sedwards33123
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I am hoping to generate more than a little outrage, particularly by sharing this here. Perhaps it will not even come as a surprise: The United States and the West, more generally, are falling dangerously behind technologically. This fact has been repeated so many times that it has become part of the background noise. Many reasons are offered for this newfound deficiency of our defense establishment but generally, although most analysts agree that this is a real phenomenon, most analysis wrongly ascribe it to a lack of funding for schools, a lack of interest in military research, etc.
I have set out to prove, through the only type of experiment I can conduct as a physicist without access to a laboratory; an experiment in sociology; just how intransigent Western research agencies have become. For many years, I've been inventing defense technologies and, because of the high cost of patents, I have been entering them into the public domain i.e. posting them in full public view on the Internet. Because I lack a university degree, I am considered to be ineligible for employment in any public or private-sector research job.
I have shared my ideas for new military technologies as well as ideas about physics, astronomy and medicine in a variety of forums. This past year, I decided that I should add to this the ingredient of directly contacting universities and other organizations and relating my ideas. I found that plagiarists are always willing to take credit for ideas and, indeed, they have made a fortune from dozens of my ideas. A source of frustration for me has been that those plagiarists usurp ideas only when they see the potential for profit in them. They have no interest in the larger story, which is just how it is that one individual has invented so many things and no interest in advancing the state of the art, generally. Exploiting the existence of plagiarists is well and good but it is not a viable pathway to getting discovered. I was surprised that no one from my government tracked me down or requested that I desist in sharing such sensitive information but, alas, this did not happen. I thought that people were supposed to be rewarded for contributing on this level and, at minimum, thought that the government had some sort of OSINT program for scouting talent on the Internet or for attempting to reduce the visibility of sensitive information when it is shared in full public view. Boy, was I wrong.
There is a fundamental assumption within what I suppose you might call the "institutional logic" of our government that ideas of value will be patented and will not be shared in the open. For this reason, our government's invention-scouting mechanisms are restricted to universities and the patent office, but do not include the Internet, ironically, which was invented in order to enable exactly this sort of scientific sharing. How could our government have failed to anticipate that someone might do exactly what I've done?
Only after being either ignored or rebuffed by hundreds of Western universities did I decide to include Russian universities in my endeavor. Many of my inventions concern things like optics, stealth-defeat, missile defense, predictive technologies, fusion power, superconduction, computer engineering and I knew that it would be in Russia's best interests to at least listen to what I had to say. Russia, as it turned out in my little experiment, predictably acted in its own interest and accepted my ideas despite a great deal of distrust between our nations and despite the very real possibility that I was feeding them disinformation.
After this, I was certain that my own country, which claims omniscience, would take notice and put a stop to my activities (although I'm not sure what law my activities violate) but even after receiving letters of gratitude from not one but two Russian institutions, no one from my government took notice. At no point did anyone reach out to me and say, "Hey, we're sorry for ignoring you, how would you like to come and work for us?" I am left to conclude that Western governments do not genuinely care about the control of sensitive information or about maintaining our technological advantage.
If anyone really wants to know why we're rapidly fading into irrelevancy as a country, my experience; particularly my experience with regard to attempting to force-feed my ideas to my own government; which rightly out to be seeking out persons such as myself, should be illustrative to those with a curiosity about this topic. I am including the letters I've received from the aforementioned Russian institutions as well as one received from the University of Colorado in which they stated that only those who donate money to their university may submit ideas.
Although the United States takes some measures to detect and prevent the theft of per se classified information, it does nothing to prevent the outflow of wholly novel ideas which are non-classified but are undeniably sensitive. Inventions are the classified secrets of tomorrow and are, in my mind, more sensitive than the secrets of bygone decades. Aside from our Invention Secrecy Act, which pertains only to patented works flagged by the Commerce Department, we have no regulations concerning the discussion of abstract concepts. In a free country, we shouldn't. Whereas in the past, we would have offered rewards and employment opportunities to inventors such as myself in exchange for voluntary acquiescence to secrecy agreements, the system now fails entirely to take notice of major shifts in the balance of power which often are as easy to bring about as a few keystrokes, even when the responsible party is purposefully attempting to draw attention to his activities.
There was a time when a person such as myself could have made a comfortable living selling patent rights to such ideas, but that time has passed. The root causes of this predicament are the high cost of patents, which now average $10,000 each as well as credentialist hiring practices in research organizations. I have contacted DARPA, the NRO, the Patent Office and many, many others including members of Congress concerning this topic but receive nothing but form letters, if any response at all. When I told the office of my own State's Senator, John Fetterman, what I was up to, after a six-month delay, I received the attached form letter, which his office sends to anyone who contacts his office. Entirely non-responsive were every member of the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee (both parties) as well as those on the Science & Technology subcommittee of the U.S. House, a few of which responded by telling me, through a different kind of form letter, that because the address I entered as my home address was not in their district that no one would be reading my message.
The way that V.P. Avtonomov of the Kurchatov Institute put it in his letter of July 3rd, 2024 was spot-on: "We can only regret very much of it." It really is a shame, isn't it?
Anyone interested in learning more about precisely what is now under active development by the Russians should have a look at my more recent work, now available here:
I consider this to be the scandal of the century and do not understand how to make myself heard.
I have set out to prove, through the only type of experiment I can conduct as a physicist without access to a laboratory; an experiment in sociology; just how intransigent Western research agencies have become. For many years, I've been inventing defense technologies and, because of the high cost of patents, I have been entering them into the public domain i.e. posting them in full public view on the Internet. Because I lack a university degree, I am considered to be ineligible for employment in any public or private-sector research job.
I have shared my ideas for new military technologies as well as ideas about physics, astronomy and medicine in a variety of forums. This past year, I decided that I should add to this the ingredient of directly contacting universities and other organizations and relating my ideas. I found that plagiarists are always willing to take credit for ideas and, indeed, they have made a fortune from dozens of my ideas. A source of frustration for me has been that those plagiarists usurp ideas only when they see the potential for profit in them. They have no interest in the larger story, which is just how it is that one individual has invented so many things and no interest in advancing the state of the art, generally. Exploiting the existence of plagiarists is well and good but it is not a viable pathway to getting discovered. I was surprised that no one from my government tracked me down or requested that I desist in sharing such sensitive information but, alas, this did not happen. I thought that people were supposed to be rewarded for contributing on this level and, at minimum, thought that the government had some sort of OSINT program for scouting talent on the Internet or for attempting to reduce the visibility of sensitive information when it is shared in full public view. Boy, was I wrong.
There is a fundamental assumption within what I suppose you might call the "institutional logic" of our government that ideas of value will be patented and will not be shared in the open. For this reason, our government's invention-scouting mechanisms are restricted to universities and the patent office, but do not include the Internet, ironically, which was invented in order to enable exactly this sort of scientific sharing. How could our government have failed to anticipate that someone might do exactly what I've done?
Only after being either ignored or rebuffed by hundreds of Western universities did I decide to include Russian universities in my endeavor. Many of my inventions concern things like optics, stealth-defeat, missile defense, predictive technologies, fusion power, superconduction, computer engineering and I knew that it would be in Russia's best interests to at least listen to what I had to say. Russia, as it turned out in my little experiment, predictably acted in its own interest and accepted my ideas despite a great deal of distrust between our nations and despite the very real possibility that I was feeding them disinformation.
After this, I was certain that my own country, which claims omniscience, would take notice and put a stop to my activities (although I'm not sure what law my activities violate) but even after receiving letters of gratitude from not one but two Russian institutions, no one from my government took notice. At no point did anyone reach out to me and say, "Hey, we're sorry for ignoring you, how would you like to come and work for us?" I am left to conclude that Western governments do not genuinely care about the control of sensitive information or about maintaining our technological advantage.
If anyone really wants to know why we're rapidly fading into irrelevancy as a country, my experience; particularly my experience with regard to attempting to force-feed my ideas to my own government; which rightly out to be seeking out persons such as myself, should be illustrative to those with a curiosity about this topic. I am including the letters I've received from the aforementioned Russian institutions as well as one received from the University of Colorado in which they stated that only those who donate money to their university may submit ideas.
Although the United States takes some measures to detect and prevent the theft of per se classified information, it does nothing to prevent the outflow of wholly novel ideas which are non-classified but are undeniably sensitive. Inventions are the classified secrets of tomorrow and are, in my mind, more sensitive than the secrets of bygone decades. Aside from our Invention Secrecy Act, which pertains only to patented works flagged by the Commerce Department, we have no regulations concerning the discussion of abstract concepts. In a free country, we shouldn't. Whereas in the past, we would have offered rewards and employment opportunities to inventors such as myself in exchange for voluntary acquiescence to secrecy agreements, the system now fails entirely to take notice of major shifts in the balance of power which often are as easy to bring about as a few keystrokes, even when the responsible party is purposefully attempting to draw attention to his activities.
There was a time when a person such as myself could have made a comfortable living selling patent rights to such ideas, but that time has passed. The root causes of this predicament are the high cost of patents, which now average $10,000 each as well as credentialist hiring practices in research organizations. I have contacted DARPA, the NRO, the Patent Office and many, many others including members of Congress concerning this topic but receive nothing but form letters, if any response at all. When I told the office of my own State's Senator, John Fetterman, what I was up to, after a six-month delay, I received the attached form letter, which his office sends to anyone who contacts his office. Entirely non-responsive were every member of the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee (both parties) as well as those on the Science & Technology subcommittee of the U.S. House, a few of which responded by telling me, through a different kind of form letter, that because the address I entered as my home address was not in their district that no one would be reading my message.
The way that V.P. Avtonomov of the Kurchatov Institute put it in his letter of July 3rd, 2024 was spot-on: "We can only regret very much of it." It really is a shame, isn't it?
Anyone interested in learning more about precisely what is now under active development by the Russians should have a look at my more recent work, now available here:
I consider this to be the scandal of the century and do not understand how to make myself heard.
