 Welcome, and thank you for joining today's State, Local, Tribal, and Private Sector Policy Advisory Committee meeting, also known as the SLTPS PAC. To receive all pertinent information about upcoming SLTPS PAC meetings, please subscribe to the Information Security Oversight Offices Overview Blog at isu.is00-overview.blogs.archives.gov or by going to the Federal Register. All available meeting materials have been emailed to all registrants. We ask committee members to please mute all audio connections when you are not speaking. If you are not a member of the SLTPS PAC and would like to ask a question or make a comment, please press pound two on your phone to join the queue. This is a public meeting. Like previous SLTPS PAC meetings, this will be recorded. This recording, along with the transcript and minutes, will be available within 90 days on the NISPAC Reports on Committee Activities webpage. Let me now turn things over to Mr. Bill Fisher, the Acting Director of ISU, as well as the Acting Chairman of the SLTPS PAC. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the 25th meeting of the State, Local, Tribal, and Private Sector Policy Advisory Committee. I'm Bill Fisher, the Acting Director of ISU. I'm watching over ISU until a permanent director is hired. Mark Bradley retired in June, and I've been in this position since July. For your awareness, a vacancy announcement for the ISU director position was posted this Monday, September 18th. I'm the Director of the National Declassification Center at the National Archives in my permanent position. My career has included archival functions, records management, FOIA, declassification, and overall federal information policy and operations. This is a new area for me, and I'm glad to learn more about the vital work that you do concerning policies relating to access and safeguarding of classified national security information by state, local, tribal, and private sector entities. I will now turn it over to my designated federal officer, Heather Harris Pagon. Thank you, sir. Welcome to ISU. I look forward to continuing to work with you. I will now begin attendance. We've already heard from Bill Fisher, the Acting Chairman of the SLTPS, SLTPS PAC Vice Chairman, Rich McComb, Department of Energy's Alternate, Tracy Kindle. Tracy, are you on the call? Yes. I'm here. Thank you. Sorry about that. Thank you. No problem. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Member Tara Inversto. Heather, thank you. Thank you. NRC's Alternate, Daryl Person, Department of Transportation, Sidoni Dunham. Thank you. Department of Defense Member Michael Russo, Office of the Director of National Intelligence Member, Lisa Perez. Thank you. I'm busy. Thank you. Federal Bureau of Investigation Member, Jake Zalkert. What about FBI's Alternate, Scott Gerlach? Department of State Member, Kate Conner. Good morning. I'm on the line. Good morning, Kate. State's Alternate, Daryl Hicks. Good morning. I'm here. Good morning. Department of Justice Member, Glenn Beasley. Ben Slee. Defense, Counterintelligence and Security Agency Member, Keith Minard. What about DCSA's Alternate, Daryl Broussard? Good morning. I'm here, Heather. Good morning, Daryl. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Member, Nitin Narita-John. Local East Member, Megan Kubner. Thank you, Megan. Local East Member, Shelly Schechter. Private Sector Member, Jeffrey Insall. Mountain Region Member, Kevin Kline. Thank you. Private Sector Member, Kian Burks. Good morning. I'm here. Good morning, Kian. State Midwest Member, Jeremy Schroeder. Good morning, Heather. I'm present. Good morning. Thank you. VHS Speaker, Ivana Horne. Yes. Hi, Heather. Hi, Mama. Hi, Mama. Assistant Speaker, Ms. Alina Clark. Yes, I'm here. Thank you. Thank you. And Assistant Speaker, Trent Fisher. It's going to be Trent or I, so I'm covering for both of us. Got it. All right. Thank you so much. We request that everyone identify themselves by name and agency if applicable before speaking each time for the record. Is anyone else expected to speak during the SLTPS PAC that we have not heard from? Heather, this is Don from CIA. Oh, fantastic. Thank you. Sorry about that, Don. Ms. Evans, is anyone raising? Not at this time. Thank you. I want to remind government membership of the requirement to annually file a financial disclosure report with the National Archives and Records Administration Office of General Counsel. The same form of financial disclosure that is used throughout the federal government, OGE Form 450, satisfies reporting requirements. If you have any questions, let me know. The charter for the SLTPS PAC is expected to be renewed on September 30, 2023, and will be effective for two years. We've had a few changes to the PAC membership since the last meeting. As Mr. Fisher mentioned, Mark Bradley, the former director of IC and chairman of the SLTPS PAC, has retired, and Bill is stepped in to replace him until we have someone hired to permanently replace Mark. As Bill said, the job announcement just went out earlier this week, so please apply if you are interested. Additionally, Valerie Curbin, the primary member with the Office of National Intelligence, has retired, and has been replaced by Lisa Perez, who was already the alternate. The Nuclear Respiratory Commission's new primary member is Tara Embersa, replacing Sabrina Aitak. Cam Berks, the chief security officer of Roku, is a new member as of last month, as is Jeremy Stroka, representing the Midwest in Iowa for state matters. As a reminder, we still have several slots that are open for membership. If you have any nominations, please bring them to our attention. For those departing members, thank you for all your contributions over the years. We look forward to continuing the work you have done with the new representatives. The minutes from the last meeting were finalized and posted to the ICU website on January 26, 2023. I will now address the items of interest from the January 4, 2023 SLTPS PAC Public Meeting. The FDI is still working on providing its SLTPS security clearance data to DCSA to include, if possible, the effort to identify non-cast force officers in their systems for inclusion in the data transfers. The SLTPS PAC has been focusing on this issue for a few years. The FDI reported that they had been engaged in end-to-end testing of the data transfer process with DCSA. At this time, the clearing status held by the FDI pertaining to private sector personnel has been passed to the FDI's Phoenix Platform for the Central Verification System, also known as CVS. Because of that, this action is considered closed unless otherwise requested. For the second outstanding action item, ICU hosted a meeting in its gift March 2, 2023 with other entities to examine why the intelligence community is unable to determine the current number of SLTPS personnel that it is cleared and to see the means to obtain this information. This action item is considered closed unless otherwise requested due to DHS having a firm handle on their numbers. For the third action item, the DHS Vice Chair and Executive Agent of the SLTPS Program provided the recommendations to the Cyber Security and Infrastructure Security Agency, also known as CISA. Due to this, this action item is considered closed unless otherwise requested, leaving no action items open. Does anyone have any questions? Ms. Evans, does anyone in the queue? If anyone would like to speak, please press Pound 2 on your phones. No hands raised at this time. Thank you. At this time, we would like to now hear from the Executive Agent for the program, the Department of Homeland Security. Ms. Horne? Can you hear me? Yes, ma'am. Thank you. Perfect. Thank you so much. My name is Yvonne Horne. I'm with the Department of Homeland Security, Office of Chief Security Officer. I am standing in for Mr. McCombs today due to his unavailability. And I just wanted to go over a couple of things as we wrap up FY23 and start moving towards FY24. So I'll start with where we are number-wise. DHS across the board has a practice of 7,800 SLTPS personnel with DHS sponsored clearances. 89% of that population holds a secret level clearance and 11% of that population is at the TS level. As far as SLTPS compliance and governance, DHS has performed one room certification and performed security performance assessments, which are routine on 22 facilities nationwide that we sponsored and accredited. Just the findings from both are about 55% of the security performance assessment fell under the category of information security discipline. The findings have all been mitigated or on the spot or were within 30 days of the record being issued. So the vulnerabilities have been closed now. And those are kind of the big updates for FY23. In FY24, we plan on doing, assessing another 22 SLTPS facilities, which were sponsored by DHS. The other piece that we started in FY23 that we'll continue into FY24 is we are working with the components to validate and need to know and access levels of all federal and contractor personnel, but also as part of that SLTPS community to ensure that we have the right people and access and for those individuals to have clearances and they've departed or moved on and those have been identified and we were properly reading them out as well. So that ever conciliation began in FY23 and it's going to continue through FY24 to ensure we are mitigating all risks as well as closing up any vulnerabilities we may have. I think that's a big update from DHS as we close out FY23. Any questions for me? Kevin Klein here, new clearances. It's really become an issue for states and locals. DHS does not have a backlog for ours because we do not use DCSA. We have a workload and I do not have the current numbers available, but DHS as a whole is not experiencing a backlog. I know DCSA is. I don't know if... And I can get back on that to provide numbers on where we are with the state and local what's in our queue currently. Let's say we get together and DHS sponsored clearances are way, way behind. So I'm not sure where the disconnect is. Well, what do... And so I guess the question I said, when you say way behind, could you put in the numerical figure on it or timelines that will help me provide an answer on that? Well, going from a couple of months to get a secret clearance to a year. Okay. Okay. I will provide as a get back our timeliness on those as well as the numbers that were processed for FY23. That may help at least answer that. Okay? Thank you. That'd be great. You know, I know help us ground truth, you know, what the feelings versus the reality is, so I appreciate it. Of course. Thank you. Can you hear me? Yes. This is Megan from New York City's NYPD and I just wanted to second the backlog. We've had people that we submitted for secret level clearances back in January, February that haven't even received their SF86 yet. Okay. Okay. We're being told that we're being told that it's because of a backlog. Okay. I will definitely get that as a get back to understand where we are, how many are in queue or anywhere in the pipeline to make sure we provide a clear update. Great. Thank you so much. Of course. Anybody else? If not, that's it for me, Heather. Thank you, Ms. Horner. Ms. Evans, is anyone waiting to ask a question? Not at this time, but again, for those joining who are not on the committee, you can press pound two to raise your hand, but we have no raised hands at this time. Okay. Thank you. At this time, we would now like to hear some syssa. Ms. Clark, over to you. Thank you, ma'am. I'm stepping in for our Deputy Director, Natarajan, who sends his regards, who is tied up with something and cannot join. It's great actually to be back with this group. I, for many years, participated in it when I was at DHS headquarters. So, great to be back here today. For those, I know the Deputy joined at the January meeting. This is, in spaces to understand, manage and reduce the risk to our nation's critical infrastructure from both a cyber and physical perspective. And we do this through a voluntary mechanism with the critical infrastructure partners. And one of those key aspects is being able to ensure that within those 16 critical infrastructure sectors, that we have cleared personnel so that we can appropriately brief them as necessary at varying classification levels on the threat and what we are seeing so that they can provide the appropriate, make the appropriate adjustments and measures within their facilities to address that threat. And this was extremely helpful for us during the past year and a half, or almost two years now actually, as we were watching actions by Russia and leading up to and during the invasion of Ukraine. And so this was a vital mechanism that we as an agency used across the interagency, on the federal side with our partners and with the critical infrastructure partners as well. And so we truly value our ability to share information at varying classification levels through these critical infrastructure partners. And so with that, we'd just love to pause. I'm newer, as I mentioned, I know this is newer from the January meeting to this group. And so we'd be happy to address any questions that you might have about how this is partnering with the critical infrastructure sectors, how we are working to share information or clear these individuals. My team works very closely with our Chief Security Office to help get these individuals into the process to get cleared. So happy to address any questions that our interagency partners or other members of the SLTPS PAC have for me. So with that, Heather, I'm happy to open it up for questions. Thank you. Any questions for Ms. Clark? Good evening, Ms. Evans. Anyone waiting to ask a question on the phone line? Not at this time. Okay, thank you. We are now at the point of the meeting where we ask for SLTPS PAC members to present any new business they may have. Anyone who would either of you like to join us in as our new members? Hi, Heather. This is Ham. Just very happy to be part of the group and look forward to contributing. Thank you. Thank you. Yes, this is Jeremy with Iowa Homeland Security and Emergency Management. I appreciate the opportunity to participate with this group, and I also have concerns as well with the backlog on clearances. Thank you. Thanks, Jeremy. Yeah, we'll have that as an action item, and we'll get that information out before the next meeting. As soon as we can get that disseminated, we will do so. All right. Are there any other questions or remarks before we close out today's meeting? Mr. Fisher, I'll now turn these over to you to close out the meeting. Mr. Fisher? Still being muted, sir. Go ahead and close up. Okay, I'll go ahead and close out the meeting. Our next SLTPS PAC is scheduled for February 7th, 2024. At that time, we will hopefully have a new director on board who will make the determination on whether the next meeting will be fully in-person, fully virtual, or a hybrid. As a reminder, all SLTPS PAC meeting announcements are posted in the federal register approximately 30 days prior to the meeting, along with being posted to the IC blog. Meeting adjourned. Thank you very much.