Stranger than Fiction

Stranger than Fiction

                                                                                                                           By Christopher Davis

You may have heard mention of the strange machinations of the corporate or government bureaucracy’s collective minds. I have, but sometimes when you consider what they do and try to understand them it can lead you down strange, but interesting paths.

Especially when it’s what you don’t find that is most interesting.

What I’m talking about is that two of the most mind-boggling, blindingly important, paradigm-changing developments of the twenty-first century have not been labeled “TOP SECRET” and hidden away by the government, as many others have.

I know that sounds weird, but it’s not unusual for inventions to be suppressed by the government. There are thousands which have been.

But it is unusual when some new paradigm-changing technology of interest to the government, specifically to the NSA, has not, as might be expected, been hidden away in a cavernous warehouse like the one shown in the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark, or hidden from public view deep in the bowels of Cheyenne Mountain or on a secure computer tucked away in some closet in the White House.

Many don’t know it, but the government has a program where the use of secrecy orders allows US Defense agencies to control patents, including those that are privately developed. If they deem it to be in the national interest, those inventions might never see the light of day, or by the time they eventually do they’ve become geriatric oddities.

As of 2017, according to statistics reported by the US Patent and Trademark Office and published by the Federation of American Scientists, there were 5,784 patents that you are not allowed to see. They’re inventions stored away under “secrecy orders.”

One of the examples listed in a revealing article at www.Slate.com was the mention of a patent that was filed in 1936 that didn’t get released until 2000 when it was 64 years old. It’s particularly curious now because it concerns cryptography which is in the news every day due to cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and the database ledger called the blockchain. In this case, it was a patented cryptograph machine used to manually code and decode messages.

This then conjures up images of the famous, or infamous, Enigma code machines that were used by Nazi Germany during WWII and of the man who broke their codes, saving the lives of thousands.

The Enigma Machine                          Alan Turing

The Enigma had an electromechanical rotor mechanism that scrambled the 26 letters of the alphabet. In typical use, one person enters text on the Enigma's keyboard and another person writes down which of 26 lights above the keyboard lights up at each key press. If plain text is entered, the lit-up letters are the encoded ciphertext. Entering ciphertext transforms it back into readable plaintext.

The original secret code and its advancements were broken by Alan Turing as part of the British ULTRA program. Alan Turing is widely seen as the father of computer science and artificial intelligence and is credited with helping to shorten the course of the war and saving thousands of lives. A movie was made in 2014 about Turing’s life called The Imitation Game.

How It All Relates

Alan Turing was a brilliant twentieth century analyst, cryptographer and computer scientist who contributed much to computer science, to the understanding of artificial Intelligence and to humanity. But, in the end, regardless of his stellar contributions, Alan Turing ended up suffering due to government suppression and ignorance.

The two gentlemen I’m about to introduce are, to put it mildly, twenty-first century groundbreakers, both who are making contributions to computer science and society that will change the world. Their brief stories exemplify that government agencies don’t only use patent suppression, sometimes they act out of oversight, ignorance or outright malicious intention.

First Example

In 2002, Peter Warren, the creator of an extraordinary new method of software construction called ExoTechnology, and his team, visited the NSA (National Security Agency in Fort Meade, Maryland). One reason for the visit was to see if anyone else had invented technology such as theirs. ExoTech, as mentioned above, is paradigm-changing, much in the way that Arthur C. Clarke describes in his famous words, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Unless you’re too young to remember, there was a sentient, talking computer in the Arthur C. Clarke novel and Stanley Kubrick movie entitled 2001: A Space Odyssey. An ExoBrain (software created with ExoTechnology) is like that but more advanced. You can teach an ExoBrain how to do things using ordinary language. It doesn’t need any cryptic, hard-to-understand programming code. If you had a completed version at your office, it could run your whole office or company or just be your office assistant and carry out all your office needs, maybe even get you coffee if it had an android form. In this case, we’re not talking about an android or a robot, we’re talking about the software, a sentient ExoBrain that could run an android.

The NSA saw a live demonstration of a rudimentary ExoBrain in action at Fort Meade, they witnessed a proof of concept of what had been created, and were very impressed – enough to invite the team back for a second visit two weeks later. Warren’s team concluded that the NSA had never seen anything like it when they were invited to list themselves as a technology supplier to the NSA. Pleased that they were so well received, but not convinced that this was the appropriate direction for the company to take, the ExoTech team took it no further.

While there was no indication of any connection, six months later in 2002, the SEC (US Securities and Exchange Commission) showed up on what seemed to be an innocent data-fishing expedition. Later, this turned into trumped-up charges reminiscent of communist days, and a legal tussle was begun that lasted for years, and by 2008 ExoTech ended up as the target of a civil suit by the SEC that defied any logic anyone has ever been able to decipher.

The SEC’s imaginary scenario had been that the investments ExoTech had taken in were fraudulently obtained because there was “no technology,” even though the SEC had been repeatedly offered a demonstration of the proof of concept prototype. They also refused invitations to visit the ExoTech company offices to review the work in progress and the working ExoBrain, or read the ExoBrain patent application. Saying it wasn’t necessary to see the prototype of the ExoBrain, the SEC then still (incomprehensibly) went ahead and sued them for not having any actual technology.

This, of course, was patently (please excuse the pun) false because the “no technology” accusation was certainly disproved, ironically, by another US government agency – the US Patent Office, which later granted a 157-page US patent (number 8,397,222.) That, plus the fact that the NSA had suggested, after seeing an actual demonstration of the prototype, that ExoTech list itself as a technology supplier to the NSA. It was all ignored. Of course, do you think that the NSA would have requested ExoTech to become a vendor if they hadn’t already seen the ExoBrain in operation? Certainly not.

The SEC also ignored the fact that ExoTech, long before the SEC first showed up, had offered all investors

their money back (including those investors who the SEC later claimed had been defrauded)

 This was the accepted way of righting any real or imagined investment wrongs. The company had already identified by itself that it had unknowingly taken too many “unqualified” investors (as the SEC defines them). The company, therefore, took the standard and acceptable action, at a cost of $500,000, to correct its mistake. The SEC also ignored sworn declarations from 9 investors (representing 80 percent of the investment that the SEC claimed had been fraudulently obtained) attesting to the effect that the tech and its prototype (which is still in use today) worked just fine, and that they, the investors themselves controlled the disbursement of their own investments.

The effect of the SEC’s actions was extraordinarily damaging and effectively halted the effort in its tracks for some years. Though the coincidence is remarkable and strange, perhaps stranger than fiction, there can be no proof that the object of the suit by the SEC was to shelve the technology because they had missed the chance to label it as “secret” and hide away the technology. It’s an assumption attempting to make sense out of the incomprehensible. It makes sense because they couldn’t just shelve it away because a patent had already been published by the US Patent Office, was available to the public and therefore couldn’t be suppressed in the normal fashion. The whole affair didn’t end until 2008 and now is just a dark piece of history or perhaps a bad dream.

Second Example

In 2017, Sean Worthington was a college professor who, while working on his PhD, came to the realization that money was simply data and that a perfect money should follow the laws of data management. He created a paradigm-changing software package which is now known as RAIDA, the Redundant Array of Independent Detection Agents.

RAIDA is patterned after the Domain Name System (DNS) which supports the entire Internet. The DNS is made up of 13 core nodes placed around the world, while RAIDA has 25 core nodes scattered around the world. These core nodes are called Sentinels, and each Sentinel has 32 detection agents for a total of up to 800 authentication nodes, aka terminals. Data that is being transmitted is shredded (including the data which is money) and sent to the different RAIDA locations. No single shard means anything or is worth anything on its own and the system works on an independent decentralized consensus basis and reforms the data packets at the receipt point it was sent to. Each time any data is transferred, its authentication codes change, preventing counterfeiting or any forms of double spending.

Without attempting to get into detail here, the system is lightning-fast (faster than VISA), uses practically no electricity, is infinitely scalable, and is mathematically impossible for even the new quantum computers to hack.

Sean’s experience with the government was a bit different. He had also filed a patent and wasn’t concerned about that when he gave a talk in Cyprus to a delegation of central bankers and government personnel about his new unbreakable anti-counterfeiting technology. He spoke to them about CloudCoin, a new cloud-based digital monetary system that is the next evolution in alternate currency. One which solves all the problems inherent with cryptocurrencies and the blockchain platform the cryptos are based upon. He informed them that extensive testing had been done on a worldwide basis with complete success and that there were many potential applications that could be of benefit

This time, despite the availability of extensive test results and an offered opportunity to examine the technology … it was ignored.  Why?

We assume that the answer was that the CloudCoin monetary technology could not be used as a control tool. By its very nature, it cannot be used to suppress or control. In other words, because of its inviolate nature, it could not be co-opted and used within a digital system that is built for currency manipulation. It was the ideal currency, one that could free mankind, and they saw no purpose in it.

Unbeknownst to Sean at the time, the banks and governments of the world had already decided on using the blockchain, but with them it wasn’t going to be a decentralized one. A centralized blockchain was scheduled to be Big Brother’s ultimate tool for total control of everyone’s money and what they plan to use to introduce a single world currency.

Conclusion

Here we have two world-changing technologies, both of which are designed to make the world a better place, and due to the strength of the human spirit and the support of others who can see the value of what is being offered, each of these remarkable individuals continues creating a freer and better future.

If you are interested in finding out more and/or contributing in some way to either of these men and their groundbreaking technologies, I can be contacted at by email at:  4ccd2yo@protonmail.com

Thank you.

© 2019 Christopher Davis ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  This COPYRIGHTED work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.  It is provided free for use under creative commons licensing and may be freely duplicated used by others so long as the authors by line is included. For questions or comments, Christopher can be reached by email at:  ccd8@runbox.com