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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.
If you're the NSA, do you hand out new secret encryption that you, yourself can't break? Or do you deal in purposefully flawed encryption, that generally works pretty well, but you can break in the back room when you want?
Considering Bush and his Attorney General didn't have a problem with gutting the Constitution, don't see why the next AG couldn't do the same. Precedent had already been set.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
So, all of those things we can't get funding for because they might be illegal?
No problem, we'll just raise the money by selling some technology.
And, while we're at it, we've also got a sideline business of charging shakedown money to politicians.
If they're a government agency, and developed these technologies with tax-payer money, are the technologies theirs to sell or patent?
This sounds like an agency which has more or less decided it is entitled to do anything it wants to, and the more it moves some of its operations into the private sector, the less oversight it comes under.
This sounds like some class A bullshit to me.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
The NSA has done a lot of things over the years, most of them cool, useful, and in the best interests of the American people.
When they caught foreign companies committing bribery, that was good work.
When they hardened DES against differential cryptanalysis, that was good work.
The problem with the Clipper chip was the key escrow; Skipjack was an awesome algorithm for its time.
I'm also undecided on the TTP; I'm pretty sure TFS misrepresents it.
How can the same technology be protected by both patents and NDAs? You have to give away the secret sauce to get a patent on it.
One of the things which concerns me, is you're putting all powerful surveillance tools into the hands of private corporations.
Those corporations can then use and abuse that technology in ways which may ignore the law, and bypass any oversight.
And then if the NSA has included in their contract a share of the take, or simply invoke the PATRIOT act to demand it ... then you can effectively have government outsourcing things they're not legally allowed to do out to private industry, but then it doesn't break the law when private industry hands back the data they'd not have been able to collect legally.
At which point, they can basically do an end run around the law, and the people who are tasked with oversight.
And since we know they already lie to the people who are supposed to be overseeing the ... I have zero way that you can treat an organization like this as anything other than a rabid dog.
At this point, I think the only way to get the truth out of the NSA is to waterboard it out of them. Because they've demonstrated they don't give a damn about providing it to us.
I rank this as being massively creepy, and with legal implications which boggle the mind.
And, yes, I do come down heavily on the tinfoil hat end of the spectrum. But paranoia doesn't preclude malfeasance, especially when there's already evidence of malfeasance.
Big Brother is scary. Big Brother in bed with private industry is terrifying.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
The obvious solution is to elect a President who will appoint a law-abiding AG. The obvious problem with that is, most candidates don't admit that they'll violate your rights while campaigning. :-P
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Precedent had already been set.
By Clinton lying to Grand Juries. By Reagan and Iran Contra. By Carter...oh wait Carter never did shit other than show up, shake some hands, and talk about peanuts and saving gas. Most people on /. are probably to young to remember but I find it funny that Jimmy Carter was more of a black president that Obama will ever be. I don't mean that in a bad way, Carter had is own impediments, mostly from the liberal wing of the Democratic party, that prevented him from really accomplishing anything significant. And if it wasn't for Ted Kennedy maybe Carter wouldn't have suffered the complete ass kicking in the 1980 election, but there was no way he was going to beat Reagan. Anyways off topic, why Carter got elected....By Nixon and watergate.
I'm sure someone older than me could keep the chain going....my theory is every 2 term president will have something to tarnish their record and every single term president is basically just an unempowered placeholder that either road their immediate predecessor's coattails (i.e. Bush 1) or took advantage of a a conveniently timed disgruntled public (i.e. Carter).
That's ok right? I mean technology transfer to the public sector is a good thing. But then I thought, wait a second, why should this only be available to a few select businesses who can afford to pay for it? This work was funded by the American taxpayer. These businesses then acquire it without having taken the investment risk and cost of R&D. So basically, they've (the businesses) foisted their development costs off onto the American public, with the explicit and directed complicity of an agency that's supposed to be working in the public's interests. If the tech transfer is a good thing to do (irrespective of value judgements of the actual tech and its usage), then it should be made available back to the entire American public, not to give a competitive edge to selected corporations.
So yeah, I have an issue with the ethics of this.
The NSA has done a lot of things over the years, most of them
Funded by the taxpayer already.
Now if companies are paying the NSA to get access to their research, they're paying twice: once as a taxpayer, and now as a "customer".
If the technology can be declassified, the information should be public property, as its research was funded by the taxpayer.
I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.
As I recall the US government is not allowed to own copyrights for exactly this reason - hence the fact that all those NASA images etc. generated by government institutions are public domain. I'm frankly surprised that the government would be allowed to own patents since exactly the same reasoning should apply.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
It depends on how the money is handled. If it goes into the general fund, then I think this is great. If it is used to fund NSA operations, I think it is bad. That would make it too easy for the agency to avoid Congressional oversight.
In general self-funding government agencies are terrible idea-- that's why running the government "like a business" sounds good but is a lousy idea. Government agencies should serve the public, they shouldn't be profit centers. That's a conflict of interest. In places where police funding depends on seizing property involved in crimes -- typically drug crimes -- there's an incentive to do it to make money rather than fight crime.
There are some exceptions, like water districts that are funded by water and sewer fees, but these are essentially utilities that are run by the public, their rates set by boards elected by the ratepayers. But no agency should be self-funding except that it is controlled by the people providing the funding.
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