Who are the people negotiating and agreeing to these 'agreements'(this, ACTA, etc) and what could their justification for keeping them secret possibly be?
Why they keep it secret, I don't know.
Such secrecy is incompatible with democracy, why refer to some of the countries participating in this as "democratic"?
Secrecy, at least concerning the details, during negotiation gives the negotiators a better opportunity to work out a deal that best serves the interests of the country as a whole.
Note that I'm only talking about secrecy during negotiation. The result of the negotiations should be made public well before Congress votes on it, to give the country time to decide on whether to accept or not.
From leaked documents, it appears that inside the negotiations, there's really not the kind of secrecy you're imagining. Every part to ACTA, for example, just marked it up as they thought it should be, and then there was a lot of something (not public) to get to a final draft. That's not keeping a maximum (or minimum) position secret in order to gain advantage, that's just deciding how much of something can be foisted upon the global public without causing a revolution.
From my standpoint, the secrecy we get is of no use to anyone but corporate fat cats and insiders.
I can see how certain things can be justifiably kept secret in a democracy, like matters related to national security (military, intelligence, etc.). But secrecy in business and financial regulation is just corruption. Especially when the interests in question are those of private businesses and may not be in the best interests of the country as a whole - and if the deliberations are secret, how can we and our elected representatives decide whose interests are actually being promoted?
Doesn't pass the sniff test.
"""Declassify on: Five years from entry into force of the TISA agreement or, if no agreement enters into force, five years from the close of the negotiations."""
I don't understand why this is so confusing: It's much easier for negotiators to propose a series of concessions and trade-offs in private, knowing that they'll only face political heat for those that actually make it into the final agreement.
People cant do informed choices and elect other people that represent them if the people in power make choices behind close doors.We are not talking about 2 corporations which are negociating something.
So no,"democracies" need no secrets. Or it says a lot about what the people in power think about their constituent.
Secrets protect those who are in power,secrets never protect the people.
Secrecy is therefore totally anti-democratic.
Would that be an existential threat to the nation and the people? Or would be an embarrassment to the upper echelons of government and military?
Would it be better for the people for such an event to happen, or worse?
However in the United States these decisions are not made by citizens but by elected officials voted in by citizens. Hence the United States is not a Democracy, but a Democratic Republic.
You can play with words as much as you want, the substance here is that citizens are purposely kept uninformed, and without information there is no such thing as informed consent, a core principle of democracy regardless of the technical details.