It's Tinfoil Hat Time
The FedInvent Patent Application Newsletter for January 20, 2022
Hello From FedInvent,
Here's the preview of the January 20 patent application numbers. On Thursday, January 20, 2021, the US Patent Office published 7,076 pre-grant patent applications. One hundred sixty-one (161) benefitted from taxpayer funding.
If you like to start with the data, here is the link to the FedInvent Patent Application Report for January 20, 2022. You can browse by federal department here.
https://wayfinder.digital/fedinvent/patents-2022/fedinvent-applications-20220120.html
It's Tinfoil Hat Time
Wayfinder Digital's accountant, a tax wizard, is the purveyor of sagacious tax advice. Among his bits of tax filing and audit avoiding wisdom are the following:
Don't give the IRS any more information than you have to report your tax obligation accurately. Giving them extraneous information is asking for trouble.
Keep your receipts. Not having receipts causes a lot of trouble during an audit.
Never file your tax return electronically. Never. Who knows where your data will wind up. Electronic filing is like handing your data to hackers. Filing a tax return electronically is asking for a lot of trouble.
I've shared this guidance with a younger corporate CPA tax accountant a while back. His view is that it's the 21st Century. No one files their taxes on paper anymore. It's ridiculous. Your account needs to take off his tinfoil hat.
The IRS announced its plan to require the use of a selfie to verify one's identity so you can access your data on IRS systems. The 21st-century corporate tax guy pooh-poohed this until he found out that he would also need to send along a selfie to get to his data. The last time we checked, he was ordering his own roll of tin foil and is working on some clever hat designs.
Back on November 17, 2021, the IRS made a quiet announcement. The Internal Revenue Service announced the launch of an improved identity verification and sign-in process that enables more people to access and use IRS online tools and applications securely. The IRS says it is using a "mobile-friendly" verification process. Its new solution helps it meet a legislative mandate to improve security on the IRS's online services, so the hackers stop stealing people's identities and refunds.
The November announcement says, "To provide verification services, the IRS is using ID.me, a trusted technology provider. The new process is one more step the IRS is taking to ensure that taxpayer information is provided only to the person who legally has a right to the data." The new process seems innocuous enough until you hit the last paragraph, "To verify their identity with ID.me, taxpayers need to provide a photo of an identity document such as a driver's license, state ID, or passport. They'll also need to take a selfie with a smartphone or a computer with a webcam. Once their identity has been verified, they can securely access IRS online services."
Last week the IRS was already having a challenging week. First, it announced that it would be a miserable tax season for taxpayers this year because the IRS doesn't have enough staff, they still have a backlog of tax returns from last year, and everyone has COVID. This morning, CNBC reported that the IRS backlog includes:
9.8 million unprocessed individual returns.
2.3 million amended returns.
Over 2 million business returns need to be processed.
A taxpayer double whammy, the new upload-a-selfie verification requirement announcement came to light last Thursday. If you want to access your tax information from IRS online systems, you need to use the upload-a-selfie verification process.
The use of mobile-friendly buzzwords about how fast and easy it is to upload a selfie from your smartphone or laptop doesn't change the fact that this is a facial recognition application. Send a selfie, send a copy of your driver's license or passport to a third-party vendor so that it can match your faces — your selfie and your government-issued photo IDS. If you make it through that gauntlet, the vendor will set up another live video session to check your live face against all your IDs and that you are a breathing person so the third-party vendor can make sure you are alive. Then you're good to go. The facial recognition and privacy people are not happy.
Facial recognition technology is a contentious piece of surveillance technology. When the government uses facial recognition technology, the level of anxiety and distrust enters the stratosphere. And then add that the IRS hired a third party to collect this data, and heads are exploding all over the place.
What, you ask, does the use of facial recognition for identity verification have to do with FedInvent patents and patent applications and taxpayer-funded R&D? A lot.
Federal funding of R&D focused on trusted identity management has been going on for quite a while. ID.ME Inc. received federal trusted identity R&D funding. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) website highlights several ID.ME projects including:
$1.2 million for ID.ME, Inc. to develop and pilot trusted identity solutions that allow military families to access sensitive information online.
A 2013 cooperative research and development agreement which NIST funded at $2.8M.
NIST also funded $3,750M for a project with the city of Austin, Texas, ID.ME and other participants intend to develop a city-level blueprint for increased trust among participants in the sharing economy. In the state of Maine, ID.ME will implement a federated ID model to increase citizen access to benefits.
During the same period, ID.ME, Inc. started building its own patent portfolio. None of these patents have government interest statements.
The taxpayer-funded identity inventions cover the use of biometrics for chasing bad guys and finding terrorists. The patent documents indicate that the government is funding research and development that extends the use of facial recognition to more broad general surveillance, identity verification, and access control uses. In 2021, patents that include biometrics, facial recognition, and identity documents as part of the invention had been funded by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Army, the Navy, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the National Labs, and the Intelligence Community and the National Institute.
(We haven't found any patents or applications for biometric or facial recognition inventions from the Treasury Department. Treasury has patents that cover keeping the faces of George, Abe, Alexander, and Ben safe on US currency.)
Among the most prolific patent application filers are TSA's identity management program managers and patent attorneys. The TSA inventors are back this week with a new patent application, publication number 20220019649, "Verified Base Image In Photo Gallery."
This time around, TSA is focusing on the verification of identity for "online hosts." Online hosts include social networking sites, dating sites, professional networking sites — Facebook, Match.com, LinkedIn, and more. This patent application teaches how to use a mobile identification credential, a mobile driver's license, or passport to receive official verification of the identity of a user of one of these services. The application cover image matching, facial recognition, or other techniques for identifying matches of the same user in photographs within a portfolio of images stored on one of these online host systems. (So much for creating fake employees to LinkedIn to make your company look bigger.) The TSA application covers a similar but not identical verification process to that defined by the IRS.
Wide adoption of facial recognition and biometric technology is underway. The airlines are using Apple and TSA's identity verification software. The IRS is using ID.ME Inc.'s identity verification software. Both applications rely on facial imaging and recognition and the use of official credential documents. Both of these applications have the potential to enable commercial identity management companies to make money selling their services. However, security and privacy issues remain. Federal funding of biometric and facial recognition R&D and the development of standards for both mobile credentials and facial recognition have also matured to the point where deploying identity management is feasible. And everyone across the identity management technology universe has a pile of patents.
The question is, will the taxpayers who are being asked to use this technology feel comfortable with the federal government using their selfies to prove who they are.
An Upload-a-Selfie Verification Test Drive
One of our most trusted go-to websites for important information on cybersecurity concerns is Krebs on Security. Mr. Krebs went through the process of trying to sign up for the IRS ID.ME online access credential. You can read about his experience here. His story includes an interesting twist, a long wait time, and preferential treatment on who gets to the front of the customer service line at ID.ME.
On to this week's patent application numbers.
Patent Applications By The Numbers
On Thursday, January 20, 2021, the US Patent Office published 7,076 pre-grant patent applications. One hundred sixty-one (161) benefitted from taxpayer funding. Here are the numbers:
One hundred fifty-four (154) patent applications have Government Interest Statements.
Thirty-six (36) applications have an applicant or an assignee that is a government agency.
A federal department is the only assignee on 24 patent applications. One patent application has both the Army and the Navy as the assignees.
The 161 new patents have 173 department-level funding citations.
These patents are the work of 542 inventors.
The 530 American inventors come from 35 states and the District of Columbia.
The 12 foreign inventors come from five (5) countries, including three inventors from the People's Republic of China.
There are 87 patents (54%) where at least one assignee is a college or university, the HERD.
Four patents (4) resulted from the collaboration between two universities.
Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs) received seven (7) patents.
Two (2) patents were assigned Y CPC symbols indicating that the invention may be useful in mitigating the impact of climate change.
The Big Three States:
California has 29 first-named inventors and 110 total inventors.
Massachusetts has 13 first-named inventors and 52 total inventors.
New York has nine (9) first-named inventors and 30 total inventors.
There are no Bayh-Dole scofflaws this week.
Patent Count By Department
The Health Complex
The table below shows the number of funding citations where the recipient cites the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the institutes at the National Institutes of Health, and other subagencies that are part of HHS, the Health Complex.
There are many more taxpayer-funded patent applications than we can cover here. It was a big week for patent applications related to cancer detection, prevention or treatment (21); HIV/AIDS prevention (4); and new inventions from academic-affiliated medical centers (15).
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As always, we thank you for reading FedInvent.
The FedInvent Team
FedInvent tells the stories of inventors, investigators, and innovators. Wayfinder Digital's FedInvent Project follows the federal innovation ecosphere, taxpayer money, and the inventions it pays for. FedInvent is a work in progress. Please reach out if you have questions or suggestions. You can reach us at info@wayfinder.digital.