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Patents vs. Secrecy
giampy writes "New Scientist is reporting that the NSA appears to be having its patent applications increasingly blocked by the Pentagon. From the article: 'the fact that the Pentagon is classifying things that the NSA believes should be public is an indication of how much secrecy has crept into government over the past few years.'"
Having done a smidge of work for the government, I'm happier with secrets "just in case" than creating holes that might not have to have been made.
I'm sorry, but this attitude just smacks of laziness on the part of a classification clerk. When I worked at Department of Energy sites I was amused to discover that groundwater well construction documents known as 'as-builts' were classified during the Cold War. We had to send over a guy with a clearence to review the well log and report back to the classification clerk that no national security information would be disclosed by declassifying the record. At one site the DOE was custodian to over 4,000 wells, of which 90% of the records were classified. Every hour spent by a PhD geologist reviewing well records cost the government real money. This laziness in applying a classified status to well records cost the taxpayers millions of dollars throughout the DOE complex without advancing national security one iota. Countless other examples of construction records for other non-proliferation items were also classified.
Perhaps you like throwing money away for useless 'feel good' measures, but I don't.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
Not at all. This has nothing to do with eminent domain, this has to do with military secrets, and how the ability to peg something as "classified" results in the effective theft of intellectual property.
Back in the sixties, a company my father started did a lot of government contract electronics design and manufacturing, mostly for the Navy (some Air Force.) Some of his designs were parsecs beyond what the Navy was currently using at the time, so good that the Navy simply classified them outright. Okay, that's a compliment in a way, but it meant that he couldn't tell anyone about his concepts, couldn't use them for anything himself, and couldn't market any products made with them unless the government chose to buy them from him. Which they didn't, because after stealing his IP they simply shopped it around to other vendors to get a better deal (or to somebody's brother-in-law, whatever.) After that experience, he learned to withhold key parts of specifications so even if they classified what he gave them it wouldn't do them any good. He pissed off more than a few Navy engineers that way, but his attitude was simple: if it's good enough for the Navy to steal it's good enough for them to pay the inventor a fair price.
This all happened was forty years ago, and given the turn our society and our government has taken since, I can't believe the situation has improved any. Really, working for the military is a risky business for any private-sector operation, no matter how you slice it. Money to be made, sure, but you gotta be careful.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
cut any silly implications that government secrecy is somehow something new with the Bush administration
You're right, secrecy isn't a new idea in government. However, the sheer amount of secret things - classified data, blocked FOIA requests, and so much more has grown exponentially in the past 20 years or so. The amount of secrecy allowed in the US now is leaps and bounds above what it was when Reagan was president. (And it was a lot then!)
It used to be that data defaulted to "unclassified" unless it was specifically classified. But lately it's taken a quite a turn - more and more data is defaulting to "classified".
I think a large part of this has to do with two realizations at the government level. One, the less information about the government is out there, the less accountable their constituents can hold them. (This is why the FOIA is so critical for the protection of rights for US citizens.) Two, statistical mining, data interpolation and extrapolation, and other sophisticated, computationally-intensive information guessing techniques have advanced so rapidly and with such efficacy that even when only "non-sensitive" portions of data are released, people are becoming extremely good at figuring out the underlying secrets.
Personally, it scares me that the government can keep secrets from me without even telling me why they're keeping it a secret. ("National Security" has become the catch-all reason to classify ANYTHING, it seems.) It scares me more that the government will no longer let me keep secrets from it. That disparity is beginning to undermine the balance of power between the electors and the elect, and could very easily lead this country into a tryannical state. I thank God that there are still some idealists in the government who are trying to make the right decisions; it is they who help to counteract the creep of power and those it affects.