The US House Appropriations Committee has approved a $3bn budget for the Departments of Justice, Commerce and State which explicitly forbids expenditures on the proposed Federal Intrusion Detection Network, FIDNET. A draft of the FIDNET plan was leaked to the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) earlier this week. Privacy activists were quick to condemn the proposal, saying it amounts to a program of military surveillance of private-sector computer systems. On Friday, the Clinton administration agreed to conduct a legal review of the privacy implications of FIDNET.
Congressional concern, however, is not so much over potential incursions of civil liberties as over who will pay for FIDNET, what it will cost and whether the government could in fact do without it. The committee is concerned that the delineation of responsibility for the development, deployment and funding of this interagency system has not been determined and questions whether this effort is duplicative of on-going activities within other federal agencies, committee members explained. The fiscal 2000 budget now passes to the full House of Congress, which will vote on the Bill with the FIDNET prohibition included.
