NSA Gets Payoff From Contractor, And The Lawyers Approve

By Len Lazarick

A contractor for the National Security Agency has begun funneling thousands of dollars back to the super-secret spy shop, even handing out dough to a couple of its scientists, and Deputy Director Bill Black admitted it felt a little odd.

The lawyers had always told him: “When they get to the part where they hand the checks out, you get the hell out of the room,” said Black.

But Black was on the receiving end Valentine’s Day for checks totaling $19,500 from Raytheon, presented by Hugo Poza, vice president and general manager for strategic systems, in a ceremony at the National Cryptological Museum near NSA headquarters.

Scientists Jonathan Cohen and Marc Damashek also got their own checks for several thousand dollars for their part in the invention of software source code that has allowed Raytheon to develop a product called Silent Runner, a program that visualizes and analyzes traffic over a computer network. The program produces two and three-dimensional views to enhance understanding of complex networks.

Silent Runner can be used to identify unusual traffic on a network, and is particularly useful in identifying attempts to hack into a network from the outside.

Poza said Raytheon has sold the product to other defense agencies, defense contractors and commercial entities, including pharmaceutical companies and “bankers worried about intrusion.”

While NSA has licensed other technologies to defense contractors, this is the first time that the agency has transferred technology used to develop a commercial product sold to commercial firms and the first time the agency’s employee inventors had been paid royalties on the invention.

“We believe it is such a good product that [the royalties are] are gonna keep on coming,” said Poza.

In 1986, Congress passed a law requiring large federal research agencies to transfer some of their technology to the private sector. “Because of who we are and how we operate, it wasn’t until 1994 that we started” that process at NSA, said Black, to knowing laughter from his audience well acquainted with the agency’s secretive ways.

But since then, NSA has identified advanced technologies “in its core areas of signal processing, computing, communication networking, microelectronics and advanced mathematics as potential transferable technologies,” according to an agency release.

According to the agency, licensing fees have netted the agency over $250,000 in licensing fees over the past five years. Some of the licensees include IBM, Lockheed Martin, Marconi, AlliedSignal and Annapolis Micro Systems.

For more information about NSA technology transfer, go to http://www.nsa.gov, and click on Domestic Technology Transfer Program. It describes more than two dozen separate technologies, ranging from encryption and language training to polygraph analysis and wafer and die thinning technology that are available for licensing.

For more information about scientists Cohen and Damashek, see this month’s special section of The Business Monthly on the BWI Business District.