> and if the whole process was public there would be too much bikeshedding and pressure on the negotiators.

That's a feature, not a bug. Whence this argument that trade negotiations are somehow different from every single other aspect of good governance? For all other mechanisms of government, everyone agrees that transparency is a vital mechanism for preventing corruption, and that whatever inefficiencies it introduces into the system are a necessary evil. Yet somehow free trade agreements operate on a different set of rules; even though time after time it's been shown that this invites boatloads of the exact corruption that government transparency is meant to combat. [source: every TPP/TTIP leak thus far]

Literally having the exact same conversion on reddit. You are right, it is a feature not a bug.

I fucking hate these arguments, that "we need secrecy to negotiate effectively". The problem is, the negotiations are "effective" on behalf of corporations, not the public. Yes, they happen in secret for a reason, but that's not a reason we're bound to respect.

If only "in secret" really meant "only between diplomats" and not "hidden from the public but not corporations".

That might be true in theory. In fact, secrecy is used to hide a vast array of horrors and ram them through under the cover of "trade liberalization."

The first link doesn't even discuss secrecy, unless the implicit reason is, "because negotiator's lie".

Thanks, that was indeed the wrong NPR story. Fixed!