Secrecy orders under the Invention Secrecy Act

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Secrecy orders under the Invention Secrecy Act

A secrecy order issued under the Invention Secrecy Act of 1951 (Template:USC–188) is a directive by which the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) withholds the publication and grant of a patent application at the request of a defense or intelligence agency, prohibiting the inventor from disclosing the invention, marketing it, filing for a corresponding patent abroad, or developing it commercially for the duration of the order. Orders may be renewed indefinitely, and a substantial number have remained in force for decades.

This article covers the operational practice of issuing and maintaining secrecy orders, the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) statistical record of how many are in force, and the categories of subject matter that have been described as falling under the regime; for the statute itself see Invention Secrecy Act.

Issuance procedure

Patent applications filed at the USPTO are routed through a screening process in which examiners flag applications for review by an inter-agency roster — including the U.S. Air Force, U.S. Army, Department of Defense (DOD), Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), National Security Agency (NSA) and other agencies — any of which may recommend a secrecy order. Tom Valone, a physicist and former USPTO patent examiner, described receiving the secrecy order forms at his desk: "Across the top was various agencies such as the Air Force, the Army, DOD, DIA, various acronyms of all the different military agencies that had privy to these patent applications."

Once a secrecy order has been imposed, the patent examiner continues the normal approval process — but the formal outcome is largely procedural: whether the application is allowed or rejected, "it gets placed in the vault" — a locked, guarded facility holding paper or electronic copies of all classified applications, unavailable to the public. The applicant is informed only that the application has been classified and that they may not discuss the subject matter, commercialise it, or report conversations about it without notifying the controlling agency. Compensation is not automatically provided even when the classified technology is subsequently used by the United States government; recovery requires an affirmative claim under Template:USC.

Statistics

The Federation of American Scientists tracks USPTO statistics on active secrecy orders and publishes annual reports through its Government Secrecy Project; the data series is the principal public window onto the operation of the Act.

The number of active orders has fluctuated over the decades but has trended upward overall:

Approximately 80–120 new orders are imposed per year, while a smaller number are rescinded, producing the slow net growth seen above. Figures cited in the exopolitics literature track the FAS series closely, with Dan Willis referring to "6,000 inventions being held up by these secrecy orders" and Michael Salla giving a figure of about 6,500.

The USPTO does not publish a category breakdown of active orders, so the share of orders covering free energy, anti-gravity or other exotic physics subject matter cannot be directly determined from public records.

Subject-matter categories

Dan Willis, a Navy Disclosure Project witness, has described the categories used by the USPTO to flag patents for secrecy review as including conventional military classes alongside an "exotic" tier covering "perpetual motion machines, antigravity devices, free energy — and other matters that violate the general laws of physics... the things that don't work with the known laws of physics — they operate, but they actually expand upon the knowledge that we have in ways that can extract energy from the vacuum of space."

Michael Salla has characterised the bulk of secrecy-ordered applications as falling into free energy and alternative energy generation and advanced healing technologies. Drawing on his insider experience as an examiner, Valone considers propulsion technologies the most heavily classified single category, with energy applications more likely to be eventually allowed to issue and enter commercial use.

Connection to alleged exotic-technology concealment

In exotic physics and disclosure literature, the secrecy order is cited as the principal legal mechanism through which free energy, anti-gravity and zero-point energy extraction technologies could be concealed from the public: under the regime, an inventor who files a patent touching on any of these areas may have the application classified and be legally prohibited from further development or disclosure on penalty of imprisonment. Steven Greer has stated that any attempt to patent zero-point energy or over-unity devices triggers automatic confiscation under a national-security secrecy order, and has cited a denial issued under the Act for a device built by one of his collaborating inventors as documentary proof "from the patent office" that the regime is "not a conspiracy theory."

Dan Willis has described the regime in similar terms, asserting that "the Invention Secrecy Act has suppressed over 6000 free energy, anti gravity, medical and many other inventions" and listing it among the psychological operations he says keep the public dependent on fossil fuels. Willis has also reported working with international inventors whose devices were allegedly seized outside the formal patent process, including a Dominican Republic-based inventor whose device he says was confiscated by CIA personnel who told him "this works, you're dead," after which the inventor disassembled the project entirely.

The cumulative effect described by these commentators — applications "placed in the vault," indefinitely renewable orders, no automatic compensation, and thousands of active orders at any given time — is what the suppressed technology literature points to as a documented endpoint of the broader invention suppression pattern.

See also

References