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How the NSA Profits Off of Its Surveillance Technology
blottsie writes: The National Security Agency has been making money on the side by licensing its technology to private businesses for more than two decades. It's called the Technology Transfer Program, 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. The products include tools 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.
Let them break the constitution
Like it's some kind of ordinance with jail time attached. I don't know how you're imagining constitutional enforcement works, but whatever it is you're thinking, it's not accurate.
1. Elected officials can break the law(this is the only thing that entails punishment).
2. Laws can be unconstitutional in whole or in part, and executive can decide that, and refuse to enforce, or the courts can decide that(more commonly), and throw it out, in whole or in part.
3. The manner of executive enforcement of constitutional laws can be unconstitutional, and courts can give orders throwing out cases that match those criteria.
4. The courts can rule in an unconstitutional way about constitutional enforcement of constitutional laws, in which case you're fucked.
The Bush Defense has gone beyond beating a dead horse, now people like you are beating a smear that might be the remnants of the horse. Obama and Holder have gone so far past the transgressions that Bush started that it isn't funny. Yet the biggest defense I hear is either "Bush did it" or "At least it isn't Bush doing it".
-- Slashdot, making the Left look conservative since 1997.
Former TTP contractor here: First, there are PLENTY of issues one can have today with NSA and the American defense and intelligence community as a whole (note: FORMER federal contractor)... but it can be argued that TTP is one of the few unqualified "good" things the agency does.
In short, there are a bunch of federal regulations and statutes dictating that technologies paid for by the federal taxpayers should (barring lingering classification concerns) be made available for licensing and further development by those taxpayers, usually in the form of private companies, universities, the staffs of other public agencies, etc. There are different rules and processes for each, with the "fees" often being nominal and dependent on the scope and extent of the patent's application, and working to the benefit of the actual inventor(s).
Also, this is NOT an NSA-specific exercise. Most (and I imagine all, but can't confirm individually!) federal laboratories participate in technology transfer - the Federal Laboratory Consortium is a publicly available entity maintained for just that specific purpose.
And as a final aside... if you had seen the size of the Agency's TTP office (manned by a skeleton crew of administrative staff and often at the mercy of the general counsel/patent attornies) and the numbers TTP actually deals with, you would find a lot of the scare language in the original article patently (puns!) ridiculous. It took us two years to get an update on the NSA.gov website, which apparently only ended up being a basic refresh of content - so much for all the hidden Agency slush fund pull!
Well, give Ashcroft some credit. He pushed back while sick in the hospital against Bush White House cronies and refused to sign off on domestic spying when they wanted him to.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...