Safe Travels Across the Internet
The FedInvent Patent Newsletter for March 15, 2022
Greetings from FedInvent,
On the Ides of March, the U.S. Patent Office granted 5,802 new patents. Ninety-nine benefitted from taxpayer funding. It was a slow week for the federal innovation ecosphere.
The FedInvent Patent Report can be found here. To browse by department, start here.
From The People at Homeland Security
The Department of Homeland Security has a deep intellectual property portfolio. Its patents and applications are focused on making the Homeland safer — explosive detection technology, training drug, and explosive detection dogs, inventions that eliminate the need to take your shoes off to go through security. (The socks and slip-on shoe industries won't be happy,) Better methods for screening cargo. Improvements in cybersecurity.
This week the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) received U.S. patent 11272878, "System and Method for Detecting Cyanide Exposure." This novel saliva test replaces the current time-consuming and challenging blood test for cyanide exposure. (See the December 9, 2021, FedInvent Patent Application newsletter to read about this invention.) This week DHS received its patent. Commercializing and getting their invention into the hands of first responders should be up next.
Safe Travels Across the Internet
Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is a prolific filer of patent applications and recipient of patents focused on identity management and the use of mobile credentials. DHS, the TSA mothership, is the assignee on these patents. Their latest invention focuses on protecting our security as we travel across social media sites and protecting our privacy while we do it.
Let's start with what TSA does. The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is an agency of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security that has authority over the security of the traveling public in the United States. TSA's mission is to "protect the nation's transportation systems to ensure freedom of movement for people and commerce."
Who Are You?
TSA's intellectual property portfolio includes patents focused on its identity management mission. Who is getting on the plane? Is the person getting on the train the real person whose biographical and image data appear on their travel credential, their driver's license, passport, or other government identification? Can facial recognition and iris scan technology validate a traveler's identity so they can jump into the fast lane?
TSA's patent applications and patents for inventions deal with travelers and TSA staff challenges. These challenges include finding a better way to match a passenger with their baggage to make sure the person who checked the bag is the person on the plane. TSA employees filed patent applications for inventions that help travelers navigate the airport and streamline the screening process. TSA's patent attorneys, yes, patent attorneys, are the inventors of a new digital luggage lock system that works with your mobile phone. That invention enables locking and unlocking of the bags to let TSA do its job to screen the contents of your unlocked bag while keeping the bad guys in the baggage supply chain from getting into your relocked bag.
Lately, TSA personnel in its biometrics identity program at DHS have been expanding their portfolio far beyond travel security. They are moving from the airport, the ports and the train stations to social media, where exchanging personally identifiable information is an out-of-control frontier. TSA's latest applications focus on identity management across the internet. These inventors are the recipient of U.S. Patent 11277265, "Verified Base Image in a Photo Gallery."
TSA's inventors want to handle how you prove you are who you say you are on social networking sites, dating sites, professional networking sites — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Match, Grinder, LinkedIn, OkCupid, to name a few. TSA now holds a patent on presenting your credentials to the sites to validate that you are who you say you are. The patent's invention seeks to help protect you from catfishing, social engineering, romance scams, deception, fraud, or other abusive practices. For example, a miscreant user may attempt to develop a false persona by uploading false images — a picture or pictures that do not represent their actual appearance. Such a miscreant user may also upload false biographical information about themselves — a fake name, fake age information, fake gender information, fake residence information. (Does using the headshot when you were 35 count as fake age information? Uh oh.)
How It Works
You upload a government I.D. with your data. Verification processes match the images in the social media gallery to see if the user is a real human or a fake human. There are other features. For example, use biometric technology to check the facial image. Another use describes enabling a liveness check. This is an online session with a live human customer service rep and a live user. The goal is to validate that the user is, well, live. (Because you really want to submit your driver's license data mobile or otherwise to a website and then have a stranger show up on your phone or laptop to make sure you are you.)
(Does this sound familiar? The IRS foray into using a selfie and your driver's license as "a verified base image" to grant access to your tax data didn't go well.)
Buried deep in the description section of this patent are more "embodiments," patentspeak for ways to use an invention. The patent refers to technology for creating and detecting deep fakes and how to use these image galleries in conjunction with convolution neural networks for machine learning applications. The inventors also cite using the Viola-Jones algorithm, an algorithm created to address the problem of facial detection in images. Now it's getting interesting.
The second U.S. patent DHS received this week is 11277557, "Privacy-Aware Capture and Device." Getting to what this invention is about requires a little patent phraseology translation. The invention deals with the privacy aspects of image capture. The description says, "Region(s) of an image detected as likely including an identity-correlated object," and variations referred to as "identity-correlated regions." These identity-correlated regions in the identity-correlated object are then classified. Classifications may include persons' faces, tattoos, name tags, and license plate numbers. The identity-correlated regions may also include the biographical information on the image.
(There are law enforcement image databases that contain tattoos. A name tag database is a new one.)
How It Works
The system captures an identity object — an image or a video. That identity object has regions — full-face with a boring non-smiling picture, signature on the back, biographic information below the non-smiling face, a thumbnail version of the same non-smiling facial image, or three-quarter face with ear lobe showing. Each of these regions is classified — a face, an address, the signature, an ear lobe for biometric examination, name, address, etc.
Next, the patent covers obscuring regions of the images. Obscure the face. Obscure the license plate numbers but keep the picture of the car. Why do you need to do this? If you want to know how many yellow cabs pass through an intersection to analyze traffic flow, you need the taxi, not the license plate. Keep the picture of the person obscure the name tag. Obscure the name tag and the face.
Some of the obscured regions are reversible. Others are irreversibly obscured. The image can have a combination of both.
TSA, DHS, and its cohorts have terabytes of surveillance video from airports, parking garages, freight yards, sports arenas. A video may be essential for keeping people safe, but most people in these videos are not people of interest. After the event is over, there's no need for all these faces in the surveillance videos. TSA may want to save the videos for future training. Time to obscure the faces.
There is a compelling need for a way to protect people's privacy in these videos. Obscuring their faces and other personally identifiable information protects their privacy. But, law enforcement needs to know if the miscreant they are on the lookout for just tried to enter the arena with a big backpack.
Privacy advocates have serious concerns about digital dragnets that scoop up vast amounts of identity information and images for everyone at a location where a crime was committed. Law enforcement and the courts need to protect the privacy of people whose pictures inadvertently appear in a crowd where a crime is committed. The courts also need to protect the identity of witnesses in photographs and video evidence. There are many uses for this technology in an era of non-stop surveillance.
This brings us to intellectual property and policy issues. I.P. issues first.
These DHS identity management patent applications and patents are light on prior-art. The patent attorneys focused on Substantial New Questions of patentability can have a field day with these patents. (Call us if you need help.)
TSA sets the standards for Real ID and the emerging mobile driver's license (mDL.), one of the mobile identity credentials used in their invention. DHS and its employees serve on a wide range of global standards organizations where the U. S. Government representatives drive the requirements for things like the mDL and potential digital visas, passports, and other government-issued I.D.s. There are no prior art references to these proceedings. What's up with that?
At the risk of being spoilsports, these patents and patent applications seem to be a big move outside of the mission of TSA and the DHS mothership. Is TSA planning on licensing this technology? Are they planning on using exclusive licenses? Will social media sites that seek to create a more secure environment for their users need to license technology from DHS?
There are operational issues, too. Identity management solutions from DHS, TSA and other private sector inventions need a ground truth image. These patents describe bouncing images used for credential verification processes off other image databases to compare them with the ground truth image. Some processes execute facial recognition and other biometrics as part of the process. These inventions require a robust and fast digital verification infrastructure. These databases need 24/7 real-time image matching support for the inventions to work. The hyperscale social media sites like Facebook, Apple, and Google can probably handle the volume of verification transactions on their platforms. However, the state Motor Vehicle systems aren't designed to handle a high volume of verification processes. (Anything can be fixed with user fees. But who pays the fees?)
There is a growing portfolio of taxpayer-funded identity management, biometrics, and facial recognition patents and patent applications. These patents are stepping all over each other. For example, one group of patents addresses improving recognition technology and enhanced image capture enhance identity decision making. Other patents deal with protecting the images with the techniques to obscure or alter parts of an image.
Privacy advocates will be buying the extra-large jar of Tums.
(These inventors appeared in an earlier article called "The Curious Story of the Apple Checkpoint ID Patent." You can read it here.)
Bayh-Dole Scofflaw
Our favorite Bayh-Dole scofflaw is back this week. Raytheon Technologies Corporation was awarded U.S. Patent 11274770, "Monolithic fluid transfer tube." Raytheon Technologies Corporation is one of the largest aerospace, intelligence services providers, and defense manufacturers in the world by revenue and market capitalization. We'll classify this one as funded by DOD.
Patents By the Numbers
On Tuesday, March 15, 2022, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) issued 5,802 patents. Ninety-nine (99) of these patents benefitted from taxpayer funding. Here is how they break down.
Ninety-five (95) patents have Government Interest Statements.
Twenty-three (23) have a government agency as an applicant or an assignee.
A federal department is the only assignee on 11 patents.
The 99 new patents have 116 department-level funding citations.
These patents are the work of 363 inventors.
The 344 American inventors come from 36 states and the District of Columbia.
The 19 foreign inventors come from seven (7) countries.
There are 52 patents (53%) where at least one assignee is a college or university, the HERD.
Nine patents (9) resulted from the collaboration between two or more universities.
Four (4) patent has collaborators from a foreign university. The four universities are the University of Alberta, University of East Finland, University of Vienna, and McGill University.
Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs) received six (6) 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
This week's top three states are an unusual mix.
Maryland has nine first-named inventors and 22 total inventors.
California has eight first-named inventors and 33 total inventors.
New York has six first-named inventors and 37 total inventors.
Massachusetts came in fourth.
Patent Count By Department
Count By Technology Center
The Health Complex
The table below shows this week's count of 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.
The Health Complex Year-To-Date
The year-to-date counts for Health Complex patents can be found here. You'll find both the bar chart and the data table showing the institutes and HHS agencies and their patent count for 2022.
As a teaser — NIH is listed as the funding source on 515 patents so far this year. In 2021, NIH appeared as one of the funding agencies on 3,387 patents.
Before We Go
We updated the Messages from Ukraine page with the latest news we've received from Ukraine. Unfortunately, things are growing more dire by the day.
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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.