US Government Shutdown: Good News For Patent Trolls

When the US House of Representatives killed any chance of a budget compromise on 1 October, a number of federal agencies shut down with no indication as to when they might resume operations. But a few agencies found ways to stay open.

NASA’s regular website home page was offline on 1 October. Instead visitors were redirected to the generic usa.gov site that tells you the agency has shut down operations. You get a similar message at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The website for the Federal Communications Commission is still running, with a text-only site a the time of publication, which tells you that all but a handful of people have been furloughed and sent home.

Keeping the lights on

But naturally some critical agencies remain in operation. The National Security Agency has kept the lights on, but the agency says it has stopped updating its website. A spokesperson for the NSA told eWEEK that the intelligence community is still operational. A separate visit to the website for the Director of National Intelligence site states reveals that agency is only partly operational.

A DNI spokesperson told eWEEK, “The Intelligence Community’s ability to identify threats and provide information for a broad set of national security decisions will be diminished for the duration. The immediate and significant reduction in employees on the job means that we will assume greater risk and our ability to support emerging intelligence requirements will be curtailed. The less than 30 percent of Intelligence Community employees who remain on the job will be stretched to the limit and forced to focus only on the most critical security needs.”

However, the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), interestingly, is still open and running as if nothing had ever happened.

Why are some agencies spared?

So how is it that some agencies important to the IT industry have effectively gone offline, while others seem to be unaffected? Unfortunately, there’s no really simple answer. The USPTO, for example, is established in the US Constitution, and has its own funding that doesn’t depend on annual Congressional appropriations to the extent that some others do.

But that funding won’t last forever. And if the budget deadlock remains in force for more than a few weeks, the USPTO will cease most operations along with the rest of the Department of Commerce as part of a Shutdown Plan that went into effect in September.

The FCC has a similar Shutdown Plan, except that it went into effect on 1 October because that agency does not have its own funding, so most operations ceased after a four-hour period in which employees turned off the lights. The operations at the FCC that will continue include the acting Chairwoman and two other commissioners, and some functions that support emergency operations. At the FCC a number of employees can be called back in for work on an “as needed” basis.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology web site reported that the agency is closed due to the “lapse in government funding. NIST, meanwhile, will keep the Internet Time Service running along with the National Vulnerability Database.

For its part, NASA provides no information about its ongoing operations. One wonders if US astronauts are being furloughed, and if so, will they be required to leave the Space Station and return home? I sent an e-mail to several NASA public affairs officers, but got an automatic reply, saying they’d been furloughed.

Long term effects

The effect on the technology industry isn’t completely clear. If Congress gets its act together and finds a way to end the shutdown in a few days, there will probably be very little impact. Very few of the agencies’ operations are necessary on a minute-by-minute basis.

If the shutdown goes on for more than a few days, however, there could be problems. The FCC has dozens of operations underway at any given time and in the case of a few such as in approving licence transfers, the effects could be far-reaching. The same is true of the important work at NIST, which has a lot more going on that just managing the network time protocol.

But never fear, some of the activities we know and love will continue. Patent trolls will still be able to file their abusive and frequently bogus business process patents, for example. But now the Federal Trade Commission is closed and won’t be able to do anything to curtail their activities. Even if the FTC has already filed a complaint about their activities, the Department of Justice is also closed so there is nobody around to bring any enforcement action.

While the law enforcement functions of the DoJ will continue to operate and the federal courts will remain open for the time being, the critical prosecutorial link that brings the bad guys to justice may not be.

The result of this Congressional infighting is that your business will get no help from the FCC in expanding your wireless data needs. There is no one at NIST working on new technical standards. If you need to update your passport to conduct business in Europe or Asia, you’re out of luck.

But at least for the time being the troops are being paid, the law enforcement and intelligence agencies are on duty to keep criminals, terrorists and global adversaries at bay. Although you have to wonder why those adversaries would bother doing anything to attack the US right now. After all it appears that we have a Congress that is intent on reducing the nation to third-world status all on its own.

What about those tech cops and robbers? Try our quiz!

Originally published on eWeek.