Details and images on almost 300 patents filed by the National Security Agency

NSA patents are special: they never expire and they usually aren’t revealed to the public.

Unless someone else files an identical patent application, that is. In that case, the NSA’s ownership is published by the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).

We’ve collected data made available by the USPTO to build a unified database of:

200 NSA patents publicly granted to the NSA and published on USPTO

78 NSA patents reported by Foreign Policy that didn’t show up when querying USPTO

From game board designs to geo-locating methods; from algorithms that identify topics and summarize large amounts of text, to voice identifier: read on for the most interesting NSA patents.

Note: Silk will be shut down on Dec. 15 2017. After this date, links might be broken and interactive visualizations static. Will fix this as soon as possible