 The Trans-Pacific Partnership is an international trade agreement. While international trade agreements can be good in theory, in recent years they have tended to include a lot of things that are only tangentially related to trade. As those things have been added, they have also gotten progressively more secret. The TPP chapter on intellectual property is one of these tangential, secret things. This is a problem because of something called policy laundering. Let's say someone wants Congress to pass a bill, but the bill is a really bad idea. The public can argue against its merits to convince Congress not to pass it. But then those same people move on to the murky world of international treaties. Fewer people are paying attention to what is in treaties, and the treaties are often secret until just before they are finalized, so it is easier to sneak bad ideas into them. Now, those people come back to Congress with their bad idea. However, this time they do not debate the idea on the merits. Instead, they insist that Congress has to enact their idea in order to comply with our treaty obligations and meet international norms. This all brings us back to the IP chapter of the TPP. The only people who know what is in it are the negotiating countries and a group of industry advisors. That's not good enough. That's why we are calling on the government to bring transparency and public participation to the TPP process.