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Comment by phaemon | Hacker News Reader

The very fact that this is being negotiated in secret shows that the people involved know it is wrong. Any law that comes out of this "agreement" should be considered completely invalid.

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Secret in negotiation is like source control in software development. It is universally recognized best practice.

So that's not really an indication of anything. You cannot practically publicly negotiate as that would require either showing your hand to the other countries, or worse would prevent you to make any concession under public/party pressure.

Now, of course you know this agreement will be bad. But it is not because they negotiate in secret. That is because they negotiate at all and you know that politicians do not share our(0) views on IP and as such don't mind trading short term money, for what we see is a long term degradation of our liberties.

(0) By "ours", I mean definitively ours on HN. Considering past support, I guess it is indicative that "ours" includes a large part of the public too. Although it does not seem something important enough to be an election topic in most of the Western World.

>It is universally recognized best practice.

It is universally recognized best practice for politicians to decide which industries/businesses in their respective countries should go under and lose out on the deal and which industries in both respective countries should be the winners with as little opposition from the losers as possible.

I'm sure that there are many people all over the political spectrum that think that politicians are abusing their power by essentially deciding without anyone's input, (except for those with the deepest pockets) who should be sacrificed for the economy's sake and who should stand to gain pretty much everything.

> politicians are abusing their power by essentially deciding without anyone's input

Well the deal isn't negotiated by elected officials, mostly it's negotiated by experts/bureaucrats, and congress will just vote the whole thing up or down.

If you oppose the TPP, circulate petitions and call on your congresspeople to oppose it. The average Joe doesn't care about a lot of policy debates, but the economic effects of free trade agreements are apparent to most.

Adversarial negotiations require not telling your negotiation opponent too much about your goals and priorities. This unfortunately doesn't interact well with country-internal public discussion.

The secrecy is not from each other, it's from us, the people they're supposed to be representing. I get that some negotiations are better when there aren't TV cameras hovering over your shoulder, but it is still important that negotiators know what the position is that they're supposed to negotiate for.

This entire treaty has never been discussed by the various parliaments, because the negotiators aren't doing this for the parliaments and the voters, they're doing it for the corporations. And they do have access to these negotiations. That simple fact: that companies have access and we don't, should be enough to tell anyone that these negotiations have no legitimacy whatsoever.

Secret in negotiation is like source control in software development. It is universally recognized best practice.

Its not secret:

http://corporateeurope.org/international-trade/2015/07/ttip-...

Not at all. Negotiating and ratifying the deal are 2 separate things. Negotiating in secret is a non-issue and likely quite helpful. With open negotiation the negotiators will be beset by media with agendas and every lobby group imaginable trying to push their view on every point, many of which are likely dead-ends or unexpected to progress anyway. Total openness could be a real restriction in getting the job done.

What would be a concern is if the negotiated deal is ratified without a reasonable time and availability for political and public scrutiny and a vote. The guys responsible can negotiate secretly all they want but they'll (hopefully) be sent away if they try and pass anything that is not in a nations interest. They should know this and ideally wont take a deal to the table that cant be agreed and signed at a national level.

>Total openness could be a real restriction in getting the job done.

It depends on what you define "the job" as. Many people would say this is a job that doesn't need doing.

> Negotiating and ratifying the deal are 2 separate things. Negotiating in secret is a non-issue and likely quite helpful.

I don't agree, with secret negociations the ratifiers will be presented with a "accept everything" or "reject everything" choice, with a very strong political pressure for the former lest they throw away years of work. This tips the scale in favor of ultimate acceptance of the deal so that negociators can cram as much measures as they think will be accepted in the end.

If the negociations were public, then each point could be publicly argued with a much lower cost to say "no" than the rejection of the whole treaty.

Reminding the negociators from time to time who they work for might also be a nice side effect of publicity.

> Negotiating in secret is a non-issue and likely quite helpful.

only if given strict and well defined mandate by the congress.

I would buy into that argument, except that the ratifying part, at least in the USA, is already rigged. The US Congress has passed a "fast track" authorization. As I understand this, "fast track" means that a single yes/no ratification vote takes place, with limited debate, and no "line item veto" - in the USA, the TPP is all or nothing. I have no idea if the text of the trade pact will be made available, and for how long. No US Senator or Representative can be "against" "free trade", so the TPP is pretty much doomed to pass, at least in the USA. We can only hope that it gets derailed elsewhere, like ACTA got derailed in Europe two years ago.

Not necessarily. They might be under the impression that the public does not fully understand the economics and how the world really works.

Also, although transparency always sounds wonderful, negotiating a treaty in the open is potentially very difficult: the media are liable to trumpet a 'humiliating U-turn!' any time someone ends up negotiating to a new position, even though that's kind of the point.

So this is kept secret to avoid hurting some bureaucrat's feelings?

I think GP's point is that media will take the most idiotic view of the problem possible; it's not about hurting bureaucrat's feelings, it's about people hurting themselves by mindless, knee-jerk reactions.

No — 'humiliating U-turn' on the front pages is very much a political problem, and could lead to early entrenchment of positions.

It's better that the public get the wrong end of the stick rather than merely knowing a stick exists.

The media would get very bored of treaty details very quickly. Not that most of the media is completely independent of and unrelated to the parties doing the negotiating, anyway.

Are things negotiated in secret because the public don't understand, or do the public not understand because things like this are secret?

The public won't understand either way, unfortunately.

By that logic, most of a country's laws should be secret. Also, only a minority of people should be allowed to vote - maybe only those with an IQ of over 110.

See where I'm going with this? If you want democracy you take it with the good and bad. The solution for some issues not being easily understood by the public, is for the politicians to fight to explain that law better to the public and what it means - not try to pass it in secret.

> By that logic, most of a country's laws should be secret.

That does not follow. Law is public because people need to know what is expected of them and what is the layout of decision-space they navigate.

> Also, only a minority of people should be allowed to vote - maybe only those with an IQ of over 110.

If this is a bad idea, it's not bad for obvious reasons.

> See where I'm going with this? If you want democracy you take it with the good and bad. The solution for some issues not being easily understood by the public, is for the politicians to fight to explain that law better to the public and what it means - not try to pass it in secret.

The reality is that instead of "fighting to explain", politicians will pander to the public to get their support. In democracy, popularity wins.

While I don't have an opinion yet on whether TPP should be negotiated in secret or not, I can understand the desire to actually get something done, which pretty much precludes involving the public. If you go out there and start asking, you'll get dragged into popularity contest.

Also, why the hell are we even bothering with representative democracy, if we can't trust the officials to make good choices in our name?

> Also, why the hell are we even bothering with representative democracy, if we can't trust the officials to make good choices in our name?

How many voters know that their elected representatives have limited access to read TPP drafts, cannot take notes, cannot discuss with staffers? At the same time, TPP negotiations are lead by ex-Citibank staff while industry lobbyists are contributing to the agreements, according to leaked emails, http://www.ip-watch.org/2015/06/05/confidential-ustr-emails-...

"At another point, Jim DeLisi of Fanwood Chemical said he had just seen the text on rules of origin, and remarked, “Someone owes USTR a royalty payment. These are our rules. … This is a very pleasant surprise.”

>> Also, only a minority of people should be allowed to vote - maybe only those with an IQ of over 110.

>If this is a bad idea, it's not bad for obvious reasons.

Imagine a political party you don't like introducing this measure, along with the test that determines your IQ. Of course, since you couldn't spot the flaw, you clearly don't get to vote anyway. ;-)

I know :). It's a very valid reason (and exactly because I wouldn't support this proposal if any political party in my country came up with it), but it still is more about people abusing the concept rather than the concept itself :).

It solves the wrong problem. Voter turnout is already horrendous, we don't need to put any more barriers in the way of participation.

That's a bit naive. A vote doesn't mean a do what you want. Trust is not automatic. It comes from transparency and accountability which secrecy inhibits.

There is no concept of trust in a democracy. Everything is about being open and accountable. There is zero need to negotiate a commercial treaty in secret, this is an anti-pattern.

Debating the need for secrecy drags one down a flawed, self serving and fabricated narrative.

And the explicit purpose of things like the EU is to use international treaties to move control of law from the parliament(s)/congress to the executive of larger international organisations.

Just read up on the EU constitution debacle to see this in action.

True, they might. These people often seem to have a vastly inflated idea of their own intelligence and understanding.

They may be justified here; it doesn't take much to be smarter than public opinion driven by outrage-inducing media.

s/really works/is being ruled/

Which implies that they know how economics work.

I can't say how unbiased this [0] comic is, but I feel like it does a really good job putting TPP in perspective.

[0] http://economixcomix.com/home/tpp/

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