USPTO site downgrades to HTTP despite US federal government promise to adopt HTTPS on all websites

The US Patent Office’s (USPTO) website is now unusable with HTTPS as of April 21st, 2017. This has happened despite a 2015 policy from the White House that promised an HTTPS only standard on all federal websites by Spring 2017. HTTPS provides encryption and is recommended by everyone from the United Nations to (previously at least) the United States federal government. The US Patent Office announced earlier this month their intentions to downgrade the security of the Public Patent Application Information Retrieval (Public PAIR):

[…] users will only be able to access Public PAIR through URLs beginning with HTTP, such as http://portal.uspto.gov/pair/PublicPair. Past URLs using HTTPS to access Public Pair, such as https://portal.uspto.gov/pair/PublicPair, will no longer work.
All this despite the fact that the USPTO website still has a valid cert.

Remember when the White House decided to adopt HTTPS for all federal websites? What ever happened to that

In 2015, the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released a memorandum titled: A Policy to Require Secure Connections across Federal Websites and Web Services. The federal government declared that “all publicly accessible Federal websites and web services only provide service through a secure connection.” The OMB was very articulate and adamant in demanding that the federal government meet the internet community’s security standards:

Private and secure connections are becoming the Internet’s baseline, as expressed by the policies of the Internet’s standards bodies , popular web browsers, and the Internet community of practice. The Federal government must adapt to this changing landscape, and benefits by beginning the conversion now.
Hopefully, the USPTO’s move away from HTTP is not the beginning of more backwards security and privacy behavior from the Trump Administration, which signed away Americans’ internet privacy.

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[privateinternetaccess]