“Today, following over a year of coordinated effort among the Intelligence Community and the Department of Justice a bill is being submitted to Congress to request long overdue changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act,” according to an April 13 fact sheet (pdf) on the proposed changes issued by the Justice Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
The text of the proposed legislative changes to FISA, with a section by section analysis, may be obtained here (pdf).
“If S. 372 [the FY 2007 Intelligence Authorization bill pending in the Senate] were presented to the President, his senior advisers would recommend that he veto the bill,” according to an April 12 Statement of Administration Policy (pdf). Among the bill’s intolerable provisions, the Statement said, are the fact that it would require public disclosure of the annual intelligence budget total.
No one will be surprised if we end up with a continuing resolution to push our shutdown deadline out past the midterms, so the real question is what else will they get done this summer?
Rebuilding public participation starts with something simple — treating the public not as a problem to manage, but as a source of ingenuity government cannot function without.
If the government wants a system of learning and adaptation that improves results in real time, it has to treat translation, utilization, and adaptation as core functions of governance rather than as afterthoughts.
Coordination among federal science agencies is essential to ensure government-wide alignment on R&D investment priorities. However, the federal R&D enterprise suffers from egregious siloization.