At the end of the fiscal year 2010, 5135's inventions, which fell under the secrecy regulation,

Secrecy News has been told by the US Patent and Trademark Office last week. This is an 1% increase over the past year and the highest overall in more than a decade.

According to the Invention Secrecy Act of 1951, patent applications for new inventions can be subject to a secrecy order that restricts their issuance if a government organization believes that disclosure would be "harmful to national security."

The current list of technology areas, which is used to examine patent applications for possible restrictions under Invention Secrecy Act, is not publicly available and requests for its disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act have not been complied with (the appeal is unanswered). But the previous version of 1971, obtained by researcher Michael Ravnitzky, is available on the Internet.

Most of these technological areas are closely linked to military use. But some of them fall into a much wider spectrum.

The 1971 list suggests that patents for solar photovoltaic generators have been reviewed and possibly limited if photovoltaics have been more efficient than 20%. Energy transfer systems are also likely to have undergone a review and possible limitations if the declared transfer efficiency was "greater than 70-80%."

One might wonder if disclosure of such technologies could really be "harmful to national security", Or if the opposite would be closer to the truth. One might also ask what comparable shifts in technology could be limited and not yet published. However, we were not provided with any answers, system Invention Secrecy it remains without any outside supervision.