Once again I’m ashamed of my government. Disappointed and enraged at it.

And this time it’s not about spending public money on crap, increasing taxes to pay astronomic salaries to some lazy ass MPs or being generally worthless. It’s much worse!

Today Romania signed ACTA. An international agreement which is so broad in scope and so evil that makes SOPA look like a plea to save the whales.

At least I’m not the only one.The following EU countries also signed it: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Latvia, Luxembourg, Malta, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and the UK. Shame on them too.

Unlike SOPA / PIPA, ACTA was negotiated in secret. The public was deemed “too ignorant” to be involved in the talks. For the first time in modern history, democracy was left out on a global scale. If you’re unfamiliar with ACTA, just take a look at the clip below:

In a world where technological progress should be used to improve the quality of life for everyone, ACTA enslaves us all.

Cheap medicine could be banned under ACTA in order to protect the intelectual rights of big pharmaceutical companies. Under current legislation, a government in difficulty, for example facing an epidemic, if it can’t get the required medication at a reasonable price, can break patents and produce the drugs in order to save its population without fear of retaliation. Under ACTA, this will no longer be possible.

All internet traffic will be monitored in order to detect possible breaches in copyright. All confidential medical information, all the love letters sent via email, all the chat conversations in which you’re flirting with your hot co-worker, all your bank details, everything – and I do mean everything – will be scanned and recorded by your ISP.

Open source programs could be banned. Even if you’re a M$ fanboy / fangirl that only uses Winblows™, you still have to understand that the Internet runs on Linux and open source. Popular services such as Google, Facebook, Wikipedia or WordPress run on open source and the Apache web server powers 60% of all the sites on the Internet.

You might even end up in jail for posting a video from your birthday party because some copyrighted music is playing in the background.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a lazy-ass socialist. I truly believe in capitalism, but I also believe that everybody should have a fair chance of making a good living by hard and honest work. If legislation like ACTA gets enacted, the world will be split in the chosen few, wealthy individuals that will use legislation to kill any newcomer in their field with patents and copyright issues, an army defending them and the rest, with

Respect to Germany, the Netherlands, Estonia, Cyprus and Slovakia for not signing ACTA today. But for the rest of us, the fight is not yet lost. All international treaties have to be ratified so we can still stop this.

If you want to help, contact your representative and tell him / her that you don’t want such legislation ratified. The MPs are there to represent you and usually they tend to give in when they see their political carers threatened. If enough people contact them, they will not ratify ACTA and risk not being voted again.

Go to protests, if there are some in your area.

Do not engage in fights with the police. Do not attempt to DoS government agencies. Hacktivism is for hackers and security experts. Downloading the LOIC doesn’t make you a hacker and flooding some government website won’t help that much. And if you don’t really know what you’re doing, you’re going to get caught and thrown in jail.