Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
publish it! :D
Does this mean that there are a bunch of secret ideas out there that I can patent for my own personal profit? Score!
If the Pentagon makes your patent secret, will they compensate you? I know that's a hard call as far as value is concerned. But let's say you're in negotiations with some company. You're coming to an amount of $5 million. Will the Pentagon send you a check for $5 million. Will they compensate the company in negations with you too? Or will they just say "Eminent Domain" and just take the thing and if you object, put you in jail?
What would happen if you just said "Fuck you!" and release it on the Net - jail you? The cat's already out of the bag.
Evil people don't think they're evil. - George Lucas, Making of Ep III
...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
Quite interesting what kind of patents they have for example "US05224756 Integrated child seat for vehicle". I bet James Bond never had that one! Full list of patents: http://cryptome.org/nsa-patents.htm
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!"
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.
The war on pigeon doo-doo
Two and a half months after a Freedom of Information request was filed, a 376 document was produced, but with 149 pages completedly blacked out and 102 pages partially blacked out.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
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!"
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?