 All right. Welcome, everybody. Hi, my name is Kate Thalman. I'm the chair of the Help I'm an Accidental Government Information Library and Webinar Series. I'm from the University of Colorado Boulder. This series is brought to you by the American Library Association's Government Documents Roundtable, or Godort. And thanks for coming. You will all be muted during this webinar, but we encourage you to participate in the chat. If you don't see a chat window, you can always click on the chat icon at the bottom of your screen. If there are any technical issues that you run into, you can reach out to Kelly Wilson, who's our Zoom tech, and you can feel free to chat with her and get advice on what's going on. Worst case scenario, please remember that this session is being recorded. All right. So, real quick, some housekeeping. Our next webinar is October 18th. This is on reporting on the world of government information. It's a panel presentation from the editors of IFLA's Professional Report Government Information Landscaping Libraries. If you have any topic ideas, please let me know. My email is, I'll put it in the chat once I'm done talking. It's Catherine.W.Talman at Colorado.edu. And if you're a member of an ALA Godort committee and would like to co-host an event like this one, please also reach out. And there will be a short survey at the end of this where you can share your thoughts on today's webinar and offer any future ideas for improvement or topics. You can also see all of our webinars on our YouTube channel. I will also post that link momentarily. So please subscribe. So as these get done and uploaded, you will get to see them again. So today's webinar, I'm really excited about it is Secrecy 101 Classification and Executive Order 13-526. It's co-sponsored by our colleagues and Godort's Education Committee. So I'm going to hand it off to them. In particular, I'm going to hand it off to Aaron Wilson. For those of you who don't know Aaron, he's a government documents coordinator at the University of Maryland Libraries. And I will pass it along to you, Aaron. Thank you very much. Thank you, Kate, for that introduction. And thank you also to the help webinar series committee for their assistance in sponsoring this event as well as to the members of the Godort Education Committee for their continued support of making these events possible. We are pleased to have with us, John Powers, who will be our presenter today. John Powers is a 30-year public servant who has just recently joined the Office of the Historian and the Department of State to lead the Office of Historians, the Classification Coordination, Publication and Digital Initiatives Program. Before joining OH, he served as the Associate Director for Classification Management in the Information Security Oversight Office at the National Archives and Records Administration, NARA. He led a team of analysts and advising government agencies on policies for declassifying and safeguarding national security information. He managed work of the Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel, the government's highest appellate body for resolving classification and declassifications, determinations, and served as the senior staff officer for the Public Interest Declassification Board, which is an independent board tasked with making recommendations to improve the security classification system. Under his leadership, the board will publish five reports to the President, including the most recently a vision of the digital age, modernization of the U.S. National Security Classification and Declassification System, and a report to Congress on the feasibility of declassifying records related to U.S. nuclear weapons testing and cleanup activities in the Marshall Islands. John previously served two tours as the Director of Access and Information Management on the National Security Council staff at the White House from 2015 to 2018 and from 2022 to 2023. He led a team responsible for viewing and declassifying White House and NSC records for public access, including records for the Department of State's foreign relations of the United States series. He conceived of and led the U.S. Declassification Project of Argentina that involves 16 other departments and agencies. John also co-led an interagency process that resulted in the declassification of historical presidents daily briefs from the Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford administrations. This past year, John led or co-led the interagency process for modernizing executive orders on controlled unclassified information, classified national security information, and special access programs. John began his career at NARA in 1991 as an archivist aide at the Nixon Presidential Materials Project, eventually serving as acting director in 2007. He reviewed President Richard Nixon's secret tapes and his administration's NSC papers for public access. He spent two years at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library, the classified LDJ's secret recordings. John, it has a Bachelor of Arts in International Relations from the College of William & Mary and a Master of Arts in American History from George Mason University. John, we're very glad to have you as a part of this series and at this time, if you're with us. Okay, can you guys all hear me? Everybody can hear me? Fabulous. Okay, so thanks for the introduction. I appreciate that and thanks for the opportunity to be here on this very esoteric topic. I'm obviously a fan of the American Library Association and specifically the Government Documents Roundtable. I've spoken to you all before, although it's been a long time previously on what to do when you come across classified documents in your collections from my previous job at the Information Security Oversight Office. So happy to be here and talking about this. This is the second topic. We're doing this late. I'm going to share my screen now. Let's see if I can do it correctly. And we will start this presentation here. All right. So this is a very esoteric topic and we're putting the car before the horse here a little bit because back earlier in June you heard from my friend and colleague. David Mengel on the declassification process and I am going to start backwards here and talk a little bit about like, what in the heck happens? How do you actually decide to classify information in the first place? So let's have a hopefully a good conversation and I always start these presentations off with a disclaimer since I am still a current government employee that the views expressed here today do not necessarily reflect the views of the White House, the National Security Council, the National Archives, ISU where I used to work or my current position here at the Department of State. So I'll state that up front. So Kate mentioned that here we're here to talk about executive order 13526 classified national security information. Well, what does that actually mean? In this organization probably more than any understands the difference between a record in a document and information and data. And very specifically, believe it or not here records are not classified documents are not classified, but it's information and data within those that can be classified and I emphasize that word can be for a reason and we'll talk a little bit about that. The records documents or other media they are actually marked with the classification marking that alerts the reader the user that information in there is sensitive. So that's kind of how that breaks out a little bit. Now, when it was first signed back in 2009 it was considered kind of a groundbreaking order you know it was the and there were two others that were considered kind of groundbreaking. President Nixon's was the first to talk about declassification allowing citizens to request the declassification of information President Clinton when he signed his was the first to introduce this topic of automatic declassification after a set period of years. In President Obama's order really took that a step further or several steps further. And it will talk a little bit about some of those steps as part of my presentation. All of the orders that relate to classified information going all the way back to President Truman are divided into different sections. David talked about section three. I am primarily going to talk about section one and section two on the on my slides today. So first of all there's a weird things that as I said this was a very esoteric topic and they're, they're fewer fewer than 100 of us in government that really focus on this topic it's that kind of esoteric and really care about this. But what I'll tell you is that there are two types of classification. There's original classification, which is the initial decision that specific information in the interest of national security should be protected against unauthorized disclosure. And that's the initial decision and then the derivative classification decision is when we the information itself is already classified and somebody else is using that information and using it perhaps differently or as part of a different project. And they are going to derivatively then classify that information and I'll go into a little bit about how that works and in how it's done in a little bit. But you should know that they're essentially there are two types of classifications there's original and derivative which means that they're two types of classic people that can classify their original classification authorities and then there are derivative classification authorities and the derivative classification authorities is pretty much everybody who has a security clearance in the government and uses it. While the original classification authority are those individuals authorized in writing by the president or the vice president or select individuals within several different agencies, it's a fairly small number. What's interesting in a little bit different here is that original classification authorities have discretion and we're going to talk about that discretion in a little bit. Derivative classifiers do not have discretion they are supposed to follow the instructions and the guidelines and the rules established by the original classification authority. President Obama when he signed EO 13526 in December of 2009 he also issued a separate memo designating certain top officials as original classification authorities OCA's 16 agency heads were listed by the president in that memorandum. And those tend to be the agencies you think of those are the departments that focus on national security as their main mission, and they can classify up to top secret, or those agencies that have as some type of involvement or national security. They have authority up to the secret level. And there's six of those departments total of 16 different departments. What I'll what you'll notice here is what I said here or what you see on the screen. You have top secret you have secret there are no confidential original classification authorities. The president also recognize that. Well, he's nominating, and he's enabling 16 agency heads to originally classify information, but they have day jobs they have important jobs to run their agencies lead policies. So the executive order did give these agency heads, the authority to to delegate their authority downward to other senior leaders in the agencies. And as I talked about here that the difference here for to classifiers derivative to classifiers is that's everybody else. And then as I said we we derivative classifiers have to follow the rules that are set by the OCA's. So 16 agencies have this authority. They're not many believe it or not this is the the lowest number ever, if you can believe that they're a total of 1638 original classification authorities across government in the executive branch across these 16 agencies. Most are at the secret level, and they are most of those come from my agency the Department of State where every ambassador has original classification authority. And then the very small number at the bottom there actually are three confidential OCA's in the Department of Defense, who are allowed to classify up to the confidential level. But that's it. My former boss at the director of ISO and the Environmental Protection Agency Administration administrator, both have original classification authority. But unlike the other national security agencies, they are not allowed to delegate it. It's theirs to use. And that's it. Now I talked a little bit earlier about kind of the the groundbreaking nature of President Obama's order back in 2009. And that really has to get into and he really did try to focus on efforts to limit over classification and efforts to limit the delay of declassification of information. And so within this section one, which focuses on original classification, he set out a lot of different concepts and rules that even the original classification authorities must follow when making decisions on whether to classify or not to classify information. The most important one of those is that he put in words and language in the order that said, hey, if you have significant doubt about whether you need to classify this, you shouldn't classify it or classify it at a lower level. He also wanted to make sure that the information that derivative classifiers were receiving and derivative classifiers usually get their guidance in the form of a declassification guide. And he required that these guides be reviewed every five years that they'd be reevaluated for every bit of it to determine whether the information in there still needs to be classified and still needs to be classified at that level and still needs to be classified for that length of time. And he required specifically that this be a whole of agency approach and a whole of agency effort as part of these five year reviews that they involve original classifiers, derivative classifiers, subject matter experts who use the guides, declassifiers, and surely there may have even been some freedom of information act requests that have had some effect on this so he wanted to have some input from the staff who do those that do that type of work, and he also wanted historians to weigh in. Information is a rapidly changing area where information can become stale fairly quickly. So this five year requirement was fairly new, and this was put in there after during the interagency process my former agency at the information security oversight office learned that many of the agencies were using classification guides that were sometimes 30 or 40 years old, and the information was long obsolete, but they had never been changed. So this is one effort to really hold agencies accountable and to maintain current guidance for all of us who classify information derivative late. The second thing is that he did put some limits for original classifiers that he put some time limits they can classify up to 25 years and that's it. He made sure that information would not be classified forever indefinitely, and he put some very tight limits on what information could be reclassified. And these are really designed and important here to ensure that information that's once been it's made available to the public before it is taken off of the public shelf. There is a serious effort made to ensure that the information really truly is sensitive and to make that effort. And I also like would like to kind of say here that you know the, and I will tell you that this presentation kind of builds off of training that I give every year to original classification authorities because they are required to take training every year on the use of their authority and specifically to include information about avoiding over classification. And the government typically has always had a response that well we're fairly risk averse and we're going to classify things just to be safe. And so to original classification authorities, I always stress that over classification harms our national security to it is not just an issue of transparency. In trying to enhance our democratic tradition and democratic access to information for citizens and participation in government, but over classification, especially today and tomorrow. And into the future over classification harms our national security, because it limits or prevents information sharing. It harms decision making, and it makes us less safe if people do not have the information that they need to act on it quickly. So, to kind of continue along those kinds of line within that first section that OCA is have to follow. There are many different efforts and many and much different there are lots of language in here specifically on the importance of trying to avoid over classification including significant doubt that the number of original classification authority delegations must be very limited and it's a user lose. If you don't use it you lose it and agency heads are expected to police this work to ensure that their people that they have delegated their authority to are using it and using it appropriately by taking the training every year and reviewing the classification guides that they oversee every five years. And that that fundamental classification guidance review that takes place every five years is very, very important for those reasons. So, what is the front of there's four different criteria that original classification authorities have to use when making this decision to classify information or not. And the first thing I want to say is I've copied some language here right out of the order, but I want to emphasize that word may, and that is information may be originally classified, because the original classification authority has that discretion. And in that discretion, no matter what if she or he decides that the information should be classified. There's four basic criteria that the information has to fall within and that is specifically the OCA has to make the decision the information has to be owned by or produced by or is for the United States it has to fall within one of the categories of information that's eligible to be classified and I'll show you that in a minute. And then he has to be he or she has to be able to her information is leaked or let to the public or is subject to an unauthorized disclosure you have to be able to describe the damage that occurs. So I think David talked about this back in June that there are three levels of classification under President Truman's order there were four. And so for those original classification authorities when they decide to classify something as top secret they have to be able to describe in detail. The exceptionally grave damage that would occur if there is an unauthorized disclosure, same as true a secret, they have to be able to describe the grave damage to national security and for confidential the damage to national security. So there are eight general categories and going back to the slide from from two ago. The information has to fit within one of these eight general areas and these all kind of make sense. You know military weapons and systems. Not all foreign government information now this order does describe and define foreign government information is information given to our government with the expectation that we are going to keep it in confidence. And that includes not just the information but sometimes also the source. So the country or the international organization so it's a little bit further defined later in the executive order but as a rule, foreign government information can be classified. Certainly it makes sense to include intelligence activities. Same is true with foreign relations. Of course, when we talk about scientific technological or economic matters relating to the national security for as far as the technologies those can be hardware, think Stealth Bomber for for a period of time, or it can be software. So it doesn't just have to be it can be a physical thing to makes perfect sense that we want to protect our nuclear facilities and we want to protect our systems. And things like that too. Okay. Now I talked earlier and said that pretty much original classifications have the ability to classify information for up to 25 years. And after 25 years, their authority ends. They do not have the ability to continue classification beyond that period with two small exceptions. And those are for the names of a human intelligence source or the key design concept of a weapon of mass destruction and those are exempted from declassification for 50 years. Now, what I'll say is that not all information is automatically declassified at 25 years and David spoke I think about this a little bit back in June. And that is that agencies do have the ability to exempt specific information from automatic declassification at 25 years but that requires the approval of this interagency body called the interagency security classification appeals panel. This is very important because now the decision on whether you can continue the classification beyond 25 years is not up to the agency head or to that delegated agency official it is up to an interagency group of officials. High-level officials from the Department of State, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Office of Secretary of Defense, the Department of Justice in the National Archives and the National Security Council combined this group are the ones that make those decisions on if an agency is allowed and permitted to continue classification beyond 25 years. So, of course, importantly, there are things that no matter what an original classification authority is not allowed to classify. And that is you cannot classify information for reasons other than national security that is national security is the only reason that you may classify information. You cannot use the classification system to conceal a violation of law to prevent embarrassment to restrain competition or delay the release of information that otherwise should be released. And there are within the executive order sanctions for officials that do that, including losing your clearance, losing your original classification authority. So there are sanctions available if that happens. Now I'm going to move on and talk a little bit about the rest of us. So not those 1638 people but the other people who do most of the classification work in the government. And that's the derivative classifiers. Now we have to follow the rules. Our job is to do what the original classification authority told us to do. We are expected to kind of follow those instructions. And there are many reasons to do that, right? First of all is consistency. We are want to make sure that everybody across an agency who is looking at the same information is classifying that information the same way for the same length of time and at the same level. Consistency is very important. Otherwise you put information at risk. And it requires once you've made that decision that you're going to this information must be classified that I'm going to follow the original classification authorities decision. You are required on whatever record you are working to put down. You have to put down your identity. You have to put down the, the reason that you were classifying the information and why that's the classification guide. And you have to talk about how it is that when this information is automatically declassified, which can be no more than 25 years with the exception the small limited exceptions of those key design concepts of weapons of mass destruction or the names of confidential human intelligence sources. Typically, original classification authorities, when they make a decision, they make it in the form of a declassification, they make it in the form of a classification guide. See, I'm in the declassification world mostly. But they make it in the form of a classification guide. And those have to also kind of follow these same rules, but the expectation is, even if you were going to be classifying information when you create that guide for 25 years. After five years, you are required to reevaluate that information to see if it still meets the requirements for classification or not. The idea here again is that you're going to be deleting information that does not need to be classified. But it really is very important for those of us that do the derivative classification that we follow these rules exactly. So we follow these rules and we're going to be putting we put our instructions on here we put our names on here we portion mark records, but often derivative classifiers use many different sources. So if I'm an intelligence analyst at a at the office of the director of national intelligence, I may be receiving information from several different agencies on a topic. And when I combine all of those and I'm writing an analytical piece on it. I may be using information from the national security agency, the central intelligence agency, the into the National Reconnaissance Office and the Department of State. And if I use information from all of those agencies, I have to cite every single classification guide that I used in writing the text of that document or that record. And that's very important for accountability sake, but it's also very important to help us identify if there is a request for that information to declassify it, or even to classify it at a lower level. Who do we need to go back to to to see if that information can be declassified or classified at a lower level. This is a way to help bring some of that accountability in and also make it easier to do that process. Now the next couple of slides all come directly from training that I used to give to original classification authorities, original classification authorities must sit through a presentation and do training every year. It has to focus on the danger in the worry of over classification. And so this is one of these slides that I really do try to focus them on here and to really let them know that they are expected to be keeping their decisions to a minimum. They are expected to keep information secret only as long as necessary. And they're expected to only classify information for a legitimate reason to protect our national security. And I talked a little bit earlier about like the importance of transparency in our government, and it really is and it's an underlying principle of our government to have citizen access to the information they need to hold our government officials accountable. And to learn our history. And at the same time, that compact also says on behalf of our citizens, our public servants in our highest level public servants are only going to keep information from the public that protects our national security. And of course, for the, for the OCA is that I give this training to I also really stress the importance of why you want to reduce and really think hard about whether you need to classify information, or classify it at a lower level is because we really do in today's digital age need to rapidly share information with people who need to see it to make good informed decisions. And I'll talk about that on this next slide here. So we are no longer in an era of paper and in vaults and which are called skiff secure compartmented information facilities. We have war fighters on battlefields diplomats on foreign posts. We need to rapidly move information to people who need to see it quickly. So the ability to share information vertically and horizontally with these people means we need to classify information properly, or at a lower level, or at not at all to ensure that we can get the information to where it needs to go, so that we can maintain our decision advantage over classification diminishes informed decision making people will make bad decisions that they don't have the full picture. It's as simple as that. There's been a lot in the news lately, it's the last year and a half or so, especially from my former colleagues at the public interest classification board, who talk about the effect of classification hindering innovation and reducing competition and the increasing the in the really challenge of lengthy acquisition times which adds to the cost to us the taxpayers. And it also reduces the decision advance we have on a technology if it's taking us 10 years to get a technology from concept to active on on our national secure toolbox. That's time lost. So the less classification and proper classification really does help that. The other thing of course is like the American taxpayer, it costs a lot of money to keep things secret. Back in 2017, which was the last year that my old office the information security Oversize Office, kind of publicly kind of reported on its costs, the costs were 18 and a half billion dollars, that's a lot of money. And then the final thing I'll say here too and that is, if everything is classified nothing is classified, and you really do risk reducing the respect of the classification system if you are classifying something top secret that should only be classified secret, or shouldn't be classified at all. You put that information at risk overall when people don't respect the classification system. This is my third slide that I showed your original classification authorities. But what I want to what I wanted to show here on this are two things. And I did this for when I worked on the National Security Council staff to here. Let me let me draw your attention to two figures here as a as a librarians and as a government documents archivist and librarians here that we spent back in 2017 18 and a half billion dollars on keeping things secret. We only spent $100 million on declassifying information. And that's not a lot of money in that discrepancy is going to get is going to affect our democracy. The volume of information has greatly exceeded our ability to declassify it. If you look here and this is the other kind of figure that I like to show here and that is the volume of electronic records just held. By my old agency to presidential libraries which went from Reagan and Bush combined a less than two terabytes of electronic data to Donald Trump's administration who in four years amassed over 250 terabytes of data. As much as the previous president Barack Obama had amassed an eight. Importantly, the George W. Bush library has a backlog of 153 million pages in its FOIA queue freedom of information at queue. And under the current processing, it's going to take 130 years to declassify and make that records and make that information available to the public and access denied is not helpful to our democracy. It certainly is not helpful to our policymakers either who will want to learn from the past. So we do need to think about adjusting that bottom figure of 103 million and investing in technologies and processes that will enable us to do a much better job of declassifying information when it no longer needs to be classified. Now, a lot of people have talked about the effect of Julian Assange and Edward Snowden and other other folks who who leaked information. And what I will say is that all authorized holder whether you're an original classification authority, whether you were a derivative classifier whether you and if you have a security clearance, even if you don't use your derivative classification abilities. If you have a security clearance, you are expected in the order President Obama's order expects you to challenge the classification. If you do not believe in good faith, the information is properly classified. It's either improper in itself, where it's classified at too low or too high of a level, or it no longer meets the standards of the executive order that I showed you. And it should be declassified. And it does include in this executive order processes for how one goes about making a classification challenge. And I stress this in my training to that the first is that every agency is required to have formal written procedures on how to receive and how to evaluate a classification challenge. And that includes an informal challenge that could be word of mouth, or a formal challenge that's done in a written format. Original classification authorities have a role to play in deciding those challenges. But even if the original classification authority ultimately decides, no, I think that information is classified. The person who's made that challenge can still appeal. So there are appellate processes within the agency. And if that person is still not happy with the appellate level decision, he can go to the interagency security classification appeals panel and have this interagency body make that decision. So this body does prioritize those classification challenge appeals so that they're decided upon fairly quickly. I can tell you that I have done, I have challenged classification personally, and they've come out in my favor, but they were, they were considered very robustly within the agency. So this is the appellate level two, but the decision was made fairly quickly that no one that information is no longer classified. So this process does work, I can tell you that. And it is put in there specifically to permit those of us who believe that information is classified for the wrong reasons or at too high a level, have the ability within the system to help make that decision. And it also say kind of lastly here that there is no matter what the agencies are required in their written procedures to ensure that there is no retribution for anybody who makes a classification challenge. So this is kind of my concluding slide by quoting Potter Stewart from the Pentagon Papers case back in 1971. And this is very important here for when everything is classified nothing is classified in the system becomes one to be disregarded by the cynical or the careless. The classification system for me personally it is very important that we do classify information there are important secrets that we need to keep to protect our nation security. But I also firmly believe that we should only classify what we must. And that we have to be able to share that information with our allies, our partners with all of the stakeholders who need to see that information who can use that information to protect us. And to do so in a way that they can protect us in the timely fashion. I spent a lot of my career declassifying information so the power to declassify is very important. It is a key democratic tenant. And it's it's one that is a that is very important to our democracy so I will leave it at that I've, I've droned on about the classification system for 40 minutes so thanks for bearing with me, and I'll throw it back to Aaron. So thanks very much. Thank you so much Don for for such a enlightening presentation. I know many of us really are grateful for this opportunity of having you here and to speak speak so more in depth about this this topic. And you see the applause coming from from members of the attendees that have gathered with us. I do want to open up for the questions I do see a few questions in the chat. I do want to make sure that I am going through all of them, and I'll at least start with some of the ones that were saved in chat. Robert lever lever good pose a question if only information and data, but not records or documents are classified. Then in what form are the information and data review. We can hit that job. Yeah, it's a great question though, and it really is it's true that information data. That's what is classified it's the information itself. What is is how information is marked and it's supposed to be marked anyway as confidential secret or top secret, whether that's on paper. If it's electronic electronic format, even on the electronic front format at the very top. There's usually there are what I did not talk about in this presentation. In the executive order 13526 there is something called an implementing directive, which is 32 CFR 2001 and if you go to the information security oversight office and to their policy document section, you'll find both the executive order and this directive in the implementing directive essentially provides the instructions for how you implement executive order 13526 and it has a very big section on how you properly mark in for mark records, whether it's electronic data or different types of media to ensure that it is the user understands that the information they are about to need to use, look at is classified and is restricted and sensitive in some way. Thanks. Thank you. Another question in chat and for those who may have questions for me to raise your hand within the attendees function. You'll find I believe under the reactions tab. The next question is from Ben Amato and it's a two part question I see. How do we know if the intent or practice of the executive order is working to reduce over classification. That's the first question. Does it appear so based on your status and who provides the data on classifying and classifying. Those are also great questions. One of the things that well what I did not talk about in this presentation but it's included in a section of the executive order. There is a section in the order that talks about program management both within an agency and then overall across the executive branch. The information security oversight is tasked with every year compiling statistics from agencies to evaluate the health of the classification system and then to report on what it finds to the president. The last one if you go to again if you go to the information security oversight office website. The last report to the president is from fiscal year 2022. And it will talk about the health of the classification system what they found from gathering data from the agencies the number of OCA is the decisions that they have made. We used to report on the number of derivative classification decisions that have made. But it looks not just at that it looks at the number of classification challenges that the agency has received it looks at how many classification guides. Agencies have and how many they have updated how many have they determined were obsolete. Things like that and then this is all then publicly reported both first to the president and then it's put up on the ICU website so that's one mechanism to both improve the system. By ensuring that there's accountability and to be very transparent about it. What I'll also say though is that back in 2009 this executive order was pretty groundbreaking. It really was especially on this idea here of trying to really focus on reducing the volume of over classification into putting strict limits on the ability of agencies to exempt information from automatic declassification. That said, this order was still very much written with paper in mind. We are no longer in an era of paper as one of the slides I just showed you. And it's one of the reasons why if you if you look at the FY 2022 ICU annual report you'll see that the government is in the process of developing a new executive order that I think will be much more focused on the digital government that now exists. And also in looking for new metrics to evaluate the success of what it comes up with in terms of holding people accountable and for classifying information at the correct level. Thanks for that. Thank you. Another question by Park Lane walks home poses is the George W Bush library the farthest behind the responding to to FOIA requests of all the presidential libraries. So first of course the there are a couple other laws that kind of weigh in here to so the the presidential records act does limit. And it does kind of put in some rules about when you can start to receive FOIA requests and also kind of sets limits on on the restrictions that apply. The presidential library at the moment has the longest but I don't know that for a fact, but I would suspect that since it's the one of the more recent libraries and has a great volume of data that it's probably the largest. It is a it is a concern I think for the presidential libraries and all across government here I think on how to look for new methods to automate processes as opposed to doing the manual review that that David talked about that even though it used to take on a good day seven years to get a single piece of paper through the entire process. That process, even if it's reform does not work with 250 terabytes worth of data it just does not. You have to use machine learning technologies. I have a partnership for public service recently published an article about my agency's effort to start to think about using machine learning technologies to help automate some of those decisions so that process has started already. I was going to open up if you've got a question that you would like to pose. Well, he just answered it. I was just going to ask about, you know how machine learning tools or AI or how they might help in this process, but also how they could present a challenge. And, and from, you know, protecting information from actually being released that shouldn't be so, but that seems to have been addressed but I imagine it's something that your agency is talking about quite a bit. Yeah, they are and this is it is a very difficult issue here in agencies are using lots of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies for other things now. I think it's important that we, this is john powers talking here but I think that we do it is important that we try these and we do some risk analysis and to see what we get right. We don't let the perfect be the enemy the good perhaps, but we have to recognize that well maybe there are some bits of information that we don't want released that really we do need to be perfect maybe that's that highest level top secret information that's very current. But there are some things that we need to at least think about and try and to look at a more risk based approach, especially as information gets older. There's another thing about the digital age here that is that information becomes stale very very quickly. So there isn't really as big of a need to keep things, wrotely classified for longer periods of time, especially because events have just overtaken them quicker. So I do think that there is a role for AI and machine learning in this process it's one that's going to be that is going to require some pretty good thought and some technologists to work on it it's going to require lots of good data and time. But it is something that I think the government is going to have to address. I know that Aaron is at the University of Maryland University of Maryland is a leader in this field. And that's one of the things that that they're trying to look at to see well what can we do to make information, especially older information available quicker with that in a more automated fashion, maybe it's secret and below, or maybe it's just confidential information but there are some things that we ought to try. A few more questions that have come in. Could you could political appointees politicize the appeals process or their legal safeguards. Well, so that's a tough question to answer here. In my view, the answer is no. The people who make classification decisions. The rules are set in the executive order. There is one law that governs classification and that's the atomic Energy Act of 1954 is amended, which classifies very specific types of nuclear weapons information and nuclear technology. There's also restricted data or a weird misnomer called formally restricted data, but that information is class classified according to statute. There's also a statute that covers the inappropriate or improper disclosure of the names of undercover intelligence sources. I have the intelligence protections act intelligence agents protections act. So there are some statutes but otherwise the information is protected and safeguarded according to executive order and then decisions on the length of classification or to appeal that classification goes through an interagency process. Now the interagency process it does involve kind of senior level officials from those agencies I mentioned. The director of national intelligence Department of State Department of Defense Department of Justice National Security Council and the National Archives. And then if the CIA has their information at stake they are allowed to participate in that discussion as well. But those are professional civil servants who have decades of experience working with the classification system. They've worked with them and I know the day of work with them to these are people that way very carefully and they make decisions on whether to continue classification or not, based on the merit of whether that information meets the standards or not. Now, who's to say, you know, ultimately, the current executive order, the ice caps decisions are discretionary, which means that the agency head if he doesn't like or she doesn't like the decision could appeal to the president who could overrule the interagency classification appeals panel decision. What I'll say is that that has never happened. In fact, there have been a few instances where an agency head did not like the ice caps decision to declassify information, but in both of those instances, the president did not weigh in and refuse to take that appeal. So it's technically I suppose it's possible that a president could weigh in, but it's never happened before. I want to take the last few questions. This next one is a three parter, and it goes like this how is declassification handled as a part of the process of compiling the FR us. That's the first question. The second one do historians have security clearances. And the third, do they request the classification of records of interest. Three great questions. And that's, that's, that's kind of where I am have found a home here in the last month here working for the office of the historian department of state. So the department of state historians do go out. They look at records across government that they believe are the most historically important that would enable them to tell the story of us foreign policy and comply with the 1991 statute. After they have compiled what they believe are the most important records. We, the historians do seek declassification of those records by going out to the agencies the agencies are expected to make those decisions within 120 days. And get them back so that the the office can then do all the editorial work and the editing work that goes into publishing those volumes. So there is a process in place for that. And then the third part of your question is, do they kind of find the historically significant. Well, that's one of the things that they do. That's not to say that they're not always the most historical, but they, they certainly try their best as they do their research across the executive branch and in the presidential libraries to find the ones that they believe are the most important. There are several different agency historical advisory committees, including at the Department of State, including at the CIA, and other agencies, Department of Energy, Office of Secretary of Defense, all have historians. They all have security clearances and they're tasked with compiling the history of their departments too. So, so that does happen. So thanks for that. And with that, thank you John powers for your presentation and for answering some of these questions and I turn it back over to Kate. Thank you, Aaron. I really appreciate all of your questions. As you can see here, we have a QR code where you can provide feedback on today's presentation presentations in the past, you can also offer up any ideas for future webinars. You can also see our YouTube channel here at the bottom and contact me if you would like to volunteer for the help committee that's always appreciated. And with that, thank you very much for attending. Thanks John. This was really, really, really interesting and thank you to go towards education committee for co hosting this with me. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Everybody have a great day. Thank you for doing this.