 Thank you so much. Good evening and welcome to the conference America's Secrets, Classified Information, and Our Democracy. As the acting chair of the Public Interest Declassification Board, I'm excited for this conference and for the opportunity to discuss the critical need for modernization of the federal systems for classification and declassification of records. And I want to thank everyone for having us here tonight. We really appreciate being involved in this in the conference. This evening we welcome Avril Haines, Director of National Intelligence, for a conversation with Adam Klein, the Director of the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law. I'm honored to be able to introduce Deannai Haines, who I've known for over 10 years. Deannai Haines has had a remarkable and varied career which is not surprising to anyone who's worked with her. Her level of energy and work ethic are legendary. Deannai Haines was sworn in as the Director of National Intelligence on January 21st, 2021, as the first female Director of National Intelligence. During the Obama administration, she served as an Assistant to the President and Principal Deputy National Security Advisor from 2015 to 2017 when she led the National Security Council's Deputies Committee. From 2013 to 2015, she served as the Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. And before that, she served as the Deputy Counsel to the President and National Security Council's legal advisor, which is when I first met her. Deannai Haines initially joined the federal government as a civil servant and over the last two decades has worked in all three branches of government in and outside of the intelligence community. She's also worked in academia and as a research scholar at Columbia University and a senior fellow at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. Deannai Haines has an amazing background. She's done amazing things from running an independent bookstore to learning how to fly a plane. So that her backstory is amazing just from a practical standpoint. She's one of the most inspirational people that I think you will be able to meet. I also want to introduce Adam Klein, who's the Director of the Strauss Center and Director of Strauss's Program on Technology, Security and Global Affairs. Prior to joining the Strauss Center, he served as the Chairman of the United States Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, the independent bipartisan federal agency responsible for overseeing counterterrorism programs at the NSA, FBI, CIA, Department of Homeland Security and other federal agencies. So I want to talk a little bit about why we're here today. Deannai Haines has expressed her concerns that too much information is unnecessarily classified or is classified at too high a level and that overclassification and the inability to share information can undermine our national security and critical democratic objectives. I and the other members of the PIDB share these concerns and we welcome her efforts to reform the classification system. We look forward to hearing her remarks and the conversation with Adam this evening. Please join me in welcoming Deannai Haines and Mr. Klein. Thank you so much for that very kind introduction, Alissa. It is truly an honor to be here with all of you today, particularly also with Senator Coran, who's a long term member of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee and someone who support and wisdom has really enabled the intelligence community to pursue its mission over the years. But thanks as well to the Clements Center for National Security, the Strauss Center for International Security and Law, the Clements Strauss Intelligence Studies Project, the LBJ Presidential Library, the LBJ School of Public Affairs and the Public Interest Declassification Board for co-hosting this important conversation on classified information and our democracy. And that was quite a mouthful, but it's a testament to the breadth of interest and equities relevant to this issue and the challenge of bringing them together. On behalf of the entire intelligence community, I want to tell you how grateful we are to be able to draw on the expertise at the University of Texas on all manner of issues, including the one for which we're gathered here this evening. And to the members of the Public Interest Declassification Board, thank you so much for your efforts to address the classification and declassification challenge. All of us in government who work in national security know how challenging this is, but also know how important it is. And we are grateful that you are trying to find ways to improve the situation. Given how many blue ribbon commissions have opined on the problem, how many reports in and out of government have talked about it over the decades, how many efforts have tried and failed to change things, the fact that you are here is a testament to your capacity to fight cynicism on this issue, which I greatly respect and admire, particularly given how important this issue is to our democracy and to our national security. You have some great panels and discussions lined up for the days ahead in this event, and those who are speaking are far more impressive experts and thinkers than I am, frankly. But I'll do what I can to contribute to the conversation. And institutionally, I want you to know that the OD&I and the intelligence community are ready to roll their sleeves up and work with you to make a difference on this issue. I thought I would just say a little about why I believe this is so important to the country and for the IC, and then talk about some of the practical challenges we face as we attempt to address classification reform. And finally, talk briefly about some of the things we're doing to try to improve the situation. Many have noted that the amount of classified information, whether properly or not, has increased significantly over the last 50 years, and deficiency in the current system have led to overclassification, as well as underclassification, but on balance significantly more overclassification than underclassification. And this is an urgent challenge to solve, because first, overclassification undermines critical democratic objectives, such as increasing transparency to promote an informed citizenry and greater accountability. And second, overclassification undermines the basic trust that the public has in its government. And third, overclassification negatively impacts national security, because it increases the challenges associated with sharing information that should not be classified, or at least not classified at the level the information is classified at. And I'll focus on the third point, even though I believe the first two are at least as important, if not more so. I'm just uniquely qualified as a consequence of my position, I think, to make the case for how overclassification can negatively impact national security, particularly given the current threat landscape. As the Ukraine War demonstrates, the importance of sharing intelligence on key national security threats with allies, partners, and the public could not be more important. And thus, having a system that can facilitate such sharing as much as possible through properly classifying such information initially, and ultimately having the resources to review and downgrade or declassify what can be released is critical. This is particularly true today as essentially every significant national security and foreign policy challenge we face requires us to work with partners and allies. But even within our institutions, the challenge of overclassification and compartmental, compartmentation, which is a derivative of the broader problem, creates challenges for our work. We've seen this in areas such as space, for example, where military leaders have publicly discussed the fact that compartmentation has made it especially challenging to work across agencies and departments to develop comprehensive strategies that take into account everyone's equities and interests and consequently minimizing overclassification or compartmentation is crucial to maximizing our capacity to help policymakers and operators make better decisions. And of course, we are increasingly in need of sharing downgraded information with the private sector and other entities who are on the front lines of cyber attacks or other threats for which the intelligence community's warning may make the difference between success and failure, including of critical infrastructure. Yet in many respects, the challenge is only becoming more acute, exacerbated by the growing amount of classified material that is proliferated across a wide range of agencies, which in part is simply a reflection of the degree to which the impact and importance of national security issues that come from abroad are of importance to everyone in our country. And all of this is to say that not only is this an important issue for our democracy, it is also critical to our national security. This problem undermines our capacity to effectively support senior policy decision-making, to rapidly share and disclose information to allies, partners and the public, and erodes the basic trust that our citizens have in their government, which makes it harder for us to do our work. And having said all that, however, I want to acknowledge that the challenge is more complex than I think most people realize at the outset. There are some real pragmatic challenges that we face as we try to create a system that is more effective. First, I want to say what is likely obvious but worth perhaps reiterating, which is that we must keep certain information secret or we will not be able to do our job in the intelligence community. But it does have to meet a national security standard. And to be clear, just because information is inconvenient or embarrassing is not a basis for classification. But there are real national security reasons for keeping certain things secret that should not get in the way of promoting an educated public debate or doing our job. For example, while it may be important to disclose the fact of U.S. military action and the nature of the threat posed, which may have served as the basis for such action, if we don't protect certain information regarding, for example, the tactics we use or details regarding the weapons employed or sources who contributed to our work, we may lose the insights that help us avoid the next threat or put the lives of those who risk their security to support ours in grave danger or give an adversary an advantage that puts our forces at risk. And keeping such information secret, even when properly classified, has nevertheless become much more challenging in light of technological advancements that have increased the risk of massive and damaging leaks. Technology has revolutionized the way information is created, stored, communicated, and accessed, making it far easier to leak classified information and to disseminate it, in some cases resulting in direct, immediate, and irreparable harm. Ironically, however, the effort taken to manage the increasing challenges associated with such leaks often make it, among other things, harder to devise a system that facilitates declassification when appropriate. Moreover, the sheer amount of information that all of us deal with every day, whether working in a classified or an unclassified environment, adds to the challenge. For example, in an already resource constrained environment, we have a relatively small number of people, money, and subject matter expertise dedicated solely to declassification review. And that relatively small group faces the daunting task of processing requests from an utterly massive repository of records. As the PIDB, as I call it, essentially noted in one of its reports over 10 years ago at one intelligence agency alone, the growth of classified records was approximately one petabyte every 18 months, which they noted was about 49 million cubic feet of paper. Imagine what it is today, right? And how many people would it take to review that much information? And over the years, numerous investigations and reviews have been done in an attempt to identify ways to improve the current system, and they pointed to not only organizational and structural barriers, but also cultural issues that make this much more difficult. For example, these reports often point to the fact that there are virtually no incentives in our bureaucracy to declassify or to refrain from classifying a document, yet there are plenty of incentives to classify. And even the logistics of minimizing classification are surprisingly challenging for national security professionals. Reducing the amount of classified material takes additional time, which is at a premium in most of these jobs. Just to give an example of which there are many, it takes extra time when writing an email or memos to mark classification of each paragraph or sentence in order to ensure that any unclassified information is marked as such. And furthermore, as national security professionals, you're trained to mitigate risks to national security, which makes it likely that you will be naturally biased toward classifying information that you believe could cause any damage to U.S. national security. Additionally, the process for declassifying information before it would automatically be declassified is more complicated and generally requires a higher level authorization than classifying a document. And numerous reports on classification have demonstrated that many employees remain uneducated about the requirements and standards to be applied when properly classifying documents, which can also lead to overclassification. So thus we recognize that we have at least two major objectives. First, we need to continue working on the development of a system that promotes the appropriate classification of information when identified to begin with and that minimizes what is classified as an initial matter. And second, we need to facilitate the downgrading and declassification of information as it ages to promote sharing and disclosure when possible, to promote a better public debate, enhance accountability and trust, and to support our work across government, as well as with partners and allies. And I realize I'm leaving aside the perfectly appropriate debate about whether the standards we use are the right ones for classification and when information that is properly classified should be declassified because of the public interest, which may outweigh the real national security concerns that may be at stake. But the two objectives I've outlined above would in my view have a significant impact and are things that we in the intelligence community can and should make progress on, particularly with the help and guidance of the Congress with the PIDB and with others. So let me talk about a few things that we're trying to do to make a dent in those objectives. First of all, to improve the system more generally with respect to how employees approach classification, we're working on implementing various recommendations from studies and reports done on this subject across the IC, working to resource the implementation of those recommendations, and highlighting the challenge with appearances like this one to make clear that this is a priority for the ODNI and for the intelligence community. Second, we're working hard on removing barriers to access and reducing FOIA backlogs by assuming the Congress supports our efforts, investing in the technology to support the most effective and efficient management of records, increasing staffing of information management experts, and developing and implementing institutionalized records and FOIA training. Third, we are increasingly investing in and attempting to scale technology that can allow us to enable significantly more declassification in a shorter period of time with greater consistency. Specifically, we're using and further developing tools that aid with searches and documents and that streamline and standardize review and release practices, and these tools have increased the consistency, speed, accuracy of declassification reviews while also reducing the amount of time they're needed from human resources by eliminating multiple manual processes. We're also experimenting with artificial intelligence, machine learning tools that might be used as discussed in a prior PIDB reports to automatically identify records for declassification and perhaps most importantly finding ways to promote the adoption of such tools across the intelligence community where we found them to be useful in certain pockets of innovation. But I want to be clear that the problem we have will not be solved with technology. Human beings in the form of classification in records, professionals, as well as the subject matter experts they consult with are critical to making progress. And the expertise this requires is not widely available. So we will need to both recruit to retrain to retain the professionals needed for this effort for even as we look to expand our capacity to deploy technologies against this challenge, we continue to require human beings to manager, to monitor, and to validate the work that's being done. And fourth, we are working to ensure that our IT infrastructure process for managing classified information and the various policy and legal frameworks that exist for managing information including unclassified but controlled information. Take into account the broader objectives that all of you are focused on. And fifth, we are looking to promote the prioritization of disclosing information of high public interest, which is often measured through criteria such as the number of FOIA requests we receive on a topic, the historical significance of documents, the potential yield of releasable documents. And we're also looking for ways to make public the key legal and policy frameworks within which we operate in the intelligence community. I think this is critical to promoting credibility and the public's trust in our work because we can explain how and why we take certain actions even as we may not be able to disclose information about the specific actions themselves. And for example, we have proactively released the Attorney General guidelines that we operate under which allow us to reference and rely on them publicly in discussing our work, and we put out significant amounts of information regarding our implementation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. We're working on other frameworks that may help people to better understand how we work and the constraints we apply to, for example, the collection and dissemination of intelligence. And we're increasingly reviewing intelligence products for public release on issues of public interest so that more people can understand better what we do and what we're telling policymakers on key national security issues. As an example of this, if you have any interest, you should take a look at our website where you'll see a number of analytic assessments from the National Intelligence Council in addition to our regular public releases, our annual threat assessment, our global trends reports, and other reports like that. So although I have no complete solutions or comprehensive recommendations to address all of the practical and structural challenges that are presented, I am committed to working on this issue to improve the situation. And I'm especially grateful to the PIDB and to those members of the Congress who have been willing to spend their time on these challenges, particularly Senators Wyden and Moran who have been stalwart supporters of improving the system and have really raised attention on this issue. And without question, this will have to be a team effort and without your collective assistance, we're just not going to be successful in reforming our classification system to better meet the needs of the intelligence community and the American people. I thank you very much for listening to me for that long. Thanks. I'm Adam Klein, Director of the Strauss Center here at UT Austin. Thank you again for being here, especially on this topic. I think, first of all, it's a telling illustration of why we needed Director of National Intelligence, someone who is not part of any of the agencies but sits above all of them and can drive these kind of initiatives. And second, it's such a contrast at a time when we're dealing with authoritarian adversaries where the intelligence services exist primarily to oppress the citizens. And here we have the leader of our intelligence community pushing for greater transparency in cooperation with an independent board that's doing the same. So thank you for being here. We appreciate it. You alluded in your remarks to the need to declassify information to share it with the public. And in fact, you led one of the most remarkable instances of that recently before Russia's invasion of Ukraine. And we saw the U.S. government being very proactive in releasing information about Russia's intentions. And I think the consensus is that it was very effective in stripping the pretext away from their invasion. We were always one step ahead of them. Can you walk us through some of those decisions and maybe pick out one piece of intelligence in particular? How did you persuade the agencies to release that information? How did you evaluate the security equities, the sources and methods, as they say in the business behind that? And how did you ultimately come to the decision with the president with the National Security Council to release the information? Thank you for the work that you've done to Adam on these issues. I mean, I think it's been extraordinary and particularly in your leadership role in the P-Club. But on this issue, you know, we were producing obviously in the intelligence community intelligence for the president and our senior leaders on what we saw in terms of Russian's intentions in relation to Ukraine. And what happened was after they sort of received our analysis and were working through it the president directed his team to go out to start to talk to partners and allies about what we might do together in response and whether we might shape that events essentially by creating deterrence and a variety of other policy interests at that time. And our secretary of state or national security advisor others went out and started talking to partners and allies. And they came back and they said they're really skeptical. They don't think Russia's going to invade in this kind of large scale way and they don't really think this is being contemplated. And the president sort of turned to us in the intelligence community and said you've got to get out there and start sharing this because we've got to make sure that our frankly partners and allies are prepared for this but also so that we can actually start having a conversation about it. And so we did. We, you know, really many of us director Burns, myself, others started to sort of push out. But one of the things that we did in trying to promote this was recognizing that it's great for me to take a trip or for director Burns to do this and others in the intelligence community leaders. What was really useful is getting the subject matter experts together with subject matter experts in other countries that we're working with to begin sharing that kind of information and to build essentially a mechanism whereby we could do that. And then as you indicate as we, you know, continue to sort of push down that a lot of that can still remain classified. Right. You're providing it. You're downgrading it. We frequently call it in the intelligence community and providing it to partners and allies. But we also were being asked by the policy community to expose some of what we were seeing that the Russians were doing particularly in the context of establishing a pretext for the invasion. And it's hard to walk through a particular piece of intelligence to be able to give you the insight that you're describing in an unclassified way. Right. But what I would say is I think one of the things that we did, you know, is first of all, we really worked together as a team, honestly, across the community and rarely now does any product, you know, of analysis frankly go to our senior leaders without it including a variety of different points of intelligence from across the community. And in many ways what we tried to do was figure out how could we expose what we were seeing which we might have learned from, you know, classified sources using open source and there is a remarkable amount of open source commercial imagery other things like that that we could effectively point to and what we recognize too is that in doing that using that open source intelligence and developing those products in that way they're extremely productive and you begin to develop essentially a process for doing this that kind of, you know, adds and creates its own momentum in a way. Staying with the war here for a moment because it is obviously the seismic event of this moment. We've seen Ukraine be very effective in targeting things like Russian commanders, logistics facilities using the precision strike weapons that the United States has provided. There have been media reports suggesting that the U.S. is providing intelligence support and for those of us who study this professionally certainly looks like the U.S. which of course has the best capabilities in the world in many areas is providing support. What if anything can you say about the support that the United States is providing to Ukraine and in the intelligence realm? Yeah, I mean, absolutely we are providing intelligence support to Ukraine and, you know, and generally trying to help them to defend themselves against Russian aggression and I think one of the things that is likely to be among the lessons that are being learned coming out of this conflict is the degree to which that kind of intelligence sharing can be useful in a conflict. I mean, I think, you know, it's obviously always been useful in conflict but I think the degree to which it has had an impact is something that, you know, has not been recognized necessarily as much before and building that system I think has been kind of a key element of our work. Why do you think it's more effective now than in the past? Is it because of precision weaponry or because of different intelligence capabilities that might not have existed? Yeah, I mean, I think it is at least in part due to our capacity to provide that kind of intelligence and to share it real-time and to develop those mechanisms with, you know, with a partner like Ukraine. I think also Ukraine deserves an enormous amount of credit for the way in which they've been able to utilize really everything that is handed to them in a pretty extraordinary way in order to prosecute the conflict. You recently said that Russia is expending ammunition at a rate that's faster than they can produce and you've expressed some optimism about Ukraine's prospects. What factors do you look at and do you weigh most heavily when forming these assessments about the future course of the war? Is it purely military? Is it logistics and supply? Economic factors, internal regime dynamics in Russia or something else entirely? It's really all of the above to be honest. I mean, I think ammunition is, you know, one of these things where people have focused in and rightly so it has been a challenge honestly on both sides of the conflict and something that we're, you know, consistently trying to monitor and understand what the implications are of different shortages. But the supply lines, morale, sort of how the leadership is doing, a variety of factors are critical. And one thing that we've really seen in this conflict is, you know, in addition to the grinding conflict that we're seeing right now where the movements are not, you know, they're sort of in hundreds of meters. It's really extraordinarily challenging and the front lines have, for the most part, remained relatively static even as we see the Russians engage in a offensive in the Donbass region around Bakhmut and Solidar and these cities and making kind of very incremental progress in that area. What we are also seeing obviously is just this extraordinary illegal outrageous attack against critical infrastructure in Ukraine. Civilian infrastructure and really, you know, it is intended to, from their perspective, undermine the will of Ukraine to fight and also to have an impact on their economy and their capacity to deliver supplies to the front lines. And I think the place that they are having the most impact because we do not see any reduction in the resolve of Ukrainians to fight this war and we see them continuing to be capable from a military perspective in this way. What we do see is the impact it is having on the economy and the Ukrainian economy has already been devastated during this conflict and, you know, we are seeing reduction of about 30 percent the GP. I mean, it is really, it is brutal and if they take down the grid and if they have the impact that they are looking to have on critical infrastructure it will be really challenging. Shifting gears to our other principal, authoritarian, adversary, China, of course, the threat of a Chinese invasion or blockade of Taiwan is obviously a very acute one that would have huge economic and security consequences. You said earlier this year that China is working hard to build the capability to take Taiwan militarily and you described the threat as acute. How close is China to being able to do that and do you think they will try? So I think this is one of the things where they are building up the military capacity in order to have the option in effect to take Taiwan through force and potentially over our intervention or, you know, a Western intervention. Our assessment continues to be essentially that they would prefer to do so through peaceful means rather than using force and that that will be their sort of, you know, approach to this. But I think one of the challenges is that if they become convinced that peaceful means are insufficient that in other words, they won't be able to do it through those means then, you know, this is partially why they're building a military option. And I think one of the challenges in this space is among other things trying to help policy makers and others understand what are the implications of this. And, you know, and I think there's obviously, you know, 24 million people in Taiwan for which this has an enormous implication and potentially tragic outcome over time. But it is also you know, any disruption around Taiwan from, you know, say a shipping disruption or a natural disaster or other things can have really significant impacts on the financial global economy. And this is something that, you know, they have, they make most the vast majority of leading edge semiconductors for the world. These exist in almost every category of electronic, you know, devices that we have. It will take years for, you know, the West to build up the capacity to do that. Should something happen to that supply, there's a variety of things that are just worth understanding in this, you know, in sort of how we think about what's happening in that space. An American president, if China does decide to move, will have to make an exceptionally wrenching decision about whether we are going to fight to defend Taiwan. We've had a policy of strategic ambiguity. The president has made some statements about that. Of course, the intelligence community's job is to provide warning about if that is happening that is definite enough to enable the president to have decision space. Will the intelligence community be able to provide timely warning and what types of capabilities are being brought to bear to make sure that we're watching China very closely? That one's I really can't answer about it. I would say, but we will do our best to obviously to provide all the warning and decisions basically can. Yeah, exactly. I know. Shocker. Let's stay on the China topic, but switch gears pretty dramatically here to something that may be of interest to our younger audience members, TikTok. And of course, if you try to access TikTok on our campus network, you no longer can. Of course, the state issued an order prohibiting it on state networks. We are a state institution here at the university. And this, of course, is in response to the massive amount of data that the app collects on your activities, your movements, your personal attributes, your interest, and so forth. And of course, there's also the risk that the app, the algorithm, can be potentially changed or programmed to influence American public opinion. Can you describe in more detail why the federal government sees this as a risk? What the potential intelligence risks look like to an intelligence professional? Yeah, I think let me take it out of TikTok in any particular company and just say that, you know, as a general matter, one of the challenges and we, you know, I mentioned that we have been putting out some of our national intelligence community assessments, for example, releasing what we can. One of the ones that we put out is related to China's effort to accumulate data and what they can do with that data and how that can be used. And this is something that we concern ourselves with. I think, you know, as you look at companies that are collecting the kind of data that you described, they are, you know, holding that data someplace. If they are in headquartered or otherwise have a a business presence in China, China has certain laws that require them to provide them with access under certain circumstances to data. That data is something they can then draw on in the context of their own capacity to collect data. And what we see increasingly is, you know, frankly, a variety of authoritarian governments using digital data to engage in kind of a form of digital repression and and managing that to affect essentially in their efforts to influence. And I think that's something that we just have to be conscious of as we're trying to, yeah, think through these issues. Staying on the subject of technology with the war in Ukraine, but also other things happening around the globe. If you go on to Twitter, if you go on to another social network, you can see videos coming off the battlefield and you can see amateur analysis of these things. This is called open source intelligence or OSINT and there's a growing group of people who do this professionally with varying levels of quality. Bellingcat is perhaps the most famous and one of the highest quality examples. How does the intelligence community regard the rise of competitors in the open source space? Is it a benefit to your work? Is it potentially a source of bad information that can influence the public or something else altogether? That's really interesting. I mean, I don't, I think, I remember George Tenet came back who former director of the CIA when I was deputy, he came back and he did a a talk for employees in what we call the bubble, which is sort of the auditorium that we have there. And one of the things he said was, you know, and this is now years ago, but nevertheless relevant to your question, he said, you know, I just, I thought it was going to be terrible not having the PDB every morning, the president's daily brief, not having access to all of the intelligence that you get in the intelligence community. You know, and then I started reading the paper, you know, it was a little tongue of cheek, right? Like, and he was like, and actually it's not bad, right? Like they've got some great analysis, like on these things. And it was funny and it's not, I mean, the reality is there is a lot of obviously open source information. There's some remarkable analysts, you know, around the world that are producing information and thinking on these issues. And we don't consider them as competitors in any way. Honestly, we try to tap into the best of what's out there and learn from them. And I think, you know, that's an area where we don't always do it as well as we should. It is something where I think we need to increasingly, you know, get those outside perspectives. They are quite helpful and mostly, you know, what I see is opportunities in the context of open source intelligence for us, where I think bringing that in as much as possible and then vetting it the way we do everything. We have trade craft that we apply to our analysis. We try to make sure that, you know, when we're looking at sources, we understand the context so that we can tell whether it's a source that's trying to spin us or, you know, a source that's the level or what their biases might be as we then produce analysis on these issues. And similarly, you want to look at what's in open source and do the same. And you know, hopefully we can add that value as we produce analysis that draws on everything that we're able to understand. We had several audience members who asked questions and submitted questions related to politics and intelligence. And ideally, these are things that are kept separate. Increasingly, we see them blending together and becoming subjects of intense partisan debate. It used to be one of the most bipartisan areas in Congress. You'd regularly have bipartisan support for important intelligence bills and that has shifted over time. Does that concern you? And what do you think we can do to restore a degree of consensus around national security generally it absolutely does concern me. I mean, I think that the perception of the intelligence community as being politicized makes it harder for us to do our job, right? If we are the ones that are trying to produce warning, for example, to disclose concerns about any number of topics to the public, if the public doesn't trust us and believes that we are biased politically or otherwise, frankly, in a way that's illegitimate, then people won't pay attention to the warnings that we have. It makes us less effective from a national security perspective. And the way that I think sort of moving forward and I would say just even before moving forward, one thing that is true today that gives me great hope and something I'm grateful for is, frankly, our Senate Select Intelligence Committee, our House Intelligence Committee is quite functional. In other words, and particularly, we've had the chair in ranking come over and do workforce interviews with me. I've, you know, I talk to senators on both sides of the aisle on a regular basis and same on the House. And we try to do briefings to them on a bipartisan basis. So we send everything to both sides. We try to do everything in a way that promotes confidence in the system and that allows for that. And then we have a lot of ways in which we try to manage this issue. And I think, you know, among the things that sort of structurally built in is the fact that we don't have very many political appointees. I mean, it is, you know, in my own institution, it's me, it's my principal deputy, it's the general counsel, it's the inspector general, right? Like, and that is basically what it is in, you know, various elements across the community. And, and in some, you don't even have, you know, more than one to presidential appointees. And, and that is, you know, part of just trying to ensure that people understand the degree of, of, you know, that this is career service in a sense. And what we're doing is for the nation and not for politics. And a piece of it, from my perspective, is related to what I was talking about in my remarks, which is, I think, trying to expose as much as we can about what we do and what we don't do and being as transparent about that as possible, so that again, we can engender trust, I think, with the American people about how we do our business because there's a lot of, I think, misconceptions about the intelligence community that we're constantly trying to pierce in this space. Is there one thing that you can't yet say more about an area that you think would demystify things and reduce some of this tension, whether it's domestic terrorism and the intelligence community's role there, or some other topic that you think has inspired public skepticism that you would like to address and that you are working to enable more declassification on? Yeah, I mean, there are definitely a number of places where we're looking to try to create some frames that help people understand, you know, sort of how we're working on these issues. I think commercially available information is an example of this, you know, where I think it's, there are, you know, reasonable questions and concerns that have been raised about, how do we handle commercially available information, information that we purchase, for example. So this is things like certain agencies reportedly have purchased location access to geolocation information from private sector companies where you could put in a phone number and see where that device has been, for example. Yeah, any kind of data that might be purchased. And I think one of the challenges with this is, you know, on the one side, our adversaries can purchase the same information. And so we're trying to, you know, understand what is out there and how to manage it. We obviously want, as we ingest it to apply all of the same safeguards that we apply across the board with respect to U.S. person information with respect to, you know, PPI personal and private information, other things, and have frameworks for dealing with that. But one of the concerns, for example, you know, that gets raised is, well, you know, you can get, you might have to get a court order to get certain information, right? If you can purchase it, well, and you don't get a court order, you know, isn't that undermining the system, right? Isn't that somehow, then aren't you incentivized to purchase, right? So we need to think through some of these issues to make sure that people understand, here's how we're thinking about it. This is why we do this. This is what we don't do. And I think, you know, as I noted to you, it's, there's a trust piece to it, but there's also just supporting democratic government, which is to say that I think it is fair for people to have questions and want to be able to debate what are the guidelines and structures within which we operate? What's the legal basis for our work? And while the Congress has to step in the shoes of the American public for our oversight, for a great deal of what we do because so much of it is classified, we do want to give as much of the outlines of what we're doing so that there is the opportunity for that kind of public discussion. So for those of us for whom the 9-11, post 9-11 era was formative, it's remarkable that we've gotten this far and haven't talked yet about terrorism, but I think it's also telling, and this is something that several of our audience questioners picked up on about the shifts in the geopolitical environment. And so several audience members wanted to know about the shift from terrorism to great power competition as being the defining theme of U.S. security policy. How is the IC adapting and how do you rack and stack those threats and allocate resources accordingly in today's world? Yeah, it's a great question. A few things that may or may not be interesting, but one is I think there's no question that we are shifting and that we are focused as we sometimes call it the unparalleled priority of China or the pacing thread or however you want to characterize it in this context and in great power competition is another piece of this obviously including Russia and others. And so it is that is in terms of racking and stacking that's at the front of the line. At the same time terrorism continues to be a threat that is something that we have to continue to focus on. And so as we're shifting and as we're making sure that we're focused on what is the top priority for our policy community and our presidential and congressional priorities we are also trying to make sure that we are continuing to be diligent about the threat that remains in the terrorism space and also to take advantage frankly of the tools and capabilities and lessons learned over those years to apply them to other transnational threats such as transnational organized crimes such as cyber crimes such as frankly narcotics. I mean when you look at the deaths in the United States as a consequence of fentanyl and drugs it is just extraordinary. And these are the kinds of things that I think we can help in the sense of being better at monitoring flows of drugs from outside the country into the United States and otherwise contributing to the sort of network mapping that gets done in these spaces to understand that threat better and effectively. And of course to do all these things you need tools you need ways to get out this information and one of your most important tools something called section 702 to give you the very short version this allows you to use digital infrastructure in the United States to collect intelligence on people who are overseas who are not Americans is about to expire at the end of this year and this is used to cover roughly 200,000 foreign intelligence targets a year and this is a public number that is published annually in your declassification report. Do you think it will be reauthorized? What are you all planning to do to make sure that it is reauthorized and can you explain why it's important? Yeah it is absolutely critical. I think most people know about it in the context of counter-terrorism and we've recently disclosed the fact that it was critical for example in the operation against Alzauer-Herry it continues to be critical in that space but what I think less is known about is the degree to which we rely on it for so many other aspects of our work. So when it comes to cyber attacks we've gone after ransomware attacks we've been able to identify such attacks and where they basically created accesses and then are looking to act on them. We have learned about we do a great deal of work in counterintelligence in the space trying to identify spies of other countries that sort of thing that are looking to spy on us and we just do a range of things like there really isn't anything Russia nothing is untouched essentially by this authority so it is fundamental to our work. We've made a lot of effort to try to ensure that people understand what the authority is where we what we do with it we have reports that we do about compliance with the privacy and civil liberty constraints that are on us and the way in which we approach this the training that we provide all kinds of things that hopefully give people a sense of the seriousness with which we take the responsibility of having this authority and this is something that I think honestly we would not be able to do our job without it and you'll hear this from I think a series of intelligence community leaders over the course of the year because as Adam indicated it will expire at the end of this year if it is not acted on by Congress in terms of you know my projection for whether we'll be able to reauthorize it I don't know it is I think it will be extremely challenging honestly and this is our sense and it is something where we're looking and have already been trying to have conversations you know with members of Congress with others about what this means what are the kinds of things that would be required in order for us to try to get there we have a question which I think is something that's on everyone's mind is there any good news in the world and of course oh wow you publish nobody comes to me for that you publish a global trends report which is public but since this is the intelligence community I also want to give you the opportunity to give us the the sobering news that we need to hear so is there any good news in the world but also is there one thing that keeps you up at night that you think the public doesn't have its eye on adequately oh my god the boss asked if I could bring on we do the president's daily brief you know on daily basis on Fridays could I bring one piece of good news and we have struggled I cannot tell you like it is really you know it's it's not an easy prospect for us yeah well just I will tell you that there's I'm sure there is good news in the world there's there's no question I do not often focus on it I will say and I do find incredibly inspiring the degree to which frankly just our intelligence community expertise that they bring to bear on some of the challenges that we are facing and I think a lot of the work that we do that is in we call it opportunity analysis which you know it's not easy for us to do but but what we're doing is trying to find places where essentially there might be an opportunity for the United States to pursue a policy that could promote you know our interests and our allies interests in different areas and you know and so things like for example as we've watched Europe try to manage the the Russia-Ukraine conflict and the sanctions and and their efforts to cut off oil and you know and so on and to sort of free themselves of that leverage that Russia has through energy you know they've been moving more towards clean energy options and other things you know and so we sort of like look for ways in which you can think about how different events around the world might create opportunities for us in different spaces that may be useful so that's more in the opportunity space in terms of of what people may not be focused on that keeps me up at night I will tell you the thing that really does is sort of at the top of my list is whether or not we're going to be prepared for the future in order to manage the incredibly complicated fast-moving constantly evolving threat landscape and you know when I brought together the intelligence heads the community to talk about priorities what are you know all of their priorities for the future we were sort of in the context of budget hearings and things like that and you know and we sort of all put together here's what we've been thinking about is sort of the key issues for us over the coming year what you will find is that the vast majority you know we know China is an unparalleled priority we know we've got to focus on Russia we know we have all of these critical threats around the world but but what we're focused on is are we recruiting and retaining you know a talented and diverse workforce do we have the right expertise that we need in the intelligence community and are we getting it integrated into all of the different work that it needs to be integrated in are we investing in the science and technology that will give us a competitive advantage for the future are we building the partnerships that we need in order to make us stronger are we paying attention to the resilience of our critical infrastructure that's going to make us sufficiently agile and flexible to address the challenges of the future but the people are at the absolute top of that list and it is fundamental that we get the most talented folks that this society has to offer and bring them into the IC so that they can help us understand what's happening and be prepared for that future well we here at the university and here in the state will be here to support you thank you so much for taking the time to join us and we wish you good luck and all the important duties we've got