Canada-EU Trade Deal Ratified By European Union; Now Needs Approval By All Member States' National Parliaments
Furnished content.
As Techdirt reported last November, while TPP and TAFTA/TTIP appear to be dead, the trade deal between Canada and the European Union (CETA) has been slowly working its way through the system. Today, the European Parliament approved the deal, which means that the European Union has completed the formal ratification process. However, for certain aspects of the agreement, notably the corporate sovereignty chapter, further approval is now needed by the national parliaments of all the EU's member states -- which means another 30+ votes that must all go in CETA's favor. That's by no means certain, as resistance has been mounting in a few countries. One of them is Belgium, where the Walloon region won important additional rights that may still be invoked.As we wrote last year, CETA's economic effects are likely to be tiny -- the official estimate is just 0.08% extra GDP in total for the EU -- or even negative. The very limited economic impact is confirmed in the official press release from the European Commission, where the only quantified benefit singled out is the following:CETA creates new opportunities for EU companies. It will save EU businesses over €500 million a year currently paid in tariffs on goods that are exported to Canada. Almost 99% of these savings start from day one. To put that saving in context, it's worth remembering that the EU population is roughly 500 million, so the only financial benefit that the European Commission mentions works out at around $1 per person per year. Since the European Commission would doubtless have trumpeted bigger benefits if there had been any, It's fairly safe to assume that this is pretty much all it could find. As for the highly-controversial matter of corporate sovereignty, aka investor-state dispute settlement, here's what the press release says:The current form of investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) that exists in many bilateral trade agreements negotiated by EU governments has been replaced with a new and improved Investment Court System. The new mechanism will be transparent and not based on ad hoc tribunals. What it doesn't mention is that the "new and improved" system hasn't been fully worked out yet, and so any claimed advantages are purely theoretical at this stage. In a rather desperate attempt to justify a trade deal that has so few benefits, the Commission adds the following:There is clear proof that free trade agreements spur European growth and jobs. As an example, EU exports to South Korea have increased by more than 55% since the EU-Korea trade deal entered into force in 2011. Exports of certain agricultural products increased by 70%, and EU car sales in South Korea tripled over this five-year period. What the European Commission fails to say is that the EU trade deal with South Korea does not have any form of ISDS. If it offers "clear proof" of anything it is that successful trade deals have no need of a corporate sovereignty chapter, whether the old-style ISDS, or the "new and improved" lipstick-on-a-pig Investment Court System found in CETA.Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+
Permalink | Comments | Email This Story
Read more here
posted at: 12:00am on 16-Feb-2017
path: /Policy | permalink | edit (requires password)
New Report On Encryption Confirms There's More Of It, But Still Not Much Of A Problem For Law Enforcement
Furnished content.
CSIS (Center for Strategic and International Studies) has just released its report on encryption and it comes to the same conclusions many other reports have: encryption is good for everyone and law enforcement fears are overstated and mostly-unrealized. (h/t Kevin Bankston)The report [PDF] opens up with this statement:It is in the national interest to encourage the use of strong encryption. No one we interviewed in law enforcement or the intelligence community disagreed with this. The disagreement comes when law enforcement is prevented from pursuing investigative leads because of encryption. According to FBI Director James Comey and Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance, encryption is already a huge problem for law enforcement and will only get exponentially worse in the next few years. The CSIS report rebuts both of these statements.While encryption use is growing rapidly, the share of traffic that is both of interest to law enforcement and unrecoverable is still relatively small. Most companies use encryption that allows law enforcement agencies to recover plaintext data. Most e-mail, if it uses encryption, also allows for recovery. Currently, an estimated 18 percent of global communications traffic is end-to-end encrypted. It is estimated that 22 percent of communications traffic will be end-to-end encrypted by 2019. This is far from the encryption apocalypse promised by Comey and Vance. There's an incremental increase taking place, not an exponential one. What could pose serious problems, though, is encryption-by-default on smartphones. As the report points out, if Android devices go the way of iPhones, 99% of the world's phones would keep law enforcement locked out.But that's only if law enforcement isn't able to access data and communications through device manufacturer/service provider cooperation, third-party app developers, email providers, and other, more old-fashioned techniques. One sure way to beat device encryption is to obtain the passcode from the user. This won't help much when the phone's owner is dead or can't be located, but compelling the production of a password is still far from settled, constitutionally-speaking. For phones secured with a fingerprint, owners are likely out of luck. A couple of courts have already reached the conclusion that providing a fingerprint isn't testimonial and has no Fifth Amendment implications.CSIS could have put together a better estimate on how many investigations are thwarted by encryption, but law enforcement agencies -- even those fronted by encryption opponents -- aren't interested in sharing this data with the public. The report points out that the problem remains mostly theoretical. Without data, all we have are assertions from law enforcement officials that something must be done. Failure to legislate backdoors or bans will apparently lead to a sharp uptick in criminal activity… except that's not happening either. The report points out that there's no data linking increased default encryption to increases in criminal activity.As for the world's terrorism, encryption is seldom a barrier to investigations or surveillance. There's no shortage of access points to intercept communications while they're still decrypted (or post-encryption stripping). According to the CSIS report, 90% of the world's instant messages are still accessible by law enforcement, even without interception. With surveillance data-sharing being the new normal in the US, law enforcement agencies will be able to dip into NSA collections to obtain communications that might otherwise be inaccessible through a suspect's device.The report notes that there's likely no consensus to be reached on the encryption issue. Because it protects both criminals and the innocent, it's difficult to see a nation's government -- at least those in the Western half of the world -- deciding to eliminate innocents' protections in hopes of nabbing a few more criminals. In the United States -- where certain rights have been long enshrined (if far too frequently ignored) -- the chance of anti-encryption legislation remains lowest. And, as the report's authors note, if the US doesn't make a move to curb encryption, it's unlikely the rest of the free world will do so on their own.The law enforcement agencies making the most noise about encryption are doing the least to help their own cause. Most of what's offered is anecdotal, rather than data-based. According to the FBI's own testimony, it only has about 120 inaccessible phones in its possession. As for other law enforcement agencies, the numbers are mostly unknown. Those that have chosen to make their numbers public have failed to show anything more than the expected rise in inaccessible phones due to default encryption. While the locked devices may number in the hundreds (Cy Vance's office says 423 locked phones were seized in a two-year span, which -- according to the office's numbers -- is still only a third of the devices in law enforcement custody), they're still in the minority of those obtained.These numbers will increase as the use of encryption increases, but if law enforcement and intelligence agencies don't like the way the future looks, they really only have themselves to blame. The report notes that the Snowden leaks -- which detailed massive surveillance programs operating under almost-nonexistent oversight -- prompted an encryption revival, both in terms of individuals doing more to ensure their privacy as well as well as device manufacturer encryption implementation.
Permalink | Comments | Email This Story
Read more here
posted at: 12:00am on 16-Feb-2017
path: /Policy | permalink | edit (requires password)
|
|