December 07, 2004 | At 615 Pages, It's All Fine Print

The House is expected to approve the intelligence reform bill conference report tonight. The Senate will likely follow tomorrow.

For those who don't live for legislation, both the House and the Senate passed differing versions. Then each names a team of all-stars that meet to hammer out the differences. This has been what all the stories have been about in the last month. The House has been recalcitrant, not wanting to remove provisions about immigrant drivers' licenses and protecting the Pentagon's turf as long as they could.

Now, on Monday, the conference committee reached a compromise and they now send a unified bill to both the House and Senate for approval, before it goes to the president. Now, neither team can amend the bill without sending the whole thing back to the original committee.

So what they ironed out is what we get:

Here's the civil liberties take on the story.

The bill includes a $40 million dollar proposal for a far-reaching government information-sharing network intended to radically expand the availability of intelligence data across agencies.

The system would allow counterterrorism investigators to instantly query a massive system of interconnected commercial and government databases, which hold billions of records on Americans.

The bill also would impose national standards for drivers' licenses and birth certificates, expand the government's wiretap powers and provide funding for research into national biometric identity cards.

To offset these changes, the bill creates a civil liberties board.

But the final proposed board is weaker than in earlier versions and less independent than civil liberties groups think is necessary.

As proposed, the board would be appointed by the president without the need for Senate confirmation and does not have the power to subpoena documents from recalcitrant agencies.

Agencies can also withhold documents from the board on national-security grounds.

Both the Center for Democracy and Technology and the American Civil Liberties Union wanted a more independent board with broad powers to investigate alleged civil liberties abuses.

In the coming year, keep your eyes on the civil liberties board and the intelligence network. The latter is full of perils, but could be very useful for inteliigence analysts. The former, well, could be a great behind the scenes force or it could be a sinecure for old, lazy professors.

Posted by Ryan Singel at December 7, 2004 05:18 PM

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