Wikileaks Unleashes TiSA - TTP - TTIP Secret Negotiations Trade Deal Policies

""Wikileaks has released 17 different documents relating to the so-called 'secret' negotiations for a massive global trade deal known as the Trade in Services Agreement, a lesser known cousin of the Trans-Pacific Partnership that US President Barack Obama has been campaigning heavily for in Washington.

The leak has been timed to coincide with a meeting of leaders for the Trade in Services Agreement in Paris. TiSA is one of three trade treaties that global political leaders have been trying to agree on, alongside TTP and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).

Negotiations for the deals have been conducted in private. While this is standard procedure, it has raised suspicions about the content of the talks. One UK MEP wrote an op-ed on the fact that she'd seen the 'undemocratic' TTIP deal, but wasn't at liberty to reveal any of its contents. Another study said even EU representatives in Brussels thought their European Commission colleagues were making deals behind closed doors.

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Supporter of Wikileaks said the negotiating texts were 'the largest leak of secret trade negotiations in history'. "The secrecy charade has collapsed," said Deborah James of the Our World Is Not For Sale (OWINFS) network, a group of activists committed to fighting against corporate globalisation.

Wikileaks published a draft financial services annex of the TISA negotiations a year ago, containing plans to deregulate the financial sector. It said the new document confirms these plans, while also revealing new information about air traffic, maritime, professional services, e-commerce and domestic regulation.

On Tuesday, Wikileaks said it would crowd source $100,000 to offer as a bounty for the remaining chapters of the TPP.

The European Union is the largest exporter of services. It believes that opening up the trade in services through TISA will lead to economic growth and an increase in jobs.""

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/wikileaks-posts-largest-leak-of-trade-negotiations-in-history-charting-progress-tisa-10296061.html

WikiLeaks Founder, Julian Assange's 'Arrest' - Supreme Court Appeal Hearing Goes Through

Assange has been holed up in the Ecuadorean embassy in London since June 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden, where prosecutors issued an arrest warrant after two women accused him of sexual assault in 2010.

The Australian, who denies any wrongdoing, in February appealed to the Supreme Court after losing an appeal in November.

His lawyers have argued the Swedish prosecutor had not acted with necessary speed in the case, violating Assange’s rights.

No date has been set for the hearing. In the meantime, the arrest warrant was to remain in force, the Supreme Court said.

The Supreme Court only considers cases where it is important to establish a judgment — or precedent — that may provide guidance for lower courts.

Assange’s lawyers have criticised the prosecution over rejecting proposals to interview him in London.

The prosecutors argued there was no value in questioning him there since a trial would most likely have to take place in Sweden.

http://www.couriermail.com.au/technology/sweden-to-hear-wikileaks-founder-julian-assange-arrest-appeal/story-fnjwnore-1227325752743

WikiLeaks Releases Hacked Sony Pictures Files Are Easily Accessible

""WikiLeaks has posted a searchable archive of more than 170,000 emails and 30,000 private documents belonging to Sony Pictures Entertainment. The movie conglomerate reacted angrily to the news on Thursday, saying that it condemned the indexing of stolen employee and other privileged information.

The data was hacked in November of last year, revealing multiple embarrassing e-mail exchanges between Sony executives and personal information from thousands of employees, including social security numbers.

U.S. officials believe the North Korean government was behind the hack, done in retaliation against the Sony Pictures film, The Interview, in which North Korean leader Kim Kim Jong Un is assassinated by two American journalists with help from the U.S. government.

The scandal surrounding the hack led to The Interview's release being cancelled, then rolled out on a much smaller scale online and in independent movie theater chains. Theaters across the country refused to release the film after ominous threats were made against them, allegedly from the same group that hacked the data.

In announcing this week's information cache, WikiLeaks said on their website that "the original archives, which were not searchable, were removed before the public and journalists were able to do more than scratch the surface." It went on to say that the data offers "a rare insight into the inner workings of a large, secretive multinational corporation.

The email exchanges, WikiLeaks said, shows that behind the scenes the movie powerhouse is an influential corporation, with ties to the White House. (There are almost 100 U.S. government email addresses in the archive). It has "an ability to impact laws and policies, and with connections to the US military-industrial complex."

WikiLeaks pointed to Sony's ties to the Democratic Party and the Rand Corporation, as well as allegations of "collecting intelligence" on rival pictures.

WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange said Sony is "at the centre of a geo-political conflict," that the data belongs in the public domain, and that WikiLeaks will ensure it stays there.""

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2015/04/16/400194658/wikileaks-makes-it-easy-to-access-hacked-sony-pictures-information

True Operations Purpose Of The TPP Trans-Pacific Partnership has been Released by WikiLeaks

WikiLeaks Reveals The True Purpose Of The TPP Trans-Pacific Partnership. From Their Press Release:

""WikiLeaks releases today the “Investment Chapter” from the secret negotiations of the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) agreement. The document adds to the previous WikiLeaks publications of the chapters for Intellectual Property Rights (November 2013) and the Environment (January 2014).

The TPP Investment Chapter, published today, is dated 20 January 2015. The document is classified and supposed to be kept secret for four years after the entry into force of the TPP agreement or, if no agreement is reached, for four years from the close of the negotiations.

Julian Assange, WikiLeaks editor said: “The TPP has developed in secret an unaccountable supranational court for multinationals to sue states. This system is a challenge to parliamentary and judicial sovereignty. Similar tribunals have already been shown to chill the adoption of sane environmental protection, public health and public transport policies.”

Current TPP negotiation member states are the United States, Japan, Mexico, Canada, Australia, Malaysia, Chile, Singapore, Peru, Vietnam, New Zealand and Brunei. The TPP is the largest economic treaty in history, including countries that represent more than 40 per cent of the world´s GDP.

The Investment Chapter highlights the intent of the TPP negotiating parties, led by the United States, to increase the power of global corporations by creating a supra-national court, or tribunal, where foreign firms can “sue” states and obtain taxpayer compensation for “expected future profits”. These investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) tribunals are designed to overrule the national court systems. ISDS tribunals introduce a mechanism by which multinational corporations can force governments to pay compensation if the tribunal states that a country’s laws or policies affect the company’s claimed future profits.

In return, states hope that multinationals will invest more. Similar mechanisms have already been used. For example, US tobacco company Phillip Morris used one such tribunal to sue Australia (June 2011 – ongoing) for mandating plain packaging of tobacco products on public health grounds; and by the oil giant Chevron against Ecuador in an attempt to evade a multi-billion-dollar compensation ruling for polluting the environment. The threat of future lawsuits chilled environmental and other legislation in Canada after it was sued by pesticide companies in 2008/9. ISDS tribunals are often held in secret, have no appeal mechanism, do not subordinate themselves to human rights laws or the public interest, and have few means by which other affected parties can make representations

The TPP negotiations have been ongoing in secrecy for five years and are now in their final stages. In the United States the Obama administration plans to “fast-track” the treaty through Congress without the ability of elected officials to discuss or vote on individual measures. This has met growing opposition as a result of increased public scrutiny following WikiLeaks’ earlier releases of documents from the negotiations.

The TPP is set to be the forerunner to an equally secret agreement between the US and EU, the TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership).

Negotiations for the TTIP were initiated by the Obama administration in January 2013. Combined, the TPP and TTIP will cover more than 60 per cent of global GDP. The third treaty of the same kind, also negotiated in secrecy is TISA, on trade in services, including the financial and health sectors. It covers 50 countries, including the US and all EU countries. WikiLeaks released the secret draft text of the TISA’s financial annex in June 2014.

All these agreements on so-called “free trade” are negotiated outside the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) framework. Conspicuously absent from the countries involved in these agreements are the BRICs countries of Brazil, Russia, India and China."" -WIKILEAKS

https://freedomfighterreports.com/2015/03/29/boom-wikileaks-reveals-the-true-purpose-of-the-tpp-trans-pacific-partnership/ 

Google Informs WikiLeaks the NSA Snooping Gmail Accounts Metadata with Warrant for WikiLeak' Employee

On Christmas Eve, as the National Security Agency was releasing a report on NSA employees’ abuses of surveillance technology, Google was telling WikiLeaks about another sort of surveillance. According to a statement by WikiLeaks on Twitter, Google informed the organization on December 24 that the Gmail mailboxes and account metadata of a WikiLeaks employee had been turned over to law enforcement under a US federal warrant.

Update: WikiLeaks did not respond to initial requests for more details on the notification. However, WikiLeaks journalist and Courage Foundation acting director Sarah Harrison displayed a redacted copy of the warrant during her presentation on source protection at the Chaos Communications Congress yesterday in Hamburg, Germany. The warrant was dated for execution by April 5, 2012 by the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, and it was apparently part of the continuing investigation by the Justice Department into criminal charges against WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange.

Details on whose e-mail was searched were not provided, and the organization does not share information about most of its employees. According to a statement on the organization’s website, “Given the high level assassination threats against WikiLeaks staff, we cannot disclose exact details about our team members.”

Read ON:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/12/wikileaks-claims-employees-google-mail-metadata-seized-by-us-government/

The "Getting" of Assange and the Smearing of a Revolution

""This Kafka-style justice awaits Assange whether or not Sweden decides to prosecute him. Last December, the Independent disclosed that the US and Sweden had already started talks on Assange's extradition. At the same time, a secret grand jury - a relic of the 18th century long abandoned in this country - has convened just across the river from Washington, in a corner of Virginia that is home to the CIA and most of America's national security establishment. The grand jury is a "fix," a leading legal expert told me: reminiscent of the all-white juries in the South that convicted blacks by rote. A sealed indictment is believed to exist.

 

Under the US Constitution, which guarantees free speech, Assange should be protected, in theory. When he was running for president, Obama, himself a constitutional lawyer, said, "Whistleblowers are part of a healthy democracy and must be protected from reprisal." His embrace of George W. Bush's "war on terror" has changed all that. Obama has pursued more whistleblowers than any US president. The problem for his administration in "getting" Assange and crushing WikiLeaks is that military investigators have found no collusion or contact between him and Manning, reports NBC. There is no crime, so one has to be concocted, probably in line with Vice President Joe Biden's absurd description of Assange as a "hi-tech terrorist."

Should Assange win his High Court appeal in London, he could face extradition direct to the United States. In the past, US officials have synchronized extradition warrants with the conclusion of a pending case. Like its predatory military, American jurisdiction recognizes few boundaries. As the suffering of Bradley Manning demonstrates, together with the recently executed Troy Davis and the forgotten inmates of Guantanamo, much of the US criminal justice system is corrupt if not lawless.""

http://www.truth-out.org/getting-assange-and-smearing-revolution/1317922597