Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

Nothing new. This has been common in the US for decades. I'm actually rather surprised that this is new for Japan, which has a mature defense industry. They even produce their own air-to-air missiles, tech right at the heart of the matter.

https://www.upcounsel.com/classified-patents

"In 2017, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) reported statistics that there were over 5,700 classified patents held by the United States government. These inventions are highly guarded under sensitive secrecy orders. The public may never know more about these classified inventions, but some once-secret patents included a laser-tracking system, a stronger net, and a warhead-production method.

Invention secrecy dates back to the 1930s, but exploded in the 1940s when nuclear weapon development became a highly classified topic. Under the Invention Secrecy Act of 1951, federal law prevented the disclosure of new technologies and inventions that may present a national security threat to the United States."

Wait, what's the point of a secret patent though? Like I get the point of keeping military innovations secret, but patents are supposed to be a trade where the government offers a limited-time monopoly on a technology, in exchange for making the secret sauce of said technology public.

If I re-invent/re-discover the tech behind a secret patent, can I be sued for patent infringement, despite the patent being non-public? What's the point of granting patents for this?

They aren't totally secret. Other companies in the field know about and can see them. The patents are just not made as public as normal patents. So friendly companies, those with the appropriate security clearances, still benefit from the shared knowledge.

If, sitting in your garage/basement, you invent a tech covered by a secret patent then you will be getting a job offer. If you market that tech then you will probably be arrested for dealing in weapons or other heavily-controlled material. Building missile guidance systems or uranium enrichment centrifuges is not something done by home tinkerers.

>"If, sitting in your garage/basement, you invent a tech covered by a secret patent then you will be getting a job offer."

Or being told to shut up and get lost. And can't sue back because the lawsuit will be dismissed on the basis of national security.

Or knocks on the door from a couple of agents informing you that you are doing something you should not be doing as a private individual. Surely, if you are, you must be a subversive which is the total point of the conversation you'd be having.

>"Surely, if you are, you must be a subversive"

You sound like KGB. Person can invent tech for what them thinks is a totally peaceful purpose and have no idea that it has high military value in some specific field. Fucking witch hunt attitude.

I mean, if you're developing a missile guidance system or something that you do not intend to be used by your country's military, then I'd hope you have a very good explanation of who you do intend to use said technology. And if not, "shut up and get lost" seems like a pretty mild reaction...

Are people not remembering the issues with PGP?

The issue with PGP was that encrypted communications were classified as a munition, not the concept of export controls. There is no civilian use for an air-to-air missile guidance system. There are plenty of private individuals with legitimate reasons to use encryption

> There is no civilian use for an air-to-air missile guidance system.

People say things like this and then it turns out to be useful for ornithologists who want to use drones to tag wild birds.

You never know what something is useful for until somebody uses it for that.

It really shouldn't be very hard to tell whether a garage lab is a terror cell trying to shoot down passenger airlines, or a bunch of ornithologists trying to do better wildlife tracking. Honestly, I'm somewhat puzzled that people here seem to be refusing to acknowledge that the two can be distinguished

The "I know it when I see it" rule works right up to the point that you start enforcing it and Goodhart's Law crushes it into dust.

Then all the terrorists you encounter are carrying ornithology equipment because their organization's lawyers told them to and/or actual ornithologists go to prison because they also bought some fireworks for independence day or have a cousin who lives in Iran.

Yesterday's top secret radar tech is today's telecom infrastructure. If we send goons to shut down every garage lab, we're hobbling ourselves and hitching our bandwagon to the ossified and crusty companies of yesteryear, the Ciscos and IBMs of the world that have degraded until they are ready to tip over the moment they get any real competition. Better to tip them over ourselves, so that we own the strong replacements, rather than let someone else do it for us and eat our lunch.

This is also ignoring how the security system allegedly works in the US.

It's based on contracts. Before the government will give you classified information, you agree not to share it except under particular terms.

It's why the New York Times can publish the Pentagon Papers even though they're classified. They never agreed not to.

But now people want to pretend there is some separate "national security" that overrides the First Amendment in cases of excessive government embarrassment even for people who never agreed not to publish whatever they want to.

Somebody tell me where in the constitution it says "Congress shall pass no law abridging the freedom of speech except when the government wants to keep something a secret."

It's not just based on contracts, there's US code that prohibits sharing classified information.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/798

NYT gets away with it because they'd probably get off on a freedom of press defense, but the DoJ doesn't want to turn grey legal theory into case law. It's more useful to leave the possibility open that it won't go that way as a cudgel. But in the general case, national security restrictions to freedom of speech have passed judicial muster.

> It's more useful to leave the possibility open that it won't go that way as a cudgel.

In other words, it's plausibly unconstitutional.

It's also kind of hilarious that the specific thing you're not allowed to disclose is how cryptosystems work, which is the thing all cryptographers agree doesn't have to be a secret in order to be secure or else your cryptosystem is completely broken and shouldn't be used.

It's plausibly unconstitutional to go after established newspapers and other clearly press institutions.

And I was wrong, it's hit the supreme court in NYT vs US. The majority opinion is a purely press freedom argument, with a joint press freedom/speech freedom argument being a minority concurring opinion.

There's plenty of case law that the government can stifle speech for national security purposes, and it's not limited to signed contracts for enforcement.

> And I was wrong, it's hit the supreme court in NYT vs US. The majority opinion is a purely press freedom argument, with a joint press freedom/speech freedom argument being a minority concurring opinion.

That case is talking about freedom of the press for the obvious reason that the parties there are the New York Times and Washington Post; print publications. Where are you getting the idea that the same wouldn't apply to freedom of speech?

It's kind of a bizarre distinction in modern society regardless. Speech and press were historically different. Speaking you did in front of a crowd, the press was in print. Today both happen over the internet. Are we supposed to treat it differently based on whether your website contains text or audio/video? Why?

> There's plenty of case law that the government can stifle speech for national security purposes

In which case did the Supreme Court say that?

> That case is talking about freedom of the press for the obvious reason that the parties there are the New York Times and Washington Post; print publications. Where are you getting the idea that the same wouldn't apply to freedom of speech?

Because the concurring, but minority opinion is a joint press freedom and speech freedom argument, but the majority of the court didn't agree with the argument, hence it being a minority concurring opinion.

> In which case did the Supreme Court say that?

For one example of many, Near v Minnesota.

"No one would question but that a government might prevent actual obstruction to its recruiting service or the publication of the sailing dates of transports or the number and location of troops."

"We're designing telecom infrastructure" is an explanation. I really don't see why my comment is being interpreted as calling for every garage lab to be shut down. Are people disputing that military technology can be misused? That those dabbling in it should be accountable to the rest of society for taking reasonable steps to prevent that from happening? For at least not outright trying to pass it to foreign adversaries who intend to misuse it?

>"if you're developing a missile guidance system"

And what if I am developing a generic guidance system and somehow figured out the way to do everything with 1mm precision? It has immense value for civil use. Same for military. I would have very good explanation on how I intend to use it for peaceful purpose.

> friendly companies, those with the appropriate security clearances, still benefit from the shared knowledge.

But access to classified information isn’t just granted by a clearance, you also require need to know. This is to prevent (in theory) anyone with a clearance from looking at every piece of classified info they feel like, which would be an operational security risk.

Having a pool of classified patents that are shared freely with only cleared people working at defense contractors would violate that safeguard.

I forget where I read it, but my understanding is that the secret patent would become public if you try to publicly patent it. I don't know if there would be any compensation for you, but I don't think you'd have to deal with patent infringement.

Iirc this happened with encryption schemes. RSA maybe?

Yeah, you just have to deal with sunk costs and an IP rugpull. Great.

I bet they don't even refund the patent fees.

It's illegal for a US inventor to file a patent application in a foreign country without either (a) obtaining a foreign filing license first, or (b) applying for a US patent and waiting at least 6 months. [0] The idea there is to give the Patent Office a chance to review the invention for national security.

[0] https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s140.html

If a Lockheed engineer spontaneously discovers a defense technology, Lockheed can patent the tech and try to sell it independently or license the patent to another firm.

Some government contracts will assign such spontaneous discoveries to the government with some incentive on the contract for patents produced.

Without the patent system, some discoveries would simply be forgotten about or remain in one engineers head - unfortunately the patent world has become fairly bloated with minimally inventive discoveries being written up by lawyers.

Japan is a bit different in that its constitution renounces the ability to make war[1], including maintaining forces to make war.

They sidestep around the issue (probably a bit illegally) with their self-defense forces but there are some purely offensive technologies, like nuclear weapons, that even that sidestepping has yet managed to work around.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_9_of_the_Japanese_Cons...

Japanese politicians in the past have made the case that having a nuclear deterrent would be legal, and the country has the material, tools, and knowledge to build a MIRV ICBM immediately if TSHTF. In general, the population is against war and nuclear weapons because of what happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but I think that would change quickly if China invades Taiwan (for example).

Not only that, but Japan and South Korea, and a few other nations, have (and long have had) the ability to assemble working nukes in very little time because the hard part they have already solved: making weapons grade fuel. I mean, there's a famous nuclear accident in Japan where some workers mixed too much plutonium solution in buckets and it went critical, and that was in the 70s. They have tons of plutonium from breeding reactors. They almost certainly have designs for nuclear devices, and probably even a stockpile of parts. It would be a matter of months to assemble them and the fuel.

>purely offensive technologies, like nuclear weapons

This is absolutely not true. Nuclear weapons have many non-weapon usages, and they would be really good for those, too. Like excavations, shutting down runaway oil well fires, protecting against stuff striking earth, etc.

Deterance, is also (kind of) defensive purpose.

Those patents are obviously void outside the country, though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com