Hopefully if by SOME MIRACLE the United States were again to find itself in possession of a truly paradigm altering Invention, Inventor, Physicist, or etc. it would reflect upon the lessons learned from the MISTAKES associated with the Manhattan Project (to name the obvious) BEFORE another generation of greedy procurement salesmen or gormless R&D jocks tried to apply the Invention Secrecy Act so quickly that they were unable to ACTUALLY SECURE the INDIVIDUAL responsible in the first place. This would be very embarrassing, as to claim a proprietary ownership of A CITIZEN, rather than A PATENTABLE PROCESS, is SLAVERY! LOL. Given the nature of the incoming administration, attempts to achieve this EFFECT under a different name aren’t very likely to be successful (which no doubt occured to the CJCS when he canned a recent DARPA funding request). Still, were such a ‘hypothetical’ case to occur, the irony would be rich indeed for those hundreds if not thousands of physicists, engineers, and etc. who themselves had NOT escaped the Invention Secrecy Act waiver Catch 22, and thus lost authority over their own intellectual property.

In my own personal opinion, the current Supreme Court would not accept the legal reasoning of 1951 today, and would require the U.S. military demonstrate it was not abusing the Act to contravene the Constitution the brass has, to a man, sworn an oath to ‘protect and uphold’. And were THIS to occur, the brass would be forced to look at the practices of it’s civilian deputies and procurement corporate partners with much greater care… but then again, what do I KNOW anyway?!

Best,

Alexander Scott Crawford