The World's Next Major Trade Agreement Will Make NSA Spying Even Easier
MotherBoard ■ With paranoia over NSA surveillance reaching a fever pitch, foreign governments are making a reasonable plea: bring our data home. But the Americans are doing their best to ensure that the world’s Internet data stays on U.S. soil, well within the reach of their spies. To do so, American negotiators are leveraging trade deals with much of the developed world, inserting language to ensure “cross-border data flows”—a euphemism that actually means they want to inhibit foreign governments from keeping data hosted domestically. The trade deals they’re influencing—the Trans-Atlantic Partnership (TPP), the Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA), and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP)—are all so secretive that nobody but the governments themselves are privy to the details. But thanks to the Australians and Wikileaks, both of whom have leaked details on TPP, we have a pretty good idea of what’s going on in the latest Trans-Pacific Partnership—a trade agreement that will act as a sort of NAFTA for Asia-Pacific region nations.