ALEXANDRIA, Va., Aug. 20 -- United States Patent no. 12,393,720, issued on Aug. 19, was assigned to MICROSOFT TECHNOLOGY LICENSING LLC (Redmond, Wash.).

"Blind subpoena protection" was invented by Ramarathnam Venkatesan (Redmond, Wash.), Nishanth Chandran (Bangalore, India), Panagiotis Antonopoulos (Redmond, Wash.), Srinath T. V. Setty (Redmond, Wash.), Basil Cherian (Bellevue, Wash.), Daniel John Carroll Jr. (Columbia, Md.) and Jason Sydney Barnwell (Seattle).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Embodiments described herein enable at least one of a plurality of entities to access data protected by a security policy in response to validating respective digital access requests from the entities. The ...