SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
The leak is here.
First announced on reddit
Original Submission
[Ed. addition]
What is the TTIP?
It's the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership.
TTIP is the biggest free-trade agreement ever, it's being discussed for quite a while now between Europe and the US. The discussions have been critizised for their lack of transparency and a lot of people fear that industry regulations will be lower after the agreement diminishing rights of citizens. Since the outcome will affect 820 million people, we're investigating it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_Trade_and_Investment_Partnership
According to the reddit discussion, a number of the documents have already been made public.
[Ed. update: Typo fix and revised the link to the correctiv.org web site to point to the English version; removed text pertaining to the German version.]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @11:47AM
Just create something from scratch that looks like it could be related to the TTIP. Base your creation on the rumors that have circulated so far. Get some news organizations to pick up your fake, and start raising hell about it. Who will claim it is a fake, if they will not show the public the real documents? Politicians are not known for reading the whole documents, so you can make the fake say something really outrageous. Then ask the politicians for their comments on the outrageous statement, and watch them back away from TTIP.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by c0lo on Monday July 13 2015, @01:18PM
Sorry mate, not only that it'd be quite an effort, but the reality will beat fiction pants down. Want an example you say? Have some excerpts from the eBay lobbying letter [documentcloud.org]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2, Informative) by topdawg on Monday July 13 2015, @11:54AM
The link at the bottom didn't work for me when I clicked it either, but if you actually pull the link out and paste into the browser, there is an actual English version, here is the link to save you the time https://correctiv.org/en/investigations/ttip/documents/ [correctiv.org]
(Score: 2) by martyb on Monday July 13 2015, @12:49PM
Hey! Thanks for the the link — I've updated the story link to point to it, and removed verbiage pertaining to the German version.
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @12:02PM
From the summary:
There's no link to connectiv.org. There's a link to correctiv.org. That name already suggests a certain type of action. ;-)
(Score: 2) by martyb on Monday July 13 2015, @12:50PM
I "correctiv-ated", the text, but when I replaced the link to point to the English version of the site, that text became unnecessary, so removed it. Thanks for keeping us on our toes!
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2) by fritsd on Monday July 13 2015, @12:50PM
I'll give it a swing.. don't laugh about my poor German.
Mon Jul 13 14:46:30 CEST 2015
downloaded from https://correctiv.org/recherchen/ttip/dokumente/ [correctiv.org]
The Documents
The negotiations to the free trade (abkommen?) TTIP take place behind closed doors.
The documents to the (unterredungen=discussions?) are not public.
That creates mistrust.
Nobody knows, which positions are discussed, or for which reasons.
Are citizens' interests played out against business interests?
Is the industry lobby undermining our democracy?
What do the USA and the states of Europe really want to achieve?
(Score: 3, Informative) by fritsd on Monday July 13 2015, @12:59PM
paragraph 2:
"We want to elucidate. And that's why we are publishing, under #openTTIP, a lot of confidential documents that we obtained.
Those point out, which states represent which interests, which questions are heavily under negotiation, or which side is blocking [which issue -tr].
Many worries from TTIP critics are also shared by some governments."
I translated "heftig gestritten" as "heavily under negotiation" ;-)
(Score: 2) by fritsd on Monday July 13 2015, @01:08PM
The rest of the text:
"We are of the opinion, that more transparency can lead to a better debate of the agreement.
Hence: if you have (Unterlagen=topics?) of TTIP about which the public would like to know, please send us these documents.
Please also anonymously to our secured anonymous letterbox.
We will (prüfen != try out in this context. no idea -tr) all available documents, prepare them, and collect and publish them on our website.
We are interested in all available positions (position papers?) that are sent by the lobbyists to the governments of the EU and the USA.
You have documents? Send us the information. We have an anonymous letterbox for this purpose under https:// correctiv-upload.org. "
(Score: 5, Informative) by Thexalon on Monday July 13 2015, @01:48PM
In a nutshell, the dream of many in Washington and Brussels (and their bosses in New York and London and Frankfurt) is a world in which there is no such thing as a tariff or trade regulation. And now they really want to hurry that up and make it the law of the world before those pesky voters come along and elect somebody who doesn't want to do that.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by dry on Tuesday July 14 2015, @03:53AM
Of course they want trade regulations. They want consumers to be stuck in their geo-location and not capable of directly buying from over-seas. Think regional protection on DVDs and such as well as how much more expensive many things are in some countries such as Australia and Canada. In the case of Canada where the average price of goods is a third more then in America, it is done just because they can (at least according to the Canadian Senate). And obviously the same with Australia when it comes to digital goods at least.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by redbear762 on Monday July 13 2015, @04:59PM
This is the rise of the Megacorps of Gibson and Rucker's Dystopian Future.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Monday July 13 2015, @06:17PM
Having plowed through many of the documents, there is little that should come as a surprise. Most of it is also on the EU Negotiations site. This might not be getting the publicity that it deserves, but it is not because the EU is trying to hide it, in fact quite the opposite. It is the first of the trade agreements that is getting any publicity at all - the fact that not many are accessing the information is hardly the fault of the EU.
Still, I don't like the look of what is being discussed. Somebody will drive a coach and horses through whatever is actually agreed.