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An October 2007 global measure, overriding national sovereignty, also threatens Net Neutrality, consumer privacy, and civil liberties. Called the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), secret negotiations seek to subvert them, ostensibly to protect copyrighted intellectual property, including films, photos, and songs. ACTA remains a work in progress, but developments going forward bear watching, especially if a global agreement is reached.
These and perhaps other measures, including presidential Executive Orders, threaten America's First Amendments freedoms, without which all others are at risk.
(4) ICE Operates Secret Detention and Courts
On November 25, 2002, the Homeland Security Act (HSA) established the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Then in March 2003, its largest investigative and enforcement arm was created - the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE). Charged with protecting public safety by identifying and targeting "criminal" and "terrorist" threats, most often undocumented immigrants are victimized, most here because NAFTA globalized trade rules destroyed their livelihoods at home. As a result, they came out of need, not choice, and aren't terrorists.
Yet they're treated that way - sought, rounded up, and detained oppressively, thousands in unlisted, unmarked subfield offices before secret court hearings deport them.
"People are held in a vast network of more than three hundred detention facilities in nearly every state in the country," yet no major media reports explain it or how they're treated. Instead victims are racially profiled, vilified and terrorized as criminals, laws like Arizona's making all resident Latinos suspected intruders, authorities empowered to demand citizenship if asked or be detained and then deported.
In the past decade, constitutional protections have seriously eroded en route to eliminating them altogether, repressive agencies like ICE, the FBI, local goon squads, and others on the prowl against anyone for any reason, including peaceful demonstrators.
(5) Blackwater (Xe): The Secret US War in Pakistan
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