Once the various parties to the negotiations agree, must the final agreement be made public before it is officially adopted — or is there a danger that the changes could be made without the American public ever knowing? This would rightly be classified as “concealing controversial changes to intellectual property rights law behind a sheild of classification” — but this hasn’t actually happened yet, and there’s no evidence to suggest that it will happen, is there?

It seems to me that an agreement that allows border searches of iPods would effectively be made public as soon as an American citizen’s iPod was searched at the border. But if such a provision were made public in advance — so it could be debated before it is enacted (presumably by the Senate?) — is it likely that most Americans would object loudly enough to make a difference?

The fact that the Obama Administration can keep the details of this agreement a secret and there is virtually no media coverage of the negotiations speaks either to (a) the insignificance of this issue compared to all the other, more important things going on in this country, or (b) the degree to which the media is complicit in ignoring these important issues.

Either way, I wonder what you would say to the editor of the New York Times in an effort to convince the newspaper to run a front-page article about the agreement. (My apologies if the Times has run such an article and I missed it.)

The Wired article says, “If ratified, leaked documents posted on WikiLeaks and other comments suggest the proposed trade accord would criminalize peer-to-peer file sharing, subject iPods to border searches and allow internet service providers to monitor their customers’ communications.”

Who cares? What difference does this make? Why are these changes so controversial?