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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.'"
...to make the judgement that the government is becoming more secretive. The article states that in each of the three years prior the Pentagon has blocked 4, 5, and 9 patents submitted by the NSA. Three years of evidence is hardly enough to go by. There may be a perfectly good reason as to why more patents were blocked this year. With such a small number of patents denied it is possible that the NSA applied for more patents and the percentage of patents blocked is actually less than previous years. It is also possible that The NSA developed more inventions this year that could be deemed sensitive information. I would like to know how many patents submitted by the NSA have been blocked by the pentagon in the past 50-60 years and what percentage of patent applications have been blocked each year. That information would be much more useful. Move on, nothing to see here.
Time makes more converts than reason
Seems to me more like an indication of how much secure cryptography has gained value as a tool of war.
I suspect that the Pentagon is more concerned with preserving an edge in weapons technology, than with secrecy-as-secrecy.
The secrecy thing is just a side effect of wanting the edge.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
Honestly, the fact we know there ARE secrets is progress from the Cold War, in my opinion.
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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.
Does this mean that what is being kept secret *needs* to be? Not always... but it is better safe than sorry.
[obviously there are extremes, making an office supply order confidential for example, but patents are understandable]
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
The brief description of this article on slashdot as well as the article itself are a bit alarmist. The article does say that the number of secrecy orders on NSA patents has increased (nine in '05, as opposed to five in '04 and none in the previous three years), but the number of secrecy orders on private inventors has been cut nearly in half, from 61 to 32. This indicates that in some ways the USPTO is being less secretive, not more. It is possible that the small change in NSA patents is due to a different bureaucratic mechanism for screening patents, perhaps the NSA itself has gotten less stringent so the USPTO and the Pentagon have had to become more sensitive in order to compromise, and it is even possible that the change is statistically meaningless due to the small sample size, but it is harder to account for the larger drop (numerically) in the secrecy of the patents of private inventors.
Honestly now...
Coca-cola is a private company. The government is by definition a public body that we, ideally, control. If Coke invents some new thing and decides to keep it a secret, you can tell them how you feel by not buying any Coke. You have no choice with the government.
They take your taxes, period. I think it is quite reasonable to insist that what the government does/creates with our money be made, if at all possible, public. That's how government is supposed to work.
Elrond, Duke of URL
"This is the most fun I've had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"-Sam&Max
I suspect it's the sign of a culture clash as much as anything. Below the top level of bureaucracy, the NSA employs a lot of very smart people -- and not just smart, but creative and curious people as well, many of them mathematicians and computer scientists engaged in pure research. (One of my math professors, an absolutely brilliant guy and a great teacher, was hired away by them to work on Some Project for Some Amount Of Money That Was Unspecified, But Was Much More Than He Was Making Teaching College. I was happy for him, but sad that I wouldn't be able to take any more classes from him.) Even if they work for "No Such Agency," they're basically long-haired hippies who want to share their work with, like, the human race, man. And of course the Pentagon is ... well, it's the Pentagon. No hippies allowed. It's like the standard IT-guys-vs.-suits conflict that's played out in the corporate world all the time, but with much higher stakes.
/. terms: the Pentagon loves Microsoft, the NSA released its own Linux distro. You figure it out.
To boil it down to
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
If you've never been in a position handling classified information, it may be hard to see security holes.
... and gave away the entire computer industry in the process. The world could have been at least a decade ahead in computer technology, and the UK far richer, if not for this display of paranoia.
I have "been in a position handling classified information" -- some of it very classified indeed -- and here's why I think you're wrong:
1) Classification costs insane amounts of money; not just the classification process and the protections classified material requires, but in the case of technology, the potential profit to be realized by releasing the technology for civilian use. A good example of this is what the British government did to their nascent computer industry after WW2. At the end of the war, they had the best computer technology and computer scientists in the world, bar none. No one else, including the US, was even in the running. So, of course, in classic late-stage empire style, they classified everything, destroyed the actual machines, hounded people out of that line of work (and at least one of them to death)
2) Classifying everything is equivalent to classifying nothing. People who work with classified information which they know is bullshit tend to get contemptuous of the rules (I've seen classified documents just sitting around in public areas, no one watching them, with people milling by!) So it increases the chances of genuinely important information getting leaked.
3) We, the people of the United States, pay for that work with our tax dollars. I don't think anyone will argue that everything the government comes up with should be for sale at Radio Shack -- but the government must have an overriding interest in keeping potentially useful technology (and everything else, for that matter) secret from the people who paid for it, and whose interests it is supposed to serve. And no, "this might be useful to someone somewhere sometime who wants to do something bad, better safe than sorry" just doesn't cut it.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
okay, how about better safe then my million dollar ass and 450 million dollar plane lost. Classification is expensive. Loosing people and hardware is very expensive. Loosing a war is terminal.
Yes, but in an over-classified world, how would you know that we were losing the war?
Secret governments fail due to internal decay. The only cure for that disease is the sunshine of open government.
Only in the most extreme cases should information be classified. Once you start creating state secrets "just in case" it is impossible to stop.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
Thanks for that link, there's some pretty cool stuff on there.
I went to the uspto.gov site and looked up a few of them (in particular "rocess of preventing visual access to a semiconductor device by applying an opaque ceramic coating to integrated circuit devices," No. 5,258,334) and the assignee is listed as "The U.S. Government as represented by the Director, National Security."
I wonder if this means that the patented idea is essentially public domain? Other creative works which are products of the Government are automatically public domain in terms of copyright, so is the right to use an idea as well? Or if you want to use one, do you have to go to the NSD and ask for permission / licensing? And if the latter, what do they charge, and who gets the money?
I suspect, judging just by the problems and obvious conflicts-of-interest that you'd get if licensing was required, that they are free to use, in which case having the NSA patent something is much like having one of the Linux associations trademark something; they're never going to actually profit from it, but it potentially prevents someone else from doing so unfairly. And I suspect it also looks really good on the NSA's researchers' resumes and improves morale.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Don't worry, this is self-limiting. After enough of its material becomes non-disseminable, the NSA's ability to innovate will quickly dry up...
Seeing bad movies only encourages them. Watch responsibly
For me, the big surprise here is that the NSA, an agency of the federal government, can apply for a patent in the first place. How does that work, exactly, when the NSA actually gets a patent? Since it's funded by tax dollars, can anyone use the invention? Do we need to apply for a license to use the invention? Is there a licensing fee? If so, where does that money go? Government agencies are neither people nor corporations, so do they have some sort of legal status that allows them to own things like patents? Could the FDA or the NIH start patenting drugs? Could the House of Representatives patent some novel method of voting and prevent the Senate from using it?
Perhaps they're trying to patent ideas in order to make them public and prevent anyone else from obtaining a patent on the same idea, and we're all free to use the idea. But then why not just publish the idea and make sure that the USPTO is aware of it?
In my experience, those with broad powers to keep secrets will eventually misuse such power in order to cover up wrongdoing. The temptation is simply too great-you screwed up, badly, you can either:
A: Admit it, or
B: Keep it secret.
While there are exceptions, most will choose to keep it secret. That's an unfortunate reality but a true one.
And in fact, it's been found that classification has quite often been used unnecessarily or even maliciously. It has also been found that information is kept classified far longer then it need be (i.e., it held strategic value 50 years ago, and needed to be classified, it lost its strategic value 40 years ago and could've safely been declassified, but it stayed classified until 2 years ago because it would've embarrassed someone. Coincidentally, of course, that person died 2 years ago.)
A democratic government (or ANY government which claims to serve, rather than rule, the people it represents) must by definition be open. If we cannot get a complete picture of what any given leader or organization is up to, then we cannot make an informed choice as to whether to re-elect that leader. If we do not know a problem exists, we cannot protest it to our Congressmen/Senators. If the press are routinely denied access to critical information on potential wrongdoing, their "freedom of the press" becomes a farce.
We are indeed "better safe then sorry"-and we are safest when we can keep a close, critical eye on our government. Not when they're allowed to keep anything secret they wish with no oversight and no consequences for misuse of that authority.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
Unfortunately, I believe their numbers are dwindling, as corporate sponsorship (what else can you call the necessity of corporate "campaign contributions") continues to become more necessary for one to be elected.
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Notice that if I'm going to be investing $50000 in parts and equipment (say because I've just figured out to make a Farnsworth generator actually produce power), another $10000 for a patent makes a lot more sense. It is software patents that have such a ridiculous discrepancy between the cost of invention and the cost of a patent. That is why "people on /." (and Groklaw.net) are against *software* patents, not patents in general.
It is also software patents for which the Patent Office seems to have the most trouble distinguishing real inventions from the trivial. But even if that problem (USPTO ignorance of software technology) is fixed, there is simply no need for patent protection of software, because there is no hard cost of invention. It "only" costs time to write and debug code - and that debugged and working code is already protected by copyright. Software patents are purely a tool of oppression.
"So here is the hypothetical question, suppose I invented a new method to decrypt information VERY fast (i.e polynomial time). If I did not apply for a patent here, but either patented it in europe, or just published it, would that be illegal?"
Release the information anonymously, and enjoy being the catalyst that begins the post-crypto world.
If you came up with such a discovery, would you *really* let any government have it?
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
You may be right.
...But you may not. That's kind of the point. When everything is a secret whether there's a valid reason or not, none of us knows what kinds of motivations are at work behind the scenes.
Even if I give the people in charge now the benefit of a doubt and pretend like all they're doing is covering their ass, it doesn't change the fact that now that the precedent is set and government secrecy is the rule, not the exception, there's nothing to stop someone who is truly evil from taking power and wreaking havoc the likes of which this planet has never seen.
Imagine a modern-day Hitler. (No, I'm not comparing him to George Bush, I'm talking about a hypothetical person who's litierally—word used correctly—much more evil.) Does anyone remember that he was Time Magazine's Man of the Year of 1938? As he was working his way into power, people loved him, because he seemed like an average working-class guy who wanted to do right by the German people. They had no clue what future atrocities were to come. It's not too hard for me to imagine someone like that being elected in this country. Now imagine if this modern-day Hitler managed to get in charge of the one and only world superpower, and that once he started doing things like, well, Hitler did, there was no way to hold him accountable. No one knew because all of his actions were classified as national security secrets. Hey, wait, isn't that pretty much exactly what happened back then?
Again, I'm not saying that that is what's going on right now, but who knows? Maybe it is. But even if it's not, if we allow a political environment in which it can happen, there's nothing to stop it from happening in 2008. Or 2012. Or 2016. Because it can, it's just a matter of time before it does. Such is the nature of absolute power.
Is this what we really want?
I'm sorry, but whether they're covering their asses or trying to take over the world doesn't change the fact that what they're doing is evil, and it literally—word used correctly—has the potential to destroy any semblance of freedom in this country and maybe even the whole world.
And to the parent post, that was an excellent point about the government not letting us keep any secrets from them. I've never really thought about it before, but it's really a scary thought. Every intimate detail of my life is open to Uncle Sam, but when I ask stupid questions to try to make sure Uncle Sam's not evil, well, it's a totally different story.
People are so wrapped up in how Uncle Sam will protect us from the terrorists that they forget to ask the question that's much more important: Who will protect us from Uncle Sam?