The NSA's Clearance Rack Goes Public, Offering An Assortment Of Declassified Patents For Use In The Private Sector

Patents

from the civil-liberties-fire-sale-still-ongoing dept

All the money being poured into the NSA (under the cover of darkness) over the past several years is paying off. Taxpayers who helped fund the NSA’s programs have the opportunity to pay even more money for the privilege of licensing the non-classified fruits of the agency’s labor.

So if you’re looking to buy a tool to transcribe voice recordings in any language, a foolproof method to tell if someone’s touched your phone’s SIM card, or a version of email encryption that isn’t available on the open market, try the world’s most technologically advanced spy agency.

It’s called the Technology Transfer Program (TTP), under which the NSA declassifies some of its technologies that it developed for previous operations, patents them, and, if they’re swayed by an American company’s business plan and nondisclosure agreements, rents them out.

There’s actually no “transfer” going on here. Nearly everything in the catalog [pdf link] (with the exception of a few, decidedly unimpressive physical items near the back) is a license, and quite possibly a non-exclusive license at that. (Companies can lock other companies out, but not the government itself, and the catalog notes that licensees will have to relinquish sole control “within a reasonable period of time.”) Should the NSA decide it can trust a company with its leftover inventions, it will have an opportunity to utilize stuff most companies don’t really need or technology that’s hardly state-of-the-art at this point. While some of this could be a potential starting point for bigger and better stuff, most of the offerings are leaving security/cryptology experts underwhelmed.

[Bruce Schneier] was dismissive of the remarkability of the agency’s cryptographical offerings. “It’s not new, it’s very old, a few decades,” he said of one product, listed as a Cryptographic Efficient Elliptic Curve.

“It’s a way to get your door locks a little bit better. Does that change the value of your house? Kind of, not really,” he said. “These are all pieces of plumbing. Plumbing has value, but this is one of the problems of patent law. Patents really overstate the value of plumbing, of technology. It’s a little value, sure, but it’s never gonna make or break a business.”

In some of the released tools, you can see the origins in bulk metadata/communications harvesting. One patented product automatically detects voices in audio recordings. Another deals with creating cryptographic key escrow accounts for “third parties” to access encrypted files. Various data visualization programs separate needles from haystacks, while multiple tools tackle the task of turning virtual reams of text into coherent summaries.

While the NSA is following the spirit of the statute ordering the redistribution of government knowledge, it’s probably the agency least likely to declassify anything groundbreaking. The best stuff still remains locked up. One also has to question the timing of this catalog release — it’s offered this service for years, but this is the first time the NSA has ever made the document public. Is this just another stab at rehabilitating its reputation, albeit one approached at a very oblique angle? Someone inside the NSA seems to think so.

The Daily Dot relayed one NSA employee’s claim to Schneier, that the TTP was a means of injecting federally-funded research back into the U.S. economy.

Well, only if you take the most generous view of the NSA’s scattershot collection of fine licensables. Schneier doesn’t take this view.

“Bullshit,” he responded. “The NSA’s not stimulating the economy. They just said that and it sounds good. They just made that up.”

No, it very definitely isn’t stimulating the economy, at least not anywhere outside the Beltway. The damage the public disclosures have had on the private tech sector very much outweighs the potential income created by the NSA’s mandated return of publicly-funded research and development — a “return” that isn’t a gift but a perpetual license and one that’s only available to the companies the NSA chooses to work with.

Filed Under: innovation, nsa, parents, tech transfer