Intelligence Authorization Act

The Intelligence Authorization Act, which passed the House February 26, 2010, will increase funding for human intelligence collection and counterterrorism activities. The bill supports our intelligence officers by improving oversight of covert activities, directing essential funding for efforts abroad, and boosting foreign language capabilities to ensure that officers have the critical tools they need to carry out operations around the world.

The bill boosts funding for language programs that are crucial to gathering intelligence abroad and strengthens recruitment efforts to attract the best possible talent. It also contains critical provisions to enhance the nation’s cybersecurity efforts and to better fight the proliferation of WMD’s around the world. The bill increases funding for intelligence efforts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and funds efforts to address emerging national security issues in places like Africa and Latin America.

Additionally, the bill makes important reforms to the oversight of covert actions, creating an Inspector General for the intelligence community and requiring that IG to audit each covert action. It reforms the process for notifying the intelligence committee of covert actions so that Congress can more effectively perform its oversight role and prohibits private contractors from conducting interrogations of detainees in CIA custody and requires that all detainee interrogations be videotaped.