State Secrets: Defense Contracting, Intellectual Property, and the Hidden History of National-Security Information

Time: 4:00pm

Location: Director’s Conference Room, National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC

Speaker: Katherine Epstein, Department of History, Rutgers University-Camden

The establishment of national-security information as a legal and political category now applied on a massive scale has a hidden history in disputes over the intellectual property rights to advanced weapons technology between the US government and the private sector. In the late nineteenth century, the US government began to collaborate extensively with private firms on the research and development of new weapons. (Shown above is the guidance system used in early U.S. Navy torpedoes.) That collaboration gave rise to disagreements over which party owned the intellectual property rights. When the government realized that its claims to the intellectual property rights were weak, it learned to reframe cases not as legal disputes over intellectual property but as public-policy matters concerning national-security information. Thus today’s national-security state has a little-known history stretching back more than a century.

For further information, please contact: Tom Lassman at 202-633-2419; lassmant@si.edu.

NON-SMITHSONIAN VISITORS MUST RSVP NO LATER THAN 48 HOURS BEFORE THE SEMINAR. On the day of the seminar, please report to the South Security Desk at the Museum’s Independence Avenue entrance. Those holding SI ID badges may proceed directly to the Director’s Conference Room on the 3rd floor.