(NaturalNews) It isn't often that a federal government agency or official admits wrongdoing. In fact, it almost never happens.

Almost.

But in June, one official from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) broke that trend when he admitted that he had stolen a massive amount of intellectual property.

According to a press release by the John Galt Program for Investigative Studies, in June, the acting commissioner of the FDA, Dr. Stephen Ostroff, admitted to one of the largest intellectual property thefts in U.S. history.

The group noted that the pilfered technology involves patents and trade secrets for a process known as "predictive analytics," which pertains to the harvesting of "big data" that is analyzed by supercomputers to predict future events.

The predictive analytics market is especially useful for retailers but also government, which is why it has grown exponentially over the past decade. The John Galt Program estimates that the industry will rise to more than $5.2 billion by 2018, then grown annually at about 25 percent.

In May, the John Galt Program noted, Ostroff was served with an affidavit giving his agency 45 days - or 15 more than is legally required - to refute allegations that it stole a small firm's predictive analytics patents and trade secrets, valued in the billions of dollars in today's markets.

No comment

"Dr. Ostroff's failure to refute the facts now legally stands as an admission of guilt that the FDA intentionally stole our technology," said Dr. John Hnatio, one of the owners of the small company, FoodQuestTQ LLC. "This represents a watershed moment for technology entrepreneurs across the nation who, every day, face the theft of their intellectual property by the U.S. Government. In far too many cases, these small companies do not have the resources to defend themselves from the government Goliath."

The company's victory in getting the admission from Ostroff is huge in terms of preventing the federal government from simply appropriating (stealing) the intellectual or real property of small businesses in the future, the John Galt Program said.

"What FoodQuestTQ has done, is a strategic legal departure from relying exclusively on abstract codes or text, and an overburdened court system," Bruce Becker, another FoodQuestTQ entrepreneur, told the organization.

"Instead of relying solely on government statutes, we have turned to the use of common law which allows judges to rely on their predecessors' decisions of actual controversies. It's a whole new ballgame," Becker added.

A number of private sector companies including the 300 members of the Grocery Manufacturers Association and Battelle Memorial Institute have also gotten similar affidavits from FoodQuesTQ LLC but had not responded by publication time.

One GOP presidential candidate tried to rein in the FDA recently

"Any company out there that stole our technology can be sure of one thing. We will aggressively pursue you. The entire future of small business is at stake here," said Hnatio.

Ostroff also had not responded to requests for comment.

In 2012, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., who is one of a dozen GOP candidates for president in 2016, sponsored legislation as an amendment to an FDA funding bill that would have:

-- Disarmed the FDA and make the agency stop using guns against the American people;

-- halted the FDA's armed raids on raw milk farmers;

-- would have stopped the FDA's outrageous and longstanding censorship of truthful health claims of dietary supplements and medicinal herbs.

At the time his amendment was introduced, Paul noted the importance of its passage.

"Today, I'm offering an amendment to the FDA. I'm troubled by images of armed agents raiding Amish farms and preventing them selling milk directly from the cow. I think we have bigger problems in our country than sending armed FDA agents into peaceful farmers' land and telling them they can't sell milk directly from the cow," Paul said on the Senate floor introducing his amendment.

It didn't pass, by the way, as noted here.

Sources:

http://jgpis.org

http://thecompletepatient.com/article/2012/may/29/defeat-sen-rand-paul's-amendment-fda-cops-serves-another-american-civics

https://www.naturalnews.com/035966_rand_paul_fda_censorship.html