of the infringed good or service, measured by the market price, the suggested retail price.

The US has proposed that patents should be clearly carved out of the Civil Enforcement Chapter (fn 2). But as of now there are no other countries indicated as supporting this position. This is a major advocacy point for access to medicines groups. If the US does not carry the day, the claims of negotiators that the agreement will not limit important TRIPS tools to promote access to medicines will ring hallow.

As currently worded, and in contradiction to many public statements by the negotiators, the border measures section still extends to patents and to in-transit seizures. In fn 6 on page 9, there is proposed language carving out patents. But that language is proposed by the US and is not joined by any other party according to the text as released.

The damages section contains many provisions that will encourage the over-enforcement and excessive punishment of copyright infringers. The text requires that countries to maintain a system of "pre-established" damages, as well as "additional damages," which means damages not based on any actual proof of harm. Such a system will over-deter the making of copies of copyrighted works where the copyright owner does not adequately serve the market on reasonable terms and conditions, and therefore does not actually suffer significant damage from the copy.

The ACTA language is not limited to commercial scale infringement. So individual downloaders and copiers for personal non-commercial purposes could be subject to massive "deterrent" fines without proof of any market harm to the copyright owner.

The negotiators have failed to adequately protect the most important "fair use" and other rights of users with respect to copyright. The definition of copyright piracy does not include the reasonable suggestion to add language making clear that it "does not extend to copies that are lawfully made, without the permission of the right owners."

• Newspapers need readers to pay to survive. Not true. Not even close to true. First, newspapers have almost never made money from subscription fees or newsstand purchases. Those fees rarely even covered the cost of the newsprint and delivery. Newspapers have always made their money on advertising and classifieds (a form of advertising).
• Free content online is why newspapers are in trouble. Again, not true. In most cases, the publications that are in trouble are in that position because they took out tremendous amounts of debt. Most newspapers are actually still profitable on an operational basis, but aren't making enough to repay the debt. The problem was poor management thinking in believing that leveraging their futures to ridiculous levels made sense.
• Without old school newspapers, government corruption is not well covered. This one remains to be seen, but there is growing evidence that it, too, is not true. The power of the internet has made it such that many more people can hold our governments accountable by gaining a voice and speaking out against corruption or corruptive influences. It's not fixing the problem entirely, but then again, neither did newspapers. The fact is that it's much easier now to call attention to corruption, and there are more and more forums to help with that -- such as Wikileaks, combined with the ability to self publish or more easily contact those with a larger audience.
• Putting up a paywall will somehow fund more journalism. Again, remains to be seen, but there's little evidence to support this claim. There are numerous competing offerings providing news in the marketplace today. There is little indication that enough people are interested in paying directly for news to the level it would take to support news operations. Combine that with the decrease in ad revenue (the real source of revenue for most news organizations) from cutting off a large chunk of an audience, and it seems likely that these paywalls will actually serve to decrease overall revenue over the long term rather than increase it. It's not clear how that helps anyone.

"Instead of demanding that Internet providers censor the Internet and monitor the content that's transferred, Telenor believes that the best way to decrease illegal file sharing is to put more effort into making legally downloadable content available."

Meanwhile, USA Today reports that the presidential candidates are raising eye-popping sums of money in small increments via the Internet. In the first quarter of 2008, Barack Obama led the pack with $129 million in small donations, followed by Hillary Clinton at $65 million and John McCain at $37 million. Even John McCain's fundraising would have been considered a major accomplishment four years ago -- Howard Dean made headlines with $15 million in online donations in the third quarter of 2003, much of it from small donors. If the trend lasts -- and there are good reasons to think it will -- it will also have a democratizing effect on the political process. Presidential candidates will be more inclined to pay attention to the priorities of grassroots activists, and comparatively less worried about pleasing insiders capable of raising money in $2300 increments.

And of course, these developments are connected. The rise of blogs, YouTube, and other participatory media has gotten more people engaged and invested in the political debate, which in turn makes them more likely to open their wallets. Conversely, the fact that blog readers are often campaign contributors gives bloggers real leverage over candidates -- bloggers can punish candidates perceived as not playing fair by directing contributions to their opponents. All of which is producing a more engaged and accountable political process. Of course, things are far from perfect, but there are good reasons to think that 21st century politics will be better than politics was in the 20th century.