The last two days have featured a number of congressional hearings of interest to the computing research community. Here’s a brief summary:
Senate VA-HUD Appropriations Subcommittee, Thursday – OSTP Director John Marburger, NSF Interim Director Arden Bement, and National Science Board Director Warren Washington testified before subcommittee chair Sen. Kit Bond (R-MO) and Ranking Member Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) to defend the Administration’s FY 05 budget request for NSF and the physical sciences. Bond and Mikulski both cited the large disparity in federal funding between the life sciences supported by NIH and the physical sciences and engineering as supported by NSF. Bond said he was “alarmed by the disparity” and believed it put the nation on track to lose its leadership in technology. “I think we need to treat this as a crisis,” Mikulski agreed.
Senate Budget Committee, Wednesday – Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge told the Senate Budget committee that DHS was not using data-mining techniques to threaten the privacy of US citizens. “I can assure you nothing we are doing in the Department of Homeland Security has been designed to collect information or spy on Americans…We are getting access to personal information and to some extent, proprietary information,” Ridge said. (Thanks to Tech Daily (subscription req’d) for the quote). Ridge was responding to concerns from Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), the Senator who led the charge against DARPA’s Terrorism Information Awareness (TIA) project in 2003. Wyden has a very negative perception of data-mining, and believes its use by the federal government is intrinsically bad. “Nobody is in charge, nobody knows how many programs involve data mining, nobody knows how much money is being spent, or how many agencies, and no one knows whether there are any privacy protections,” he told Tech Daily.
House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Science, and Research and Development, Wednesday – DHS Undersecretary for Science and Technology Charles McQueary defended his agency’s decision to direct the most funding towards research aimed at preventing biological attacks rather than cyber security research. The ranking minority member of the full committee, Rep. Jim Turner (D-TX) criticized the funding level for cyber research, saying “I’m not certain I’m very comfortable with the process that leads us to conclude that $18 million (the DHS request for FY 2005) is sufficient for cyber.”
House VA-HUD Appropriations Subcommittee, Wednesday – OSTP Director John Marburger told the House appropriations subcommittee that he satisfied with the President’s request for R&D in FY 2005. “We’d be in good shape,” if the budget was enacted as proposed, he said. He also noted a few areas of technology he believed would provide the most return on the government investment in research, including nanotechnology, information technology, and biomedical research.
House Science Committee, Wednesday – The Science Committee heard testimony on the impact of US Visa Policy on Scientific Research at a hearing timed to correspond with the release of a new GAO study on the same subject commissioned by the committee one year ago. In the report, GAO found that the average delay in issuing a visa to a foreign researcher or student is 67 days, and that much of that delay is attributable to a faulty process for the Visa Mantis program. Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) noted the concerns the science committee has with the issue: “Americans must keep our doors open to innovation and new ideas. The work of foreign students and the collaboration with their American born colleagues has not only created scientific discoveries and technological advancements for our country, but it has resulted in job creation that our economy so desperately needs. The visa system should incorporate enhanced security checks that do not create unnecessary or burdensome bureaucracies that will only further damage our scientific leadership and image throughout the world.”
House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection, Tuesday – In a suprise move, Subcommittee Chair Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-FL) introduced his own version of a database protections bill, reneging on an agreement the committee had reached with the House Judiciary Committee, which has already passed its version of the legislation. Stearns bill, which was subsequently approved by the subcommittee, is a more restrictive version of the judiciary committee bill — a bill which would provide publishers of databases of facts broad protections against the misappropriations of their databases. Stearns bill sets a more stringent test for content to be protected than the judiciary measure, which is supported by a coalition of database companies, publishers, realtors and newspaper companies. USACM has some great background material on the issue. Wednesday’s markup throws into doubt the fate of either bill, as the House Leadership had counted on an agreement between the two committees to work together.