Pickles, along with many other privacy and civil liberties campaigners, has serious concerns about what he considers to be the secrecy and lack of public scrutiny surrounding ACTA. “The UK Government needs to urgently address these concerns in Parliament”, he said when MEP and ACTA rapporteur Kader Arif resigned last week. “When decisions that will fundamentally affect our economies, privacy and civil liberties are being taken behind closed doors, we can only assume it is because what is being proposed is not in the best interests of ordinary citizens.”
Now Big Brother Watch has written to Vince Cable, UK Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, asking that those concerns be openly addressed in and by Parliament. Privately, Pickles told Infosecurity that his worries center around the merging of agendas between copyright and national security. “The mechanisms to avoid detection on a copyright level”, he explained, “are the same as being used by terrorists, so the agenda is being pushed as a national security one to – in my opinion – justify much higher levels of monitoring and non-judicial co-operation.” He cites a possible example in which the Home Office has a list of websites that it doesn’t like, where ACTA would allow the content to be both monitored and blocked.
“I write to ask you urgently to address the lack of any Parliamentary statement or debate on this proposal, and to outline the impact of the measures contained within ACTA on the British economy, cyber-security and civil liberties”, he writes to Cable. “I would also ask you disclose the UK’s role in this agreement, and our input into the drafting process an elected member of the European Parliament has referred to as ‘a masquerade’”.
He also highlights the technical concerns about ACTA noted by the US White House, which warned: “Our analysis of the DNS filtering provisions in some proposed legislation suggests that they pose a real risk to cybersecurity and yet leave contraband goods and services accessible online. We must avoid legislation that drives users to dangerous, unreliable DNS servers and puts next-generation security policies at risk.”
Pickles’ letter asks Cable to “confirm whether you intend for Parliament to have a vote on this matter”, and “to publish any assessment of the economic impact of these proposals.”
“The Coalition agreement”, he concludes in his letter, “makes clear that civil liberties are a fundamental part of the Government’s legislative agenda. I urge you to not allow laws which would have an unprecedented impact on civil liberties online, threaten jobs and increase cyber-security risks to be adopted without any Parliamentary debate.”
At this time, Vince Cable has yet to respond.