A petition has been raised for the White House to pressure the USA’s National Security Agency to allow unused discoveries to be declassified, and for “gag order” patents to expire after they have served their purpose.
The petition goes as follows:
The NSA is the largest employer of mathematicians in the United States. Currently, the discoveries of those mathematicians in their official areas of research, being deemed potentially critical to national security, are indiscriminately classified for an indefinite period, with limited circumstances for declassification.
It is requested the White House press the NSA for an expiration policy for the classification status of non-applied discoveries and instituting an expiration for gag order patents in the interest of furthering American academia and industry advancement and in the interest of crediting the discoveries of our nation’s talented NSA employees.
If you agree with that, you can sign the petition at whitehouse.gov. It currently has just over 1,800 signatures, gathered over a week and a bit.
via BikeMath on Twitter.