Last year the number of patent applications that were subject to a “secrecy order” under the Invention Secrecy Act of 1951 was the highest that it has been in more than two decades, according to data obtained from the US Patent and Trademark Office.
Whenever disclosure of a new invention is deemed to be “detrimental to national security,” a secrecy order may be imposed on the patent application, preventing its public disclosure and blocking issuance of the patent. Most affected inventions seem to involve technologies that have military uses. But the current criteria that are used to make the determination have not been released, so the actual scope of invention secrecy is not publicly known.
At the end of FY 2018 (September 30, 2018), there were 5,792 secrecy orders in effect, up slightly from 5,784 the year before.
There were 85 new orders imposed, and 77 existing orders that were rescinded. The remaining orders, which were originally imposed in previous years, were renewed. Among the new orders, there were 43 that were imposed on private inventors (i.e., not government employees or contractors). These so-called “John Doe” secrecy orders are a constitutionally suspect category, since they involve prior restraint on the speech of a private citizen or business.
The new total of 5,792 secrecy orders in effect is the highest since 1993, when the total was 5,909.
When a secrecy order is rescinded — years or sometimes decades after it was imposed — the invention may finally be patented.
When asked whether any of the inventions that were released from a secrecy order in 2018 had subsequently been patented, the US Patent and Trademark Office said it had no record of such patents.
See, relatedly, “The U.S. Government’s Secret Inventions” by Arvind Dilawar, Slate, May 9, 2018.
Using the NIST as an example, the Radiation Physics Building (still without the funding to complete its renovation) is crucial to national security and the medical community. If it were to go down (or away), every medical device in the United States that uses radiation would be decertified within 6 months, creating a significant single point of failure that cannot be quickly mitigated.
The federal government can support more proactive, efficient, and cost-effective resiliency planning by certifying predictive models to validate and publicly indicate their quality.
We need a new agency that specializes in uncovering funding opportunities that were overlooked elsewhere. Judging from the history of scientific breakthroughs, the benefits could be quite substantial.
The cost of inaction is not merely economic; it is measured in preventable illness, deaths and diminished livelihoods.