TISA: Leaked Documents Related to TTP

[Oscar]

TPP: WikiLeaks Releases Secret (TISA) Documents Related to Controversial US Trade Pact

[ http://www.alternet.org/wikileaks-relea ... 037371&t=5 ]

Document dump regarding Trade in Services Agreement comes day after organization put $100,000 bounty on documents from series of US trade treaties

By Sam Thielman / The Guardian June 4, 2015

WikiLeaks on Wednesday released 17 different documents related to the Trade in Services Agreement (Tisa), a controversial pact currently being hashed out between the US and 23 other countries – most of them in Europe and South America.

The document dump comes at a tense moment in the negotiations over a series of trade deals. President Barack Obama has clashed with his own party over the deals as critics have worried about the impact on jobs and civil liberties.

On Tuesday, WikiLeaks put a $100,000 bounty on documents relating to the alphabet soup of trade treaties currently being negotiated between the US and the rest of the world, particularly the controversial Trans-Pacific trade agreement (TPP). The offer, announced yesterday, has already raised more than $33,000.

Wednesday’s leak is the third time that WikLeaks has published sections from secret trade agreements. In January it leaked a chapter from the TPP related to the environment. In November 2013 it made public a draft of the agreement’s intellectual property chapter, containing proposals that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange said would “trample over individual rights and free expression”.

Among the text leaked on Wednesday are TISA’s annex on telecommunications services, an amendment that would standardize regulation of telecoms across member countries, according to WikiLeaks. Other documents in the batch of files relate to e-commerce, transportation of living people and regulation of financial services corporations.

Andrew Bates, press secretary for the president’s office of the US trade representative, said: “While the US does not comment on alleged leaked negotiating information, it is important to underscore that American services exports are at all-time high of $710.6bn, and those exports support 4.6m well-paying jobs all over the country.

“That is why president Obama has made opening markets for US services exporters a chief priority of his middle-class economics agenda.”

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