Data privacy paramount, says Pirate Party

Pirate Party Australia recommends caution be exercised in regards to the establishment of a global digital market that would involve ceding sovereignty of data to the United States or other jurisdictions with poor data protection legislation and records.

The Party’s warning bells were triggered by an opinion piece from Jeffrey Bleich, US Ambassador to Australia, published in the Sydney Morning Herald two days ago[1]. Mr Bleich’s opinion piece states that the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) may be used to eliminate what he refers to as “cloud protectionism”.

“It’s alarming that they would be even considering such a thing, when the Dutch are currently wondering whether the US can access their confidential health records[2] under the PATRIOT Act[3],” said Brendan Molloy, Secretary of Pirate Party Australia.

“It concerns me that we may be putting our privacy unnecessarily at risk of foreign exploitation for very minimal gain. I find it very unlikely sufficient safeguards could be possibly built into the TPP, and I fail to see the necessity in ceding our legislative ability in this area when the major impediments to cloud services are poorly formed copyright legislation, region locking and geoblocking.”

Pirate Party Australia has regularly criticised the opacity of the TPP, a free trade agreement that has been negotiated by a very small group of representatives from involved nations. Most recently, non-state stakeholders were barred from contact with negotiators in Auckland[4]. The Party has also advocated the protection of Australian sovereignty in reaction to increasingly opaque negotiations between Australian and the United States particularly, but also other current and potential trade partners.

“More worryingly many thousands of innocent users have had their data seized by the US Department of Justice when MegaUpload was raided. While the site promoted itself as a file-host that rewarded high volume downloads, it complied with takedown notices and seems to have acted within the law. As is being revealed through the court cases against the raids, the same thing cannot be said for the US Department of Justice or the New Zealand Police,” said Simon Frew, Deputy President of Pirate Party Australia.

“In the frenzy to catch Kim Dotcom, the US has shown exactly why it cannot be trusted with cloud storage. When entire companies can be closed down without notice and all the customer data taken by law enforcement because some of the users were sharing copyrighted material, you would be stark raving mad to trust your data to the United States,” Mr Frew continued.

Pirate Party Australia is also critical of double-standards surrounding moves towards establishing a global market, as the TPP “seeks to integrate the economies of the Asia-Pacific,” and there have been similar moves in the trans-Atlantic region[5].

“If we are to have a single trans-Atlantic, trans-Pacific, or global market that allows data to flow between borders unhindered, then why is there a difference in price between content provided from the same servers, despite the parity of the Australian and US dollars? Why is region encoding and other artificial means of segmenting markets protected?” questioned Mr Frew.

“The United States wants to host and serve our data, but won’t let us buy their media. It’s ludicrous.”

[1] http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/cloud-agreement-can-bring-blue-skies-20121210-2b5ov.html
[2] http://www.dutchnews.nl/news/archives/2012/11/america_may_have_access_to_dut.php
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_invocations_of_the_USA_PATRIOT_Act
[4] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/12/digital-rights-groups-shut-out-secret-tpp-negotiations
[5] http://www.euractiv.com/infosociety/data-protection-reform-derail-hu-analysis-516557