New intelligence chief might oversee data-sharing system

House lawmakers want a new national intelligence director to take the reigns of a beleaguered project created after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to improve information sharing.

A recently passed House bill, H.R. 10, would create a post for a director and give that official authority over numerous intelligence agencies. The new authority would include power over the so-called Chimera system, which is currently overseen by the Homeland Security Department. House lawmakers said the system has "not in any way" been implemented in the last two years.

A Senate version of the legislation does not have a similar provision. The two chambers hope to reach a compromise on the legislation later this month.

While legislators avoided blaming Homeland Security directly, they are aiming to place stricter guidelines on the national intelligence director for implementing the initiative. One year after enactment of the bill, the director would have to have an interim system in place, and a fully functional program would have to be ready by Sept. 11, 2007.

Under the bill, the system would have to be a "state-of-the-art" program able to incorporate biometric information, such as scanned fingerprints and linguistic information.

A 2002 law mandated the system to let State Department and Homeland Security officials immediately access criminal, immigration and intelligence information on every foreign visitor from different federal databases. Congress set several deadlines to implement the system, but as of last December, Homeland Security officials had not met one of them. And since then, according to the intelligence bill, the department has made "little progress."

However, one security policy expert disagreed with transferring responsibility for the program to a new national intelligence director. "The solution is stupid," said James Carafano, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, who argued that the mandate would "overload" the director with "unnecessary additional duties."

Carafano said the problem dates back to a political compromise brokered between the Homeland Security and State departments in 2002, when Congress created Homeland Security. That law kept the authority to issue visas within State but put Homeland Security in charge of visa policy.

"A far better solution would be consolidating all visa management into a single, responsible agency -- the Department of Homeland Security," Carafano said.

He also put part of the blame for Chimera's failure on the shoulders of Congress, saying that "very little money has been put behind it."

Congress recently cleared a fiscal 2005 spending bill for Homeland Security that would allocate $40 million for modernizing technology at the immigration and customs enforcement division. Some of those funds would go to the Chimera system. The allocation is the same amount appropriated for fiscal 2004.

By comparison, lawmakers allocated $83.4 million for the program in 2003.