What is this about

My name is Mark Harris. I'm a technology consultant in Wellington, New Zealand. I used to work for the NZ Government in a wide number of roles between 1982 and 2005. My last role was in the E-government Unit of the State Services Commission, which is one of the 3 central agencies (i.e. they manage the rest) of the NZ Public Service. My work included managing the .govt.nz namespace, the Government Web Guidelines and other stuff as and when required, usually to do with Government's use of the Internet.

On 8 June 2008, I first heard the term "ACTA" while reading an RSS feed. I can't remember which site I initially got it from (possibly BoingBoing or Groklaw) anyway, it was a note that there was a new document leaked on Wikileaks about a trade agreement to do with copyright and piracy and it was called the Anti-Counterfeiting? Trade Agreement or ACTA. I downloaded it and had a look.

Now, I keep my ear pretty close to the copyright ground and I hadn't heard about this but New Zealand was listed as a party to the negotiations. So I did a search and found that the Ministry of Economic Development (MED) was managing our involvement, which gave me pause as we have a Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT which usually deals with trade matters and a border agreement about counterfeiting would normally come under them or Customs or both. MED handles (among many things) discussions of copyright and intellectual property. This made me think that perhaps some of the 'wingnuts' raving about an attempt by the US to force an international DMCA might have a point.

Checking the Government search engine shows that indeed Customs and MFAT are taking notice and participating but MED is leading the pack. Also, Associate Commerce Minister Judith Tizard had called for submissions on this very issue on 28 May with a closing date on 14 July 2008. So I looked at the MED site - at the time there were only 2 items (sry, didn't screenshot it) which were the info sheet and another copy of the Beehive press release. I tried their search tool, but I suspect it is broken or heavily optimised for IE. Anyway (see screenshot gallery) I couldn't see anything on their site.

So, at 11:49 pm on Sunday 8 June, I sent an Official Information Act Request to MED (you can see the progression of correspondenceMED Correspondance

As of yet, I've had nothing from them - politely, of course. They had the 20 working days that the OIA allows, and then extended it for another 2 weeks, as the Act also permits. They extended my deadline for a submission as well, to the 28th of July. So they give themselves 6 weeks to comply with my request (and I'm not holding my breath that that's the last extension) then I get 1 week to boil it down to make my submission.

This is not what I call consultation or open government, and it makes me wonder (having been on a few of these from the other side over the years) what they're hiding. There are reports from overseas that the US has required everyone to sign Non-Disclosure? Agreements. I don't know about that but there certainly seems a effort not to be open about this.

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