The tech sector is known for its rapid innovation, but that quality is often believed to be absent from the federal government. However, that may not really be the case, as federal research programs often result in innovative products for commercial consumers. The Cipher Brief spoke to Linda Burger, director of the Technology Transfer Program (TTP) at the NSA, about how technologies move from the government to the marketplace. According to her, tech transfers are symbiotic arrangements that provide enormous benefits to both businesses and the government – while ensuring strong technological leadership for the nation as a whole.
The Cipher Brief: What is the Technology Transfer Program at the NSA?
Linda Burger: Tech transfer is about the exchange of knowledge capabilities and research breakthroughs between federal laboratories and private sector organizations. That could be a business, an academic institution or another agency of any kind. We put agreements in place between the federal lab and the private sector organization that define the engagement between them. It could be a patent license agreement or a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA).
The reason we do all of this is so we can do work together in the first place. The federal government invests over $148 billion dollars in basic and applied R&D annually. The government, whether it’s cancer research or DARPA or transportation research – anywhere there’s a federal laboratory doing research and development on behalf of the government—there is a federally mandated program that started in the 80s with the tech transfer legislation that we have to provide a return on the investment to the tax-payer by moving these products from the laboratory to the market-place.
It’s about the technological leadership of the nation. At NSA we have that because we have researchers here doing innovative work and it’s all really lab to market right now.
TCB: So what is the goal of TTP then?
LB: The goal is two-fold. First is to move things from the lab to marketplace, getting our patented technologies into the marketplace through these patent license agreements, or PLAs. When we do that, the companies that license our technologies gain market advantage through the technology that we license to them. Patents are an exclusionary tool – so it excludes others from doing the same thing because they’re generally the only ones that can exercise whatever that patent covers. And the second part is so that we can collaborate with industry and share the cost and benefit of research and development together.
TCB: So what is the end goal? What do you hope to accomplish, and how do you measure whether you’ve had a successful transfer?
LB: We’ve been working across the Department of Defense (DoD) to try to find metrics for tech transfer. In October 2011, the President put out a memorandum on accelerating the rate of technology transfer out of federal labs. Since that time, each lab has come up with a five-year business plan for how they were going to do that and what we were going to use as metrics.
For example, there’s downstream economic impact from this activity. It could be company creation or job creation. The Department paid to have a report done through an organization called Tech Link in which they did an analysis from 2000 to 2011 of the impact of the federal DOD tech transfer activities. For NSA in that period, we were pointed out as having over $188 million dollars of direct economic impact and almost 1,000 jobs created out of this program.
TCB: Can any business participate? Are there restrictions? Is there anything about these technologies that would be considered classified or sensitive that could not be in the public domain?
LB: We can work with pretty much any business. We’ll work with large companies, medium-sized companies, we will work with companies that haven’t even formed yet and are thinking about starting up with us around our technologies. Any size company, we can work with them.
One of the requirements that we must have in place is that we have to have some kind of technology development plan from the company in order to license the technology or technologies to them. To your last question, we have a catalogue of over 200 patents that are available for licensing from the agency, it’s available on our website online. But those are all unclassified, published patented technologies.
TCB: Is the catalogue the entire bucket of technologies or are there other ones potentially available? Does the catalogue represent everything that is available?
LB: Yes. That’s what’s available for licensing currently. So it will not include things that we’ve exclusively licensed to companies because then we can’t license those anymore.
TCB: What is the significance of NSA utilizing GitHub?
LB: For us, GitHub is just another venue through which agency innovators can engage with the open-source software community. It is a very widely used and well-known platform. We felt it was very important to get a – for lack of a better term – corporate presence on GitHub, so that there was one place for our innovators to put code out to anyone looking for open-source software code from NSA. We have released code onto the Apache Incubator as well. This is the way software development is going and the community is going and we need to be fully engaged the best we can be.
TCB: How does the NSA benefit from this program, and how does industry benefit?
LB: The agency benefits from the use of open-source software just like any other organization does. It’s a collaborative development environment. We get access to more resources – all those collective brains and eyes on the problem to develop a more robust code base. It saves time, it’s faster, and it saves money. It’s agile, it’s fast, it’s collaborative.
And how does industry benefit? It’s the same thing for them.
TCB: Can you give some examples of government and NSA working together to create or enhance a cutting edge technology?
LB: I’m going to give an example that’s not the most current example that we have but it’s a really good one. We have an exclusive license with a company called FixMo When President Obama came into office, he wanted mobile communication technology, and wanted to keep his Blackberry. So the problem came to our technologists to figure out how to make sure that the president’s Blackberry is secure. Our folks figured out how to automate a manual process and significantly reduce the amount of time it took. Well, it got patented and a company licensed it. They later were acquired by Good Technologies and just recently acquired by Blackberry. So that technology is moving forward.
We also did a CRADA—a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement—with FixMo over time to further develop the technology. The technology is widely used in the government enterprise, all the way up to the White House. We think it’s a really strong partnership. We’ve had to commercialize something that was here as a GOST –Government Off the Shelf Technology—product and make it a COST—Commercial off the Shelf Technology –product. Because we don’t want to be a manufacturer, we want to be able to buy things from the commercial sector so we wanted it to be a COST.
Another more recent example is a company called Integrata Security. They have exclusively licensed our wireless intrusion detection system or WIDS software. It’s a medium robust wireless intrusion detection system. They’re over two years old at this point, but they’re moving forward with that. Their products should be on the market in the near future. It will be called Radio Sleuth, and it will be the first medium robust WIDS on the marketplace. We’re looking forward to that transition happening.
TCB: One criticism of TTP is that many of the technologies that are being made available are old, some even decades old. If that’s the case, what is the value to the private sector?
LB: That’s a valid question and yes, some of our patents are older. Some patents have about a 20-year lifespan so they kind of get a little long in the tooth over time. But really what it speaks to is the longevity of this program. The agency’s been around since 1952 and so yes, we will have some older patents, but we’ve been innovating for a long time as part of our organization’s DNA. We have to solve hard problems to address mission goals. Sometimes those innovations result in patents.
The key thing to remember is that innovation and work on those technologies continue over time. Once you get through licensing a technology through a program like ours, you get access to the innovator. You get to actually speak to the people who invented this technology, figure out what was in their head, what were they thinking, and how did they get there because to license a patent is good, but it’s very difficult to read documents. What you really need to get is that know-how in the inventor’s head. We provide access through the agreements we put together where you really get to tap that expertise.
TCB: What benefits do the NSA employees who have worked on these technologies get? Do they get any monetary compensation for the patents?
LB: Absolutely, which is a really great benefit of being a federal employee, if I may say so, and an innovator in the federal government. When a patent application is filed and a patent is issued or allowed, they get a financial reward for that, and then if the patented technology is licensed, they get $2,000 every year—that’s in the statute for that patented technology—and then a percentage on top of that of whatever royalties come into the lab. And that varies per lab.
TCB: Does NSA get compensated itself, the agency as a whole as opposed to the individual developers?
LB: It’s all regulated by federal law. There are very specific guidelines we have to follow. Money comes in, you do the $2,000 and the percentage, and then the remainder of that is for the use of the lab to promote technology transfer opportunities.
