 Welcome and thank you for joining the FOIA Advisory Committee. I'm going to turn the conference over to David S. Fierro, the Archivist of the United States. Please go ahead. Good afternoon and welcome to the first meeting of the fourth term of the Freedom of Information Act Advisory Committee. I'm David Fierro, Archivist of the United States, and I join you from my office at the National Archives Building in Washington, D.C. If we were not in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, I would welcome all of you, committee members and attendees alike, in person to this beautiful building, a shrine to American democracy. In addition to housing our nation's founding documents, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, the National Archives and Records Administration also provides a permanent home to every statute signed into law since America's founding, including the Freedom of Information Act and the Federal Advisory Committee Act. The National Archives is pleased to charter, host, and support this important advisory committee, not simply because of our role in maintaining FOIA and countless other U.S. statutes. The FOIA Advisory Committee's task of advising on improvements to the Administration of FOIA complements the National Archives' strategic goals of making access happen and connecting with our customers from federal agencies to the American public. The committee's work also ties closely to FOIA's mandate that the FOIA Ombudsman Office, the Office of Government Information Services here at the National Archives, identify procedures and methods for improving FOIA compliance. Although Congress passed FACA in 1972, advisory committees have played an important role in shaping public policy since the earliest days of our democracy. President George Washington is credited with first using outside experts for advice. Facing an uprising in western Pennsylvania over a whiskey tax, the first ever federal tax on a domestic product, President Washington appointed an ad hoc group of commissioners to investigate the whiskey rebellion of 1794. The commissioners met with concerned citizens and ultimately advised the President that enforcing the tasks would require, quote, the physical strength of the nation, end quote. Federal advisory committees are one of the few formal ways for private sector citizens to participate in the federal policymaking process. Such committees have advised on everything from organ transplant procedures, drug approvals, and stem cell research to drinking water standards, space exploration and federal land management. Earlier this summer, OGIS delivered to me the final report and recommendations of the 2018 to 2020 term of the FOIA advisory committee. The committee identified and approved an unprecedented 22 far-reaching recommendations seeking to enhance online access to information, improve FOIA and records management training, raise the profile of FOIA within agencies, and embrace new technologies. I have entrusted OGIS with fulfilling some of the recommendations in tracking the progress of other recommendations, and I am particularly pleased that some of the recommendations marry records management and FOIA. As we have often recognized, a strong records management program is the backbone of an excellent FOIA program. Please know that I don't expect any other 22 recommendations or even half that at the end of this committee's term in 2022. I welcome your advice and participation in helping to implement some of these recommendations over the next two years. Much work is ahead of you, but I am impressed with your broad experience, both inside and outside government, and your deep commitment to making the FOIA process better for all. Finally, I'd like to acknowledge the difficult times we're in as we continue to physically distance ourselves from one another in our workplaces and adapt to life's challenges in ways that tax our minds, bodies, and spirits. Please take good care and stay safe, and I turn the meeting over to the committee's chair, Alina Sema. Thank you, David. I really appreciate it. As the director of the Office of Government Information Services and this committee's chairperson, it is my pleasure to also welcome you to the annual meeting of the fourth term of the FOIA advisory committee. I have a few opening remarks. I'm going to talk really fast, because we've lost a little bit of time due to our technical difficulties. I apologize to both the committee and our attendees for that. Let me take a second to also introduce the committee's designated federal officer, DFO Kirsten Mitchell. And I've asked her to help me stay on track today. I know she will. But everyone who's joining us today has been staying safe, healthy, and well. We do have a packed agenda, and I will, again, keep my opening remarks very brief. I want to welcome all of our committee members. I'm really glad to see that we have a full house today. And I want to express my gratitude upfront for your commitment to studying the current FOIA landscape and for developing consensus recommendations for improving administration of FOIA across the federal government. We are going to take a roll call very shortly, so stand by for that. I also want to welcome our colleagues and friends who are watching us today via WebEx. Despite today's ambitious agenda, we will leave time at the end for public comments. We look forward to hearing from many non-committing participants who have ideas or comments to share. And we always welcome written comments. We will open up telephone lines at the conclusion of the committee's deliberations and OGIS' deputy director, Martha Murphy, is monitoring our chat function throughout the meeting. And if you have any questions or comments, feel free to chat them at any time. Martha can read them at the end. Public comments, suggestions, and feedback can be submitted at any time by emailing FOIA-advisory-committee at NARA.gov. Moving to the virtual meeting space has challenged all of us, but we are happy to let everyone know that we are also attempting to screen this meeting on the National Archives YouTube channel today, and we will post the screen on the FOIA-advisory-committee website. A few housekeeping rules before we get started. Meeting materials for this term will be available on the committee's webpage. Click on the link for the 2020-2022 FOIA-advisory committee on the OGIS website. We will upload a transcript and video of this meeting as soon as it becomes available. Members' names and affiliations are already posted. Members' biographies will be posted in the near future. As will a complete set of all 30 recommendations this committee has made since its inception in 2014, along with their status. Since March of this year, we have held several meetings virtually. We anticipate continuing to do so in the foreseeable future. Whenever we do get the green light, we will once again meet on the stage in the McGowan Theater, but until then, the virtual environment is our friend. And the virtual environment has some advantages, including much shorter commutes for all of us. Very casual Fridays, as well as Mondays through Thursdays. The disadvantage for me and Pearson is that we will not be able to see you, the committee members, raising your hand or eagerly leaning forward, ready to make a comment or ask a question as we would if we were on stage in the gallon. I will be doing my best to monitor committee members' non-verbal cues during the webcast, but we all need to be respectful of one another, try not to speak over one another, although I realize that's inevitable at times. I want to encourage all committee members to use the all panelists option from the drop-down menu in the chat function if you want to speak. You can also just chat me and Pearson directly, but in order to comply with the spirit and intent of the Federal Advisory Committee Act, please only keep communications in the chat function to housekeeping and procedural matters. No substance or comment should be made in the chat function. They will not be recorded in the transcript of the meeting. Also, if you need to take a break, please do not disconnect from either audio or video, especially now that we're all up and running. Instead, put your phone on mute and close your camera. Send a quick chat to me and Pearson to let us know if you're going to be gone for more than a few minutes. And join us again as soon as you can. We have noted a 10-minute break at approximately 2.25 p.m. We'll have to see where we are in our agenda, but I do promise to take a 10-minute break. And as a reminder, for purposes of our transcript, please identify yourselves by name and affiliation each time you speak. This will help us down the road with both the transcript and the minutes, both of which are required by the Federal Advisory Committee Act. So this seems to be a logical time to do a brief low-call. I would normally solicit each one of you to introduce yourselves, but in the interest of time, we're going to do a quick low-call. Kirsten will do that next. We'll save the introductions for our next meeting. Before we get started, you may be seeing a new face and name on your screen today. Lubna Haddad is joining us from Defense Intelligence Agency. She is a last-minute substitution, graciously accepting David's nomination to fill one of our government slots. So please help me in welcoming Lubna. And now she is able to join us for the beginning part of our meeting today. I'm going to turn over to Kirsten now to provide the low-call and a brief introduction to the FOIA Advisory Committee's bylaws and responsibilities. Kirsten, over to you. Thank you, Lubna, and welcome, everyone. I apologize if you are hearing any background noise. It is pouring rain here in Washington, D.C., causing a lot of noise on my skylight. So I apologize for that. So I will go through and just do a quick low-call. I think we have everyone here, but Roger Ando from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. If you could just let us know that you're here. We don't have Roger. Pardon me? We don't have Roger. We had him earlier, but I did not see him on... Does anyone else see him? I don't see him. I do not. I'll check on that since he's on. Okay, thank you. I think Roger... I see you. I'm the panelist. Roger, are you there? I don't see his picture, though. Right. We don't see you on camera either. I'll reach out to him for you to chat. Okay, thank you. Next, Alan Westin, America Rising. Here. David Collier, University of Arizona and NSLIC, the National Season of Information Coalition. I'm here. Thank you. Thank you. Allison Dietrich, U.S. Department of Commerce. I'm here. Kristen Ellis, the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I'm here. Thank you. Linda Fry, Social Security Administration. I'm here. Jason Garth, History, Associates and Corporate. I'm here. Thank you. Alexis Graves, U.S. Department of Agriculture. Good afternoon. I'm here. Great. Lucna Haddad, U.S. Department of Defense Department of Intelligence Agency. I'm here. Thank you. Thank you. Kell McClanahan, National Security Counselor. Here. Thank you. Michael Morrissey with Muckluck. Here. Alexandra Berloss-Guylo, New York High. Hi. Yes, hello. Hello. Twan Samohan, Belanova University. I'm here. Great. Thank you. James Schwartz, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. I'm here. Thanks. Thank you. James Soaker, Trinity Washington University. I'm here. Great. Tom Sussman, American Bar Association. Here. Bobby Tolivian, U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Information Policy. Hi. I'm here. Thank you. Roger Wagner with Marquette University. Here. Great. And last but not least, Patricia Lough, the National Labor Relations Board. Hi. I'm here. Okay. So I'm going to feel like a teacher on the first day of school. I'm going to social back up to Roger Ando. Is Roger with us? I have not received a response yet. Okay. Super. Yeah. If you could keep checking in on that, that would be great. So as Alina mentioned, I'm going to go over some bylaws and responsibilities real quickly. So I just want to take a few minutes of your time. We sent a two-page summary to all committee members, and we also have that posted on the FOIA Advisory Committee website, which is accessible at archives.gov forward flash OJF, that's O-G-I-S. So this committee, in addition to being governed by FOIA, also is governed by the Federal Advisory Committee Act, also known as FACA, and the Government and Sunshine Act. And transparency and openness are the crucial aspects of both of those laws. And in that vein, I want to let everyone know that all committee and subcommittee emails must include the FOIA Advisory Committee email for record-keeping purposes. And that, I think Alina read it earlier, but I will go ahead and read it again. It's FOIA-advisory-committee.gov. So the committee's charter and bylaws are both posted on the FOIA Advisory Committee website, but I want to go over a few things very briefly in the bylaws. So while most of these meetings are, these full committee meetings are the most public-facing events, if you will, the committee will have subcommittees, and each subcommittee will have two co-chairs. One is a government member, and one is a non-government representative member. So we find that that's a really great way to get the membership balance working together, and that is in both the charter and the bylaws. A quorum, it constitutes two thirds of the committee members or 13. We have a history of great attendance and look forward to that continuing. So along those lines, committee members, your responsibilities are pretty straightforward. Attend all meetings of the committee and the subcommittee or subcommittees of which you are a member. Submit items for committee and subcommittee agendas. Deliberate in a collaborative manner with fellow committee members and advise the archivist on FOIA-related matters. And finally, for you federal members, submit confidential annual financial disclosure forms for ethics review. And thank you to all of you who have already done so. I think we're just using one of them. So a little bit about public comments. All full advisory committee meetings must be open to the public, and the public must be permitted to present oral public comments, unless otherwise noted in the federal register notice that announces the meeting. And to those of you attending today's meeting, please know that written comments may be submitted to us at any time, and we welcome those. A little bit about the voting. Any committee member, including the chairperson, Alina, may make a motion. No second is required, but Alina appreciates a second. So pretty much there's unanimous decision. Every member present has cast a vote in favor of or against a particular motion. General consensus is at least two-thirds of total vote cast, and general minority is a majority of votes cast. So that was a real quicker review of the bylaws. And I just wanted to go over a few of my responsibilities as the designated federal officer. I am here to ensure efficient operations, ensure compliance with FACA, the Federal Advisory Committee Act, and other applicable laws and regulations. I attend all committee and subcommittee meetings. So we will be seeing a lot of each other in the coming two years, and we will also prepare and approve committee meeting agendas, maintain records of committee activities, ensure transcripts of minutes for each meeting, and share in any meeting when directed to do so by the Archibalds. So that sounds like a lot, but I wanted to let you all know I have several National Archives colleagues assisting me. I wanted to give a shout out to Crystal Lemelon, who works with me at the Office of Government Information Services on FOIA compliance issues, and also really thrilled to have Kimberly Reed. She is a public affairs specialist for the National Archives Office of Legislative Archives, Presidential Libraries, and Museum Services. And she will be detailed to help us with committee work. And finally, and some of you have met Rana Kandekar, who's in the National Archives Office of General Counsel. She is our ethics attorney and the government folks heard from her joining our ethics briefing earlier this week. Finally, one of the things I love most about looking at OGIS is bringing together FOIA requesters and federal agencies, and I'm thrilled to see the committee bridge that FOIA community. Finally, I'm here to help, so please don't hesitate to contact me. If anyone has any questions, I noticed there's one from Kell McClanahan in the chat about, can we give someone a proxy to vote? And there is no provision for that in the Charter or the By-Law. So the answer to that would be no. So any questions? Otherwise, I will turn it over back to Alina. Great, thanks very much, Kirsten. I really appreciate it. I'm trying to move things along. So prior to our meeting today, Kirsten, I asked all of you to give us your top two or three issues you would like the committee to consider during this term. We shared those with you yesterday. They are also now posted on our website for all of our attendees. And not surprisingly, several of you identified issues related to FOIA and technology. That is why I have asked the co-chairs of the Chief Officers' Council of Technology Committee to join us today to tell us about the exciting work their committee has already accomplished and will be taking on in this coming year. My ultimate goal is to balance the work of our two committees and avoid duplication of effort as much as possible. The Technology Committee was formed in September of 2018 as a result of a past FOIA Advisory Committee recommendation. Originally a subcommittee, we have elevated their status to a full committee, so so far they're the only committee. There might be more. I am very pleased to welcome the co-chairs of the Technology Committee, Eric Stein and Michael Starrich. Eric is the Director of the Office of Information Programs and Services at the State Department. His office is responsible for the Department's records management, FOIA, Privacy Act, classification, declassification, library, and other records and information access programs. I am now exhausted. Michael is the Veterans Health Administration's FOIA Director. He leads a program with over 300 FOIA and Privacy Act officers. We handle 25,000 plus requests across 151 facilities worldwide. I know that Eric has a hard stop at two. Hopefully he can stay maybe until 2-0-1. Michael promised to stay a few minutes behind in the event that there are questions, and I hope there will be. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Eric and Michael. So we need the slides up. Great. Well, good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for the opportunity to come and present. My name is Eric Stein, and I'm joined by my colleague, Mike Starrich. Mike, are you available? And we have put together a presentation about this wonderful Technology Committee that we've been so fortunate to co-chair over the past almost two years now already. So as we go through this presentation, we have an opportunity for questions and answers at the very end, and I just want to get right into it. So about us, as Alina pointed out, we were created about two years ago, and we have really grown. We started with maybe just about a dozen agencies and now have approximately 40 members from 25 different departments and agencies. It has been a great experience to have so many different FOIA professionals working together and to share perspectives with regard and a real focus on technology. With an accomplishments for year to date, well, earlier this year we released our report with best practices and recommendations as posted on the OGIS website, and we're very happy to say that we're making we've either completed a couple of those recommendations or are making progress to complete the rest of them. Additionally, Michael and I participated in the OIP best practices workshop on FOIA technology. I believe that was in April this year, right when the pandemic started, and we really received a lot of excellent feedback from FOIA practitioners about the issues they're facing within the FOIA programs across the government. As you know, agencies are large, they're small, they do have diverse record types. So the perspectives we got from our colleagues who work on FOIA helped to enrich the group and to get more specific, the challenges they faced, many of them working remotely and some for the first time ever. So technology and the role of technology was already critical, but that much more critical is the results of events that they unfolded across the world. We mentioned we added about 25 new members this year, and that has been wonderful. It took us about a month or so to establish a governance structure which we'll be hearing about shortly into different working groups to really leverage the full expertise of so many members who want to take full advantage of their expertise and experience in the different areas in the working groups we've created. Again, Alina's point is noted, and we don't want to duplicate with any existing efforts. So a lot of our job is often to play facilitator, agencies and practitioners are wondering, I had this question, but I don't know who to ask, and if it's technology related, of course they always go to OGIS or OIP, but with the network we've created, and it's nice because we have a range of employees across all different ranks and levels. We've created a nice network of people who are willing to and really want to help one another succeed, whether it be in their specific programs, program areas, or just cross-cutting issues. So we look now at the FOIA working... We'll talk about the FOIA working groups in a moment and the working group charters because we're fans of creating governance structure, but we want to make sure we're clear about what our working groups are doing. We don't want nebulous objectives or tasks. We want to say, here's what we're working on, here's where we're going, and if you ever have ideas or recommendations or we went through the list that you've already provided, a lot of the topics you've raised are already things we're looking at. We are happy to drill down harder on some of those topics or back off if there are existing groups already doing that work because there's so many aspects of technology that are still so important. We can go to the next slide, please. So here we have the eight technology working groups, and what Michael and I will do is go back and forth. We've divided them up, and we've found chairs and co-chairs for these different groups from across the interagency to discuss... to lead and to participate in these efforts. Just while there's overlap on some of the topics and themes, we've carved out specific taskings for each one of them, and we also encourage committee members, of course, to work across their working groups in the bigger sessions to make sure that they're aware of what each other... aware of what the other members are doing, but also to help inform the efforts they're specifically working on. So for FOIA's searches, that is an effort dedicated to the search of electronic records. And electronic records, as we know, is where we are. It's not the future. The future is now. We're here. So a lot of agencies have expressed interest in best practices when it comes to electronic records management, tools, and really drilling down and focusing on FOIA, how are those tools leveraged to conduct the best possible searches? Now, if you do a search on certain terms in electronic archives and databases, you can be inundated very quickly with 200,000, 2 million, even more records that are potentially responsive to requests. And we have to bridge this gap between the wonderful ability to search so much electronic records in such a quick way to finding what requesters really need in a timely manner. So that group has a nice range of employees from across different FOIA programs looking at large agencies, small agencies, and different software tools that are being used for those searches. The next two here are FOIA Express and FOIA Online. And for those, I just want to point out, you don't endorse any specific tool but rather these are tools that we found that are used by a lot of agencies. I want to see, Michael, are you on the line? Yes, thank you very much. Can you hear me? Sure, yes. Michael, over to you to talk about those. Sure, great. So one of the great things about this consideration of the Tech Committee are these lanes of effort and these A-Technology Committee working groups and to make sense to talk about the FOIA Express and the FOIA Online one together. One of the things that we're attempting to do here is create community of interest. And again, as Eric mentioned, we're not endorsing any particular product one way or the other, but what we want to do is bring those folks who the agencies have chosen to use these products together so they can share best practices, resources, and the like so they're not duplicating and reinventing the wheel. So for example, the Veterans Health Administration and VA have created great training products for FOIA Express, then they can share those out. And likewise, the Social Security Administration has created great training products for FOIA Online. Likewise, they can share those out with, for example, the Department of Interior. So that's what we're working towards there in those lanes of efforts. And we're going to be excited to share with you some of the preliminary findings in just a second. So we'll talk to you back for artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence, AI, a very popular topic. The question is, how do you leverage it in FOIA and how do you do it effectively? So what we've been doing is looking, we have a group looking at records management practices, AI and government in the private sector, and looking for implementable solutions in the short and long term to leverage concepts like machine learning. Another concept that they're looking at is what's called technology-assisted review. These are different ways that the agencies, while not necessarily AI, they are AI-like concepts on how do you leverage technology better to actually do the searching and review of records in an effective way. And they're all types of considerations for AI that's a very interesting group. And we're working to possibly have sessions in the future with FOIA practitioners to introduce them to the concept of AI because I think for a lot of people, it's a frightening thing. They go to the worst possible scenarios or what this could mean. But rather, we have to look at how can AI be leveraged to really help work with people, whether it be FOIA practitioners, the public requesters across the board to make FOIA programs better in the future. And with that, Michael, by the way, compliance? Sure. One of the things that you hear in the FOIA space frequently when you go to ASAP or you're talking with colleagues across the community are challenges with by the way compliance. We have all of this information that we're either obligated to under the rule of three or that we would like to post proactively. However, that dreaded five-way compliance piece comes up where folks are a bit concerned or reticent about putting things up and putting their agencies at risk. So what we're looking here to accomplish is to provide a suite of tools, a set of guidelines, best practices, ways so we don't have to be afraid of posting these things proactively online, these records that we really want to get out as far as the transparency community to the larger requester community and indeed the public great large. So we're really looking forward and excited to the work of the five-way compliance working group to be able to provide some of those hard tools for the FOIA professionals in our community so they can have those in their toolbox moving forward. Great. And now FOIA and classified information there are a host of issues, technology related that agencies have raised with us, those that work with classified national security information and we wanted to look at what tools are available right now that agencies are using and while some of the other areas you just mentioned like AI or different software tools or searches or key factors, there's some unique classified issues that agencies wanted to discuss and so what we're going to do is continue to reach out to other agencies that work with classified information and provide options and solutions to some of those challenges. So back over to you Michael. Sure. So another kind of emerging issue is collaborative tools. Many of our many folks in many agencies are moving to Microsoft teams. A lot of us during COVID moved to Zoom calls or to Zoom gov or to other platforms as quickly as possible. So the question then arises, are we creating records here when we're using these collaborative tools? So for example, if a Skype message might have a very short retention schedule and might be gone, you might not have to necessarily worry about it in a FOIA request but now maybe in the Microsoft teams environment how is that going to impact and implicate your operations as a FOIA program? What do you need to do and what do you need to be aware of in that space to make sure that you're capturing an appropriate, conducting your appropriate search and reasonably calculating to discover all of the relevant records there. So part of this is also in employee awareness, making sure that employees, federal employees understand what records are and what they are. And then part of it is also how are we going to deal with the deltas which we expect to happen for Microsoft teams chat and from other these collaborative tools that come on the team. So that's a big, it's going to be a big and emerging piece as we're constantly looking to increase our efficiency as agencies by embracing these collaborative tools working together especially in a distant setting. So that's, we're really looking forward to the work of this group. And then video reductions, Michael, do you want to? Sure. And then so what we thought we would do is we would go ahead and provide you with some of the early findings. So we can kind of demonstrate the work that we've accomplished so far in this real relatively short amount of time. So if we can move to the next slide, we'll give you just a kind of a quick sampling of some of the early, five early findings that we found from the video reduction working group. And in the interest of time, we're not going to go deep into each of these, but this, you can think of this as kind of the teaser of a trailer but kind of tummy attractions. So briefly, first we found that video reduction retention schedules can vary across platforms and across agencies. So something that might be held a closed circuit camera television piece might only be held for 30 days because then the drive will loop over and it will start again unless it's flagged in that time period. So video record retention schedules can vary from agency to agency and from platform to platform inside of that agency. Tools that FOIA professionals are using vary in complexity. There's some tools that can be purchased where you can basically do the next version of Star Wars on your computer. You can do all kinds of crazy, crazy things in it, but then you might need to have that level of, George Lucas like expertise in working with video software to make that work. So kind of making the tool fit the job is an important piece because we've seen, you know, we've all gotten new products pushed to us and it got all kinds of bells and whistles but you just need to do one thing. You need in the FOIA space to maybe blur the faces and blur the, or maybe change the sound. So we wanted to do those two things. We don't need to put, you know, Rainbows and Star Wars and all the rest of it, you know, in there. So making this tool match the job or matching the tool to the job is very important. Litigation we found can drive video-reactive schedules and agency resource allocation. So some folks might not have any tools at all. Some agencies have zero tools, but it then, based on the court order, have to stand something up from scratch and that can be very challenging, you know, in a resource-instricted agency to be able to we've been sued for this, now we have to do it. And I think the implication is if we, if as federal agencies we create the record courts will look at us perhaps to say well, you created it, now it's your job to process it properly. And this is where one of the, I think one of the recommendations that are going to come out is earmarked marketing funds for foreign contractors with specialized skills can be efficient because instead of hiring an FTE with video background for one or two or five requests a year allocating a certain percentage, allocating a certain number in your budget to be able to go out and on a surged basis or as needed basis to be able to hire that skill in it could be very efficient rather than having a FOIA officer spend their wheels spending a week or two to learn software that they may have a very limited need to be doing. And the last piece of this is if you can't do that as you build out your FOIA programs, consider adding video reaction skills to position descriptions and performance plans. We're always looking in the FOIA space to who we recruit, you know, how can we recruit people. Eric has great stories about working and looking for librarians which make a lot of sense. And you take those lessons and you look to see who we're bringing into this community of practitioners and it makes a lot of sense moving forward as we look at this across the entire FOIA space and the government to see if there's room for and if we can bring on folks with those video reaction skills and I think we'll see that more and more. So again, that's just a quick flavor of some of the things that we've accomplished but now we're going to talk about some of the next steps for our working group. So we'll throw that back to the next slide please and over to you Eric. Sure. And just that we can probably make up a little bit of time here. Right now we're working to finalize our working group charters with clear deliverables so we can say a lot of the groups are looking and doing research or doing outreach or looking at existing documents already out there from whether it be previous advisory committees or other findings. So we're doing that work right now and we are in a good place there and then the next steps will be of course to implement those plans and to do a series of actions you see here at the rest of the screen. I think just for the sake of time as well Michael, is there anything else you want to add before we open up for questions? Sure. Just that this is a group a very active group that is interested in you know talking about discovering but then implementing. We want to bring these tools to the field and we want to make sure that we don't just do reports, right? We want to make sure that we get to the hands of the FOIA practitioners across the federal family and they're able to take these and improve processing across the spectrum which is one of the reasons I'm so excited for Eric and I to be here before the FOIA advisory committee who often sets the tone in ten or for improvements across the field. So with that I think we can definitely take questions so thank you. To ask a question on the phone line please press pound two on your telephone keypad. Again pressing pound two will indicate that you have a question at the time you will be unmuted and you will be able to state your name and ask your question looking to the phone lines. Not seeing any questions at this time and you will also welcome to write your questions in the chat by sending a message to all panelists from the drop down menu not seeing any questions in the chat or the phone lines. Well we do want to say thank you again for the opportunity to present today and as we continue to work on our process moving forward we welcome the opportunity to come back and brief again or provide updates not just with the charters but also with findings or any recommendations that you may have. So if there are no questions I just want to say thank you it's always a pleasure and we're always humbled to have the opportunity to come and brief this group or any group we're doing. So thank you. So Eric before you jump off I know Cal McClanahan has a question for National Security Conference. Cal go ahead please. Hi so listening to your presentation when you're talking about the search methodology and how to use technology to improve the searches then you later on when you got to the video you were talking about basically the records disposition schedule when the video may be deleted after 30 days or something. One of the problems that some of the bigger agencies run into in my experience is that they have such a backlog that they don't get around to tasking the relevant office to do a search until after the records you're looking for have already been destroyed and so have you figured out are you looking at a way to sort of use technology to allow a person to basically almost pre-search to go out and identify potentially responsive records for the purpose of putting a hold on them from destruction until the time comes around for them to be processed in the order in queue. Sure so you raised in the context of both search and the video redaction piece but I think it touches on several of the working groups. One of the things I just point out is we've found that electronic records they're proliferating they're popping up in all types of different forms and so agencies are having a challenge on how to preserve and follow records for these different tools and technology. It's something we're looking at. I don't think we have a specific answer or we could take that point back to the committee to look at it's definitely something I think agencies in general are working through based on the conversations I've had. Michael? Yeah I would just say just to add to that one thing I like to reference is James Holzer's report on backlog reduction from DHS which is fantastic. He makes the point which I think we shouldn't forget in his report that federal agencies are creating more and more records than they ever have. We are constantly creating records and it's a challenge to stay in front of the curve there to make sure that we're able to hang on to them for an appropriate amount of time so with Mr. Holzer's point of view there which I think is absolutely correct and on point it is a huge challenge and if you don't if you only have the resources to hold material for 30 days before it stops then right I agree with you 100% that that's a challenge for agencies and certainly something that we can address. I know that we just kind of gave you top layer of some of the base findings of the DHS reduction committee but as Eric I think also correctly pointed out that does touch a lot of the lanes of effort that we have on our committee to share. And to clarify I was just using the video as an example because that's what you mentioned. I for instance had a request that had a three year discussion period on the record and the agency didn't get around asking the office until three and a half years ago. So this isn't even a short term thing this is a how do to the extent you can if you can figure out a way to front load some sort of cursory search capacity that may not be as intensive as a regular search just for the purposes of avoiding this problem so that three and a half years down the road the office doesn't come back and say we should ask this six months ago and that's definitely something our committee could look at in terms of the tools and AI and the different capabilities that are out there. Yeah, certainly. Okay, I know Eric and Michael might have to go shortly. Does anyone else have any questions before they leave us? President Kirsten, Alina there are a couple of questions in the chat that I just thought I would read. Will we see those to the end? Well, should we save those to the end? Well, one of them is from Alexandra and she asked the question if that's easier. I'm curious whether the search capabilities of different agencies are made public anywhere so I've had experiences where we give a bullion string and are told that there are too many characters in the bullion string for instance so that kind of technical information is helpful if that's available. We can definitely take that back in terms of search capabilities but I think agencies did go through all the chief voice officer reports we looked at what was shared there we look at what's also publicly available but we can try to drill down for additional detail now it's definitely something we can look into and I see another question about how will the working group solicit feedback from the public you know at the last slide here it actually has both my email address and Michael's and we welcome feedback and incorporated we actually love them people ask questions whether it be from public or from agencies because it's something to consider so it's really important and the final question I see here is when do we complete work on the recommendations in the February 2020 report I don't have we don't think we have completed deadlines yet but we are seeing different initiatives that have been created throughout the government and some of them are touching on what we're already proposing so we're just trying to figure out what role do we play what role do those initiatives that are underway play so I think we'll just keep an eye on them and continue to try to put finer points on deadlines in the months ahead COVID did put us in a tough situation where we were also working remotely with a lot of our colleagues and I can say our technology we were fortunate it's we've done our meetings and calls and we're working so far we've had a few issues in a couple of times so technology there are still challenges with technology but we're getting there okay great thanks Tom Sussman does that answer your question yeah but let me follow up although we don't have a specific deadline or date for getting back to the advisory committee could we stay in touch with the technology working group regular enough basis so that we get a little warning that's an extremely important area we invested a lot of time in the past and I think it would be useful to be able to collaborate a bit with this advisory committee rather than just get hit with the final report sometimes as we're wrapping up year after next absolutely I mean yes Lee and I turn to you for confirmation here but that Michael agrees I think we can make that and Bobby as well yes I'm not in my heart too this is Jason Gart do we want to formalize that somehow something for each of our meetings Jason I don't understand the question formalize it in reporting back in advance of each of our meetings for status during the last you know since the last gathering you know I don't know if we I usually invite Eric and Michael when they have status updates so we only meet four times a year as a committee there may be a subcommittee that gets formed that could keep in touch with them more regularly I can certainly think about adding it as a standing item but everyone else thinks that's a great idea do I hear a yes or no I think it might make more sense to just as meetings come up for us to engage with Eric and Michael to see if there's something that would benefit for an agenda item that was my thinking too okay thanks very much and we're and just so we're always very happy to publicize all the things that we're doing so for example as Eric mentioned in the different events that we may have we're going to publicize those very widely and as much advance as possible as soon as we're able to set dates and so on so we're very much looking forward to an interactive process with all of our groups so we're definitely much stronger together next month actually we'll be holding a public meeting of the chief way officer's council meeting and Michael and Eric will be presenting there so lots of opportunities to tune in and hear how much more they've gotten done in one month hopefully a lot alright guys I know you have to take off thank you again for bearing with us with our technical difficulties really appreciate it thank you and good luck take care thank you everyone so I'm just going to keep moving we are very lucky to have four returning members of the 2018-2020 committee members with us Patricia West and James Stoker in no particular order did I say those names despite challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic I am very proud to say that the 2018-2020 term continued to stay engaged and focused and as David Ferriero mentioned earlier in July we delivered to him an impressive 22 recommendations at that time and again I want to stress as David did as well expecting another 22 recommendations in this committee term and I think you're going to hear a little bit about that from our four returning members but we thought it would be very helpful and it would be beneficial to have you hear from each of those members about their experiences in the last term and some other issues that they thought they would like to share with you so we're going to turn over to them to talk about some areas that we've tackled in the past areas perhaps that need to get passed on to our current committee so with that I'm going to turn it over to who's going first Tom, James, Michael and Patricia okay let's see I'm off mute Tom you're on I have to start by saying what a thrill it is to be back again I've been involved as many of you know with FOIA and related access issues for decades now but I learned so much over the past few advisory committee sessions and today's a great example of so much still to be done in the technology area and that was an area to which I came with very little background and expertise and it is so key to the future for records management, public access, proactive disclosure that it's really something that I probably have learned more than I've contributed when it comes to that area and I think we find that through surveys, interviews, speakers meetings, demonstrations we'll all learn a lot in the next months to come there have been comments about 22 recommendations from the previous committee I think Alina said 30 total I'm struck with the fact that the first advisory committee gave birth to one so we are certainly not on an exponential path there's no question about that but I can't help mentioning that even that first recommendation from almost over five years ago has not been fully implemented it was a simple recommendation to office of management and budget concerning updating the fee schedule consistent with both judicial and legislative developments and while OMB has put out a notice on that subject far from really doing the job of updating comprehensively for the public guidelines for FOIA fees so we can go back beyond even the 22 recommendations of the last committee in terms of our look back and implementation and these are all extremely important I think the creation of the technology working group in the FOIA officers council is from our work in the advisory committee and I think we've got a lot along the way ahead in terms of getting recommendations adopted so I think that interestingly I went over the priorities that Kristin said Kirsten so ably put together quickly for us on the spreadsheet that was sent out and I wish we could cover all of them they're all great but I think the more we focus on the work that's been done and building on that the more we're likely to accomplish in the during our term and while the previous committees have expressed their recommendations in a single report at the end of two years I do suggest that we consider perhaps smaller groups doing interim reports perhaps not quite as aggressive as an entire volume that we've been putting together one example would be if the technology comes out with its final recommendations and the sponsors to our recommendation that would be an occasion for us to engage and perhaps even come out with short report based on what they've done another area relates to the coronavirus and pandemic I think most of us have some changes in the way in which the government has functioned in some agencies major in others not but perhaps they need a short-term look at how we can get back to normalcy even remotely would be important and it need to take two years for this committee to do so those are just throwing out some ideas what incredible array of expertise and experience we have the committees if we ask with a consensus so far our reports have been unanimous with both government and private sector and I think there's no reason why we can't say that we all share despite our differences of orientation, perspective professional aspects we're here because we share a commitment to access to government information and information act so I'm looking forward to all of you as we begin this challenging journey once again thank you who's next I can go next Patricia would you like to go? you go James I'll follow you Tom is a tough one to follow he is a tough one to follow so good afternoon everyone and to my new colleagues welcome to the FOIA advisory committee I'm delighted to be serving a second term on the committee I'll echo what Tom said it's a great learning opportunity particularly for me who as a historian has a representative of historians in historical organizations that FOIA is not what I do most of the time I definitely bring an outsider's perspective and had a fairly steep learning curve so I'm about to be back a second time the committee is important for a lot of reasons I think we play an important role in ensuring the effective functioning of democratic government it is transparent and one of the things that really impressed me about the committee is the high level of collegiality amongst the committee members I was very pleasantly surprised by it especially since in many cases we sit on the opposite side of the FOIA request it makes a big difference being able to sit down and chat with someone who spews FOIA from a different perspective particularly when your main experience is waiting years on in sometimes for a response or perhaps your experience is fielding five phone calls in a week from someone who is very excited to see your response to their FOIA request I'm very happy about that and expect the same going forward I also agree with Tom that it would be a very good use of our committee's time to look back at what previous committees have done just because that work does reflect the big investment of effort and if there is no meaningful follow-up by a later committee possible that recommendations can basically fall by the wayside so I do echo that at the same time the new members of the committee bring a great deal of experience they bring new perspectives fresh energy and so I think we also have to make room for new issues to be addressed I'm a little bit aware of that because I joined the committee a bit late last year and wasn't able to play a role in setting the agenda of the committee and so I think that there's some issues that I personally would like to see addressed and I know that based on the priorities you all submitted you feel the same way for me one good use of our time would be to look at the impact of the security classification process on FOIA and FOIA requests many of you know there's a separate process mandatory review request for requesting specific classified documents but FOIA requests are often concerned information that is classified in agencies are thus obligated to review classified documents as part of their responses to these requests I'm interested in gaining a better understanding of how this process of classification and declassification review impacts freedom of information act requests hopefully with a goal of expediting the process for requesters there's a lot of different directions that this could go in I think one question could be asked is just basic understanding of the impact of classification on FOIA and access to information I mean obviously it takes time to review classified documents so it ends up slowing down the request process but I don't think that we have a very good sense of the scope of this issue so basic questions like how many FOIA requests across government concern access to classified information these are things that we essentially don't know the answer to what is the average processing time for these requests what percentage of that time of processing is going towards be classifying the material all of those are questions that could be of relevance to people interested in improving the administration of the FOIA and I think there are things that our committee could explore second there's a well known and widely acknowledged problem of over classification of information all across the government far too many documents are unnecessarily classified as the declassification process is often revealed sometimes it takes months or years to clear relatively banal information and it's not clear how seriously the impact of this is on the FOIA process so is it possible to measure the impact of this phenomenon of over classification on FOIA that's another thing that the committee could look into and then finally and perhaps most importantly what measures could be taken to reduce the impact of classification on FOIA requests so one possibility would be to look at general steps that could be taken to reduce the backlog of documents in need of review but I think that there are probably other advisory committees throughout government that are looking at this issue and as our speakers a little bit earlier pointed out it's not always a good thing for various advisory committees to do redundant work so it might be fruitful to look at specifically how this happens in FOIA requests our FOIA requests at different agencies placed into a separate queue for declassification through these received prioritization with respect to other requests but they're relatively de-prioritized and the question in an appropriate process looks like how do other countries around the world handle such issues and what can we learn from this I think these are all questions that we would do well to look into because I think there is a large community of the request of the community that is interested in such matters in terms of the scope of the inquiry and the scope of the inquiry we can look at all across government but I think that could be a little bit complicated one lesson that I've learned from last term is that while we are all very capable individuals we have limited resources in terms of time the committee does not have a professional research staff to assist us with these inquiries so if the scope of our inquiry becomes too large then we might not be quite as successful as we would like to be so one way in which we can proceed would be to pick a set of agencies to look at and get a better sense of how classification impacts the FOIA process at these particular agencies as a historian I would be very interested in looking at NARA but I would be open to talking about other agencies that could be included as well I see Kella's mid-comment research staff, I wish that were possible but I think probably not and if this is an issue that other committee members are in I'd love to hear your ideas on what an inquiry into classification could look like, thanks very much Marie thanks Patricia do you want to go next? Yes, good afternoon I'm Patricia West I'm the acting FOIA officer and FOIA public liaison at the National Labor Relations Board I had the honor of serving on last term FOIA advisory committee and like the previous committees our committee has three subcommittees time volume, vision and records management I spent time on the time volume subcommittee as well as the vision committee also I was a part of the final report working group and so I want to share with you that you can be on more than one subcommittee depending upon your interest as you've heard last term we came out with these 22 recommendations and at the conclusion I didn't think that I could contribute any more to the committee but then in the final report Jason Barron wrote a section entitled Final Observation in which he makes two suggestions for our current committee the first suggestion I know Michael's going to touch upon but the second suggestion is what I wanted to visit and it's that goes with Tom James were saying so since Jason is much more eloquent than I am I'm going to read from the final report as challenging as it has been to fashion these recommendations the more difficult part is in seeing through their effective implementation without intending to bind members of any future term one further suggestion for the committee to consider rather than viewing their mission as one primarily involved in drafting many additional recommendations members should spend a portion of their time devoted to publicizing past recommendations and measuring slash evaluating compliance with them throughout the executive branch and then Jason gives a few suggestions about how we can go about this so when I read this section of the final report it really spoke to me and I felt inspired and I wanted to come back and help with implementing these recommendations because we can make lots of recommendations but until they're implemented I don't think we'll see so for me I'm just going to make a suggestion ideally I would love to have three subcommittees just devoted to following up on these recommendations but I understand we have all these amazing committee members who have excellent ideas for the FOIA which will require some subcommittees so I'm going to make the proposal that we have at least one subcommittee to look at these recommendations we could call it implementation of the recommendations subcommittee we can workshop that idea I'm not very creative but under that particular subcommittee I'm suggesting that we could have four potential working groups the first I would suggest would be training which has three recommendations that that working group could follow up on the second one I'd recommend would be online access and this would be a combination of three recommendations under the subject matter enhancing online access that would include two recommendations under the subject matter of providing alternatives to FOIA access and then the third working group I would suggest would be a congressional working group and we have two recommendations directed to congress and my thought was that members of this working group and the committee could meet with members of congress regarding these recommendations and actually draft the proposed legislation and hand it off to the congressmen so that they could force senators so they could drop it additionally Michael will be touching upon another proposed legislation that we discussed a bit last term and I thought this working group could assist with that and then the fourth working group that I thought could focus on the subject matter of raising the profile of FOIA within the agency which has four recommendations and I would also include the two recommendations directed to the chief FOIA officers council so I kind of packed a lot in this one subcommittee in the event we'll have more subcommittees devoted to following up on the recommendations so this one subcommittee would be tasked with the implementation or overview of approximately 16 recommendations so that's just my proposal and I'll get it out there and then I just wanted to share some tips or lessons learned that I learned from last term something that I found really helpful was reading the final reports of each of the FOIA committees also watching some of the meetings was really helpful too because you can get a flavor for the meetings and what is expected keep in mind though every committee is different made up of different members the other suggestion one thing I just want to comment on that was difficult for me to get used to was at these committee public meetings before we speak we were always told that we need to state our name and I believe and Kirsten and Lena can correct me if I'm wrong but this helps with the meeting transcripts and it also helps to introduce you to the meeting audience but the most helpful thing I found were the resources that the committee has and really and truly the resources are the people that we are seeing right now on this meeting we have Lena and Kirsten who are present at all our subcommittee meetings which last term of these were all conducted via teleconference and they're here to support the committee and subcommittees it's not their first rodeo so please look to them for guidance Kirsten really meant it when she said call me if you have any questions they've been extremely helpful in pointing me and my fellow committee members in the right direction for various research projects also committee members Michael James Tom and myself would be happy to help I can tell you I looked to Tom last year he was a big help to me and several committee members we had two projects that we're dealing with international research one was international research on issues in different countries and we looked to it to get ideas how to deal with luminous requests and another was we were looking at national models of agencies like OGIS and we interviewed Tom he was a great source of help he turned us to this really helpful website and then set up another another gentleman who was extremely helpful and so don't be shy about asking for help and then the third group of resources that are people are your fellow committee members and I'll just point out like last year Suzanne Piotrowski who's a professor at Rutgers she really did a heavy lift in helping with survey results for one of the sub-committees and Michael Morsey who's the co-founder of McRock is really helpful at giving us the requester perspective and James and I were on a committee involving the international research and he's a professor at Trinity Washington University in German so he looked at all those German statutes so really the people on this committee are going to be a huge resource for you and then lastly I would kind of keep your eye on the target for each of our sub-committees we need to complete a final report before the term and so I would suggest keeping notes on your research and interviews so that you can describe your methodology and process the two years go by really quickly it's hard to backtrack and remember everything that you did also a really good sub-committee report helps us create a stellar final report and I would just point to if you wanted to look at what I thought was a really good example of a sub-committee report I would suggest the record management sub-committee report from last term it's highly detailed and it has legal support for each recommendation so that's a list of my helpful for you Thanks so much Michael, over to you Great, yeah I would just say Patricia said it all and I think so eloquently except for the fact that she then said I was going to follow up on a few items so I guess I do have to say something after all but I do want to just echo everything she said because I think that's a great summary of sort of what makes this really an honor to be on and a really wonderful opportunity but also how we can effectively do our work in a way that aids our field because I think I'll start with sort of some of the advice because I think coming into the committee I come from a very small non-profit and I think government committees work a lot different than I've certainly been used to working and also we're in a kind of an interesting place because we can't legislate, we can't allocate funding we can't get Amazon to donate color scanners to every federal agency in the country or really do anything directly which can be frustrating, right? I think all we can do is provide recommendations I think we can't sort of snap our fingers and fix any problems and our recommendations have to be directed towards the archivist and the archivist also can't do a lot of those things directly either and even coming to the practice of a recommendation can be challenging. I think everybody on the requester side and everybody on the processing side both have some individual wishes that would make everybody's their particular lives a lot easier but I think as a committee we're really charged with sort of thinking through a bigger picture because I think the challenge of making recommendations that we can't necessarily enact directly ourselves is also an opportunity because we're not constrained with the political realities we're not constrained with the financial realities and we should be looking at sort of what do we need to do to kind of make sure our collective field is one that serves the American people as best as possible, what can we do to kind of create a healthy and vibrant employee ecosystem that serves the needs of today, tomorrow and many years from now. I also think it's a wonderful opportunity that brings together both the requester community and the processing community, the FOIA officers that I've gotten to know through the committee in the last term just so many committed thoughtful individuals and it's a real pleasure to kind of be working collaboratively on this project in a way that I think our field doesn't often get enough time and opportunity to do and so being able to kind of work together on this project is really, really important in special space and I'm grateful that it gets to be a part of it again. My advice is to take some time to really listen to what is and isn't working for our peers on all sides of the issues. FOIA is a complex challenge. FOIA is not easy. It involves everything from document management to digitization to AI to really tricky political realities and financial realities and also helping build strong cultural norms so that Congress and the public support the important work that needs to be done because this stuff cannot be done on a zero budget or zero political support and a lot of really interesting different fields that come together and so we have a chance and really a mandate to kind of take a step back and think through what do we need to do to make this work for everybody as best as possible. As Patricia said, the resources that the committee has here are people and really wonderful people with a lot of different experience from speaking German to the years of experience kind of dealing with things on one side or another and I think being able to tap into that and really kind of work to make sure that the experience that you bring to this committee is helping shape our recommendations but also you're doing what you can to sort of elevate the experience that other people have. I think that's some of my favorite conversations where people push back on what seemed to me like and kind of took a chance to kind of explain sort of this is why we can't do that or this is why this isn't really feasible. Taking an opportunity to kind of really listen to our colleagues is really wonderful and so I think I would just urge everybody on the committee to step back from sort of hey, I really hate this particular exemption or this kind of specific problem and trying to think through what are the larger issues that we can help shift the conversation to address when it comes to transparency in the Freedom of Information Act in general. And finally, while we're delivering recommendations to the archivist, I think it's important to not necessarily limit our scope to just what the archivist to do. I think we can treat our work as yet another accountability measure when we look at how we want FOIA to work in two years, five years and beyond. We tell the archivist here's our recommendation but that recommendation can also be a calling to task if we find for example that certain things are not funded in a way that makes them work effectively I think we have an opportunity to kind of come out and say here has been the cost of this and our recommendation is that this is remedied because this is the historical cost for not doing this properly. I think there's creative ways that we can use this sort of fact that we are a recommendation body to highlight issues that and help set agendas for other bodies that can then build on our work. I know that. When congressional staffers are looking at how they want to sort of shape legislation, one of the things they do is look at the recommendations. They do kind of use this as a springboard. While it can feel that we are sometimes held back I think we can use this as an opportunity to sort of say we are not constrained in ways that other places are constrained. That's kind of general advice is sort of use our constraints as opportunities. I think everybody working in the world of transparency and FOIA is very used to constraints and working with resources and skills and working with the wonderful people here is a great path forward. One of the things I would like to see a subcommittee on is the idea of extending FOIA and transparency laws beyond executive agencies to legislative and judicial branches as well. I think that's been a recurring topic that has come up in multiple previous terms. I think that's also something that a lot of members of the public have questions about, sort of, why is Congress exempt? Why is the judiciary exempt from FOIA? I don't think there's necessarily easy answers. I don't think this is just, hey, let's make Congress subject to FOIA. I think Congress might have some thoughts on that themselves. But I do think that this is something where if we have a subcommittee fully devoted to this issue and come out with some really strong recommendations, and maybe that is something that's more nuanced, but I think it is something that we have seen come up recurring in terms and could really benefit from, sort of, a clear suggestion or guidance to where we feel it should be so that it's something that the public should expect transparency, and this is a way that we can feel this in other components of our government. So, yeah, I'm really excited to be working with all of you. I'm really excited to be working with the three other continuing members. And this is a real privilege and honor because I do think that our work is not just in building a stronger FOIA, is not just building a stronger transparency component for our government, but is really essential to building an informed democracy. I think right now people throughout the country have a lot of questions about things. Every day you see some of those questions getting answers or getting those questions being met through the power of public records, through the power of the Free Information Act. And I think we serve a really, really strong role in helping government of the people, by the people really help be informed about making the best decisions for where we want to go as a country. So it's a real privilege. Okay, Michael, thanks for that. All four of you laying in. I was remiss in not recognizing Bobby Tullibian who is also a returning member but by charter, not necessarily by choice as the director of OIP. Bobby joined us pretty late in the last term of the committee but he was always coming to our meetings in the past so he was certainly familiar with the work of the committee. And Bobby said he's good, right? Do you want to share anything else with the committee now? No, thank you, Alina. And I'm glad to be here by charter but also would be here by choice. A lot of the work that the department does in our government-wide policy position in FOIA is greatly informed by both the agencies and the public and so I had the pleasure of working with our prior director, Melanie from the beginning of the committee and then had the pleasure of joining last year. A lot of great recommendations that both at OGIS and OIP are starting to work on and so glad to be here and looking forward to more vibrant discussions and exploring how we can all improve FOIA all the way around. Thank you. All right, so we're a little past our agenda break of 2.35 p.m., I'm rather sorry, but if I can ask everyone to keep to 10 minutes and return at 2.55 p.m., I would greatly appreciate that. Just a reminder, put your phone on mute and just shut your camera off but don't log off because you may have trouble logging back in. See you in 10. And we are live. Okay, welcome back everyone. Thanks again for keeping to our 10-minute break. Thanks for returning and sticking in it. Thanks for sticking with us. Now the hard work is about to begin. I really hope that the two presentations you heard before our break from Eric and Michael and from your fellow committee members have gotten your creative juices flowing. And I know we also have asked each one of you to provide us two or three areas of interest that you'd like to work on, the spreadsheet was circulated yesterday as I mentioned earlier and what thanks to Kirsten, our DFO she was actually able to group all the suggestions into certain buckets if you will, for lack of a better word and she also identified those suggestions, all of them are great by the way. I never think there's such a thing as a bad idea but some of them have already been covered by past committees so I definitely want to make sure that we're not duplicating work. Several there are several themes that I see going across and I'm happy to flag them but I very, very much want this to be a robust discussion amongst all of us about logical subcommittees that we might be able to form in order to tackle all these important issues. If we can reach general consensus today on each subcommittees, I am also seeking volunteers for co-chairing each subcommittee. We always want a member from the government side and a member from the requestor slash the district side. If I could go ahead and turn it over to all of you just remember state your name and your affiliation before you speak for the transcript and tell us your thoughts about what you've heard and who wants to go first. This is Roger. Hello. Hi. My name is Roger. I might take away from what I had from the returning members that I think would be a great idea to look to some of the recommendations and see the ones that we can push forward. So I'm definitely willing to table my recommendations because they are new and rather look at recommendations from last year for previous years that we can make a difference on which it goes through. Okay. Roger, thank you. It sounds like you're volunteering to be on the implementation of recommendation subcommittees that Patricia has created for presentation. Thank you. I appreciate that. I'll also just mention that the themes that I saw that I circled were classification. I know Jane spoke to that. Some legislative issues both old and new. There are definitely some great new legislative issues that have been brought up. And process. There are definitely a number of process questions and issues in slightly different ways. There are some variations on the theme, but I definitely saw a lot of process. And then obviously technology. So just fill in those topics out, those buckets out. Anyone else want to chime in? Oh, Cal is raising his hand. Cal, please. So one of the things that I noticed and Cal, Cal McClanahan. Oh, sorry, Cal McClanahan National Security Counselor. Sorry. So many of the recommendations or recommendations, many of the priorities that were in the list from me and from other people seem to cut across the buckets that were assigned to them into a bigger picture. I think that the group hasn't really looked at before, which is basically litigation stuff. Whether it be anything that Kristen had written about whether or not you should do whether or not something is classed about should be properly the subject of litigation. My issue about in-camera documents in litigation or one of the other topics was to what degree what happens when the DOJ or the agency takes a position that is against its own state of guidance litigation. So I think that we've done a lot of stuff going up to that line in the past but everything in the past has been sort of agency centric and dealing with agencies dealing with how agencies do FOIA dealing with agencies how agencies deal with requesters but FOIA litigation is an integral part of FOIA and I think the next logical step would be for one of the subcommittees to focus on just litigation stuff to everything that involves what happens after a court gets involved to look at all of those pieces and address the four or five priorities we identified that would fall into that budget would be sort of the next logical step to it. Okay, thoughts on that? This is Tuan Samuhan of Bill and Oval Law. I just wanted to second that suggestion I think at the end of the day the judicial enforcement mechanism is what backs off the operation of the statute and so it's hard to divorce internal executives of agency processing from the judicial enforcement so that I think that it can help inform executive agency process also to understand a little bit better what requesters think of the fair interpretation of the statutes and there would be some dialogue about that. I think also some of the reforms we've mentioned the desirability perhaps of going to Congress at least to my mind I think OGIS occupies an interesting space within the executive branch and has begun to serve an office with respect for the last several years of dispute resolutions but on a mediation basis I think to the extent that there were congressional appetites to do so and OGIS of course didn't object that it might be desirable to strengthen OGIS' role so that it actually can maybe diverts in a meaningful way some disputes that would otherwise end up in court. I'm just not sure from the agency perspective for what freedoms they give OGIS right now because OGIS has the power of persuasion that it doesn't wield a stronger stick with respect to you know behavior that may exist in agencies that needs to be disciplined. And this is Kell again this actually was one of the things that I did not list as a priority but I think could be looked at through this is many times you'll see sort of a tension between how judges treat a statement by OGIS and do they give a credence to they deferred to it. The agencies often take the position we'll know OGIS just as mediations you need to look at OIP for the really smart people and the requesters tend to lean on the side of we'll know but OGIS will set up a statute to do this but there's been no consensus on that and so that would be a definite area of exploration and perhaps even recommended reform to say you know if we're going to go to Congress with reform say make it clear you know OGIS is given the power to write advisory opinions say and courts shall treat them accordingly or something like that basically stop the tug of war so that it's not if I have an OGIS that supports my case and agriculture has an OIP guidance that supports their case the judge doesn't have to go whichever one I feel like today is given a clear priority OGIS writes advisory opinions OIP sets policy recommendations or the other way around so that everybody knows which to pay attention to so that confuses agency employees too if they have conflicting information this is Bobby from DOJ I really don't think there is conflicting guidance and what OGIS recommends into their advisory opinions or when they mediate only they can correct me if I'm wrong but we work together closely and I've not seen an instance where there's a conflict between what OGIS is seen in the advisory committee in a mediation and where it would be a disagreement with our guidance the one thing I caution about focusing too much on litigation is that I think that's probably the place that we have released room to make an impact particularly if we're talking about judicial court interpretations of the statute so I was sure that we're just wasting the resources that we have on some of these other topics where we can be more impactful so that would just be my one thought to keep in mind if we're talking about litigation. I echo Bobby's comment about having a litigation subcommittee but what's come to mind in hearing Cal speak and sorry the other person before him and looking at this Excel spreadsheet I'm wondering if we should perhaps have a subcommittee just for legislative initiatives or congressional initiatives I know earlier today I was suggesting that it could come underneath the implementing the recommendations but looking at the lists this Excel spreadsheet list and hearing the two earlier speakers I'm wondering if we should just have a subcommittee solely dedicated to legislative initiatives it could include the two previous congressional recommendations as well as the proposed legislative recommendation that Michael discussed about expanding FOIA to the judicial and legislative branches I just throw that out there as an idea Patricia can I just ask you to address Tuan's comment earlier about the need to strengthen OGIS' role because that is something that I know you worked on in the last term the previous committee was trying to look into Tuan just so you know yes what we looked at we were looking about we were reconsidering the model of vision subcommittee when we looked at it we certainly I've done a little bit of research and so I don't want to take up too much of the committee's time but you know we saw we can ask OGIS to do a lot of things but they only have so many staff members and so big of a budget that if their tasks were to expand even greater you know such as having binding decisions and mediation that would be a whole nother litigation department that would need to fall under OGIS but certainly I just in going through all their tasks I certainly do you think that they could use more staff and more resources with even their current tasks you're here tell is raising his hand again unless somebody has something else to say I'm just trying to watch everyone for those non-verbal cues anyone else want to speak before Cal does okay I just wanted to respond to Bobby and Patricia and to say maybe we can reconcile these two ideas because I do like Patricia's idea of having one group basically looking at not so much topic area but remedy area how would we do this we have to think differently about how to do it most of the litigation things would be probably going to Congress if you go back to a lot of the Sunshine Week hearings almost every Sunshine Week hearing involved somebody one of the congressmen senator saying if you have a way to reduce FOIA litigation please let us know that's what I'm saying we should do so I agree with Bobby that we can't affect how a judge is going to rule but we can affect how the litigation happens and we can affect how agencies make the argument and we can affect how to the extent that we want to change the law recommend to change the law we can affect how a judge is going to rule if we change the standard to make a foreseeable harm standard or something like that every statutory change changes how judges rule and how case law works and since we have been given not we the FOIA committee necessarily but we the FOIA community have been repeatedly begged by congress to find a way to reduce FOIA litigation or to produce unnecessary FOIA litigation or to be streamlined to make it not so onerous that seems well within our mandate and whether we have it as a separate litigation committee subcommittee or fold those issues into things that would be legislated I think is semantics as long as it gets addressed yeah I have something I'd like to add AJ Wagner Marquette we can hear you yeah we can hear you so that was one of my concerns as far as priorities go as well I put it under enforcement but incorrect me if I'm wrong here but I think and I'm certainly sympathetic to Patricia's concerns as far as bandwidth but I would wonder if that's something we could think about is the roles and responsibilities of OGIS I'm not entirely clear but I don't think they have investigatory power or subpoena power when they look into disputes and I would wonder I know in some states that that's been pretty effective and also what kind of authority their opinions have I don't believe it's binding authority and again I know some states their oversight or Ombuds offices have those kinds of abilities or something that would need some significant funding but I would just wonder if that might be something we're looking into as well okay thanks very much Roger did you have your hand up before yes I did okay I'm still struggling with trying to focus on litigation I think the question that comes to mind is why most cases for cases in litigation in the first place I think that's the question we should ask at least for my experience most times we get there because we didn't provide a response to markets to our request most times that's why we're there and so if we want to prevent litigation we need to find ways to make sure that agencies can respond to requests timely that's an important component I think that's where most of the cases that's why they start in the first place and once you get there then you start talking about because once you've sued you then when you provide a response the next part is right we don't like the way you we want to challenge your dismissal of the search so I think we should be focusing on how can we make sure that agencies respond timely to for a request how can we educate for your requesters to understand that in spite of the fact that we're supposed to respond within 20 working days or 30 that realistically for most agencies that is probably not a possibility and how can requesters and the agencies work collaboratively to make sure that we can find ways to prevent us having to litigate these cases that's my view this is Kristen sorry Kristen made your hand Bobby go first though Bobby go ahead I'll start raising my hand I forgot so Bobby's from the department of justice I just wanted to echo and just say if I may look from what Cal said I think the last thing I could tell you as an agency a FOI office want is to be in litigation so we want to do everything we can not to be in litigation I think the goal of reducing the need for litigation reducing litigation is a very much shared one but I think that it really the problems we'll have to problem the focus is on the administrative side because that's what this is kind of what Roger is saying as well so many of these items that we have that focus on the administrative side my opinion would be more impactful in reducing litigation particularly one that I have made some other folks have also made is focusing on what are the resources that are needed by agencies to be able to satisfy their FOIA obligations something focused on resources I think would maybe be a beneficial item for the community to look at Thanks Bobby Kristen Kristen Ellis from the FBI and Bobby kind of just stole everything I was going to say I think that one of the things that Cal mentioned or one of the words that Cal used was remedies and I think that that was something that Patricia was getting at too with legislation I think litigation is a remedy legislation is a remedy you have to look at what the problem is before you talk about somebody and so while a particular topic the timing for responding to FOIA request resource issues may lead to felt the questions of litigation and legislation I think the core problem has to be addressed because otherwise then the remedies aren't going to be talking about remedies isn't going to be helpful until you talk about what the actual problem is so I think that I would favor less a subcommittee specifically about litigation for example then something along the lines of what Bobby was talking about what Roger was talking about I'm hearing Kristen and Bobby say is a little more of a process so it's focused on the process bucket that we had identified earlier Alina how many committees can we have is there a limit? In theory you can have a hundred no there's absolutely no limit we have just found that we were actually going to break down into four subcommittees as I recall in the last term and we ended up melding together two subcommittees into one and that's when we ended up with three I see Tom maybe wanting to comment on that but it does get a little unwieldy and it takes up a lot of time for Kirsten in particular I'm very respectful of her time as well because all the rubber hitting the road works where we have to roll up our sleeves does get done at the subcommittee level but it's very important work so I would discourage you from having a hundred I would encourage you to try to keep it to a low number Well it sounds and correct me if I'm wrong and this is Kell again it seems to me that you know I don't actually disagree with Kirsten or Bobby or Roger or anybody I think all of these are good buckets and good topics for committees it's not a zero sum game I've heard roughly four to five ideas and we have roughly four to five subcommittees and I don't see that we necessarily have to be debating whether or not we should do administrative or not administrative we should do resource issues versus litigation we should do legislation versus processing when we can do them all and they would overlap and actually it would be good that they overlap because each time we have a committee meeting each subcommittee says sort of here what we've done and we feed off each other for the next quarter and I like the litigation committee can follow up on something that the administrative resource committee did and implement that into whatever we would be doing and so on and so forth so that by the end of the two years we have this report that each recommendation basically cross cuts across all of the topics to provide a sort of holistic attempt at fixing what's wrong with FOIA and what we think okay Jason has the comment yeah thank you I guess just to step back before we dive too deep just some kind of first impressions as an outsider from the requesting community from reading the report that was really and the recommendation and reports were just excellent just superb and very well done I think one of the things that I was really struck by was that was the comment that Patricia had mentioned where what are some proposed legislation what are some bigger strategic things that could be done to improve it there's 22 different recommendations there's hundreds of different issues that you're facing that both the agencies are facing requesters are facing I think maybe after the going back to the previous work maybe it's time to kind of just step back and say okay how would we really fix it with a more holistic global strategic view rather than just very tactical dealing with this issue or that issue so that's just my first impression I thought that you know the I was surprised that there's not fully a performance goal the metrics for agencies that they have to implement as part of their strategic planning process you know I was really struck by the prior committee's comment and really speaking as a historian this is you know someone speaking from the grave so to speak what publicize our past recommendations you know here new group coming here help us publicize it because we spend a lot of work a lot of work coming up with these so that's just my comment great I just want to make sure that we put that on the record thank you anyone else sorry go ahead Allison Allison from Department of Commerce to suggest one I know some people have discussed whether we should have a separate implementation subcommittee and I was thinking it would be easier to have if you have a technology or a process or whatever committee and have part of that subcommittee's goal be figuring out which of the prior recommendations they want to implement further and then do a deeper dive on and then also come up with newer or options of those recommendations and then the other one with regarding its potential litigation subcommittee I agree with Bobby and just the other speakers who said that a lot of it needs to litigation so if we could improve search adequacy or resources for staffing and timing I think that would help drive down the number of cases I get to litigation so I think that should be have these subcommittees look at things through a litigation focus but I don't know necessarily that a litigation committee would be the best use because it would just be so all-encompassing unless it was specifically focused that's all okay thanks Allison Tom were you waving at me and I didn't see you I apologize I'm not sure I'm off can you Tom Sussman I'm litigating this big problem Kel but I agree with what Allison just said is litigation seems to me to fall into two categories one are search substantive application of exemptions and that's really we may have legislative proposals but I think that's not worth a lot of our time the other is process and if you read the monthly report bi-weekly reports of litigation as Allison said search adequacy of the search is really probably the single most litigated issue and so that's not a litigation problem that's a process problem I also think that to get into litigation there may be among the group on the screen three or four participants who had firsthand experience with litigation and so I think that it may be difficult to it's a higher learning curve to try to figure out for those who haven't had a courtroom problem to figure out exactly how to track that problem back to its origin as long as it's not the origin isn't a judge so I mean I kind of like the idea of seeing how process reforms could reduce litigation and I think we had this conversation in the last advisory committee about search issues being so heavily litigated and therefore we spent attention to that subject and that's why I think technology has a lot to do with that so I guess I'm a big fan on I think going back to almost where Alina started which is process classification and technology and it may be a little bit of a focus on legislation because you'd have to do that to capture Congress or the courts so that's and I also don't it seems to me that four subcommittees may be we may be able to handle it I'm not sure that over four makes any sense at all because some of us like to be on more than one and that would number is 210 thank you I'm going to pick on Alan Blutstein Alan you are in the courtroom once the very first exemption for trial I was it was a forgettable experience because we got crushed and rightfully so James I'm sorry this is James I just did want to point out that although we had three subcommittees we have numerous sub-subcommittees so depending on how you divide it up you can see our work is having consisted of more than just three groups so basically that is to say that if we end up with a slightly larger number of committees that we have those committees be relatively narrowly focused it's not necessarily a problem at least from my view the point I think the trick is to assign the committee something relatively narrow to focus on if we say for instance it's just a litigation everything can be litigated so everything is litigated whereas as you pointed out we focus on the process of litigation or a very narrow question how can we best reduce litigation that then narrows the scope of the work and maybe allows for something productive to come out of it thank you Alan did we cut you off? I'm sorry no I had nothing further on that topic alright thank you alright anyone else raising their hand I'm somehow unable to raise my hand on the chat but this is Alexander Philips I'll turn the times I guess whereas Kelsey is a multiplicity of committees I sort of see two at this point one is FOIA as it is and making that work as well as possible and one is FOIA as it ought to be and that's the legislative side of the house and I agree with those who noted that one of the main reasons for litigation is delay I mean certainly from our point of view that's the most frequent reason the file suit is just to get in the litigation queue when we're given a deadline of 2023 if we stay out of the litigation queue so reforms the house at the agency would I think help the litigation side and this is Kel again I agree with I've been saying I agree with everybody because I'm just an agreeable person I agree with James that the it does make more sense to be narrowly focused and when I'm talking about litigation the people who are saying litigation is everything you know that means you have to look at search you're going to have to look at this I think that just like we're not trying to duplicate effort with the technology people for instance if there were say a litigation committee or some subcommittee or whatever working group it would be stupid to have those people look at how to deal with search methodologies and the process group deal with how to deal with search methodologies it's basically a Venn diagram where most of the work is done in the part outside the common area so like the items that that I raised the priorities I raised the thing that Christian raised classification those are sort of litigation specific issues like should something be done in litigation not what the litigation is about but how the litigation is conducted and that is the thing that I think is being left out by all of these ideas is that for good or for ill the lesson that a lot of FOIA officers learn is that regarding many people here will disagree with me I'm sure is that however you do your FOIA process as an agency if you get sued the DOJ will defend you and they will defend you whatever your decision was and that sends a mixed message to many processors that I've spoken to and they're being told not to do this but they know if they do it then an AUSA will write a brief saying it was perfectly legitimate for them to do it and so stuff like that if you don't address litigation conduct and or how things happen in litigation like can XRK declarations remain sealed forever should there be a legislative fake or can you file them at all stuff like that if you don't deal with that piece of the puzzle anything you do is going to be incomplete and it's going to be subject to reverse or the second the lawyer that's the perspective that a lot of the outsiders have so I just want to put on my DOJ hat for a second having been there for 23 years I respectfully disagree with the fact that every single FOIA decision that has been made there are cases in which agency counsel is persuaded to settle or stand down or change their ways and Bobby maybe can back me up on this I just want you to know it's not as clear-cut as you think I agree I'm over simplifying but it happens enough for the time to be concerning I'll add a gap so I'm hearing lots of different ideas I'm mindful of the time as well my hope was that we could end our meeting today with at least some subcommittees formed and I'm hearing and maybe I'm just echoing Tom but I'm still hearing a lot of process discussions I haven't heard classification come up as much students obviously weren't doing your job I'm still hearing technology and I'm hearing legislative and maybe woven throughout those our past recommendations Kristin is raising her hand if you need some more discussion of classification I would certainly support committee on classification it was one of related to one of the items that I brought up and what James was talking about made a lot of sense to discuss same here I would support classification one suggestion I can make and see how everyone reacts to it is one of the homework assignments that I could give especially if we can select subcommittees between now and our next meeting is for each subcommittee to come up with a mission or a vision statement so they can hone in on exactly what they want to be working on and bring that back to the committee next time for any further that's I'm floating that out as a workshop idea as Patricia has said how does that sound to folks for seeing odds and how do folks generally feel about process, classification, technology and legislative as for committees subcommittees rather sorry nods yes okay I'm getting a thumbs up from Alexis thank you okay thumbs up from Alan good okay do I have any volunteers for co-chairing any of these subcommittees this is always my favorite part okay James is raising his hand for James I would be happy to co-chair of the classification committee they'll look up a partner willing to live along with me okay Kristin I see you're raising your hand I would be happy to co-chair of the classification okay all right so James and Kristin thank you who else is raising their hand Linda thank you Alina this is Patricia can you state the subcommittees again I just didn't process classification okay technology and legislation or legislative however you want to is it monitor I would volunteer for the legislation subcommittee okay Linda I hope that's not the one you wanted to volunteer for no it wasn't I'd like to volunteer for working on the process committee makes sense great I need a non-government side for process and legislation not all at once tell Candida tell what would you like to volunteer for I'm going for Patricia on legislation okay thank you who wants to work with Linda on process Alexis I can't have you because I need one government person and one non-government person unless you want to volunteer for technology Michael okay Michael are you volunteering for a process this is Michael I'd be happy to do process or technology okay all right thank you so that leaves us with technology I haven't heard anyone raise their hand for that anyone have thoughts about do we need to have a technology subcommittee that's separate what's the consensus on that what would be the goal of the technology subcommittee three questions like the rest of us you can see all the technology issues that were raised one one goal is to leave on very closely with the technology committee from the Chief Law Officers Council but there are and I have passed on all of your suggestions by the way collectively the committee to the technology so they are aware but the one thought that I have about the technology committee that would be formed here is that it would involve both the requestor side and the government side whereas the technology committee only has government folks so I think that's a fair point to make this is a Jason the reason I asked who said that I'm sorry Jason Gard history associates I'd be happy to co-chair the technology okay thank you and this is Allison from commerce I'd be happy to co-chair the technology committee from the government side okay great thank you very much I really appreciate everyone now even the harder part now comes for each one of you and I'm not going to ask for it necessarily today but please start thinking about what subcommittees you'd like to help with even if you don't want to be a co-chair there are lots of opportunities for work and you've heard some folks talk about the fact that there were sub sub subcommittees we actually used to joke about that a little bit at our committee meetings last year and the year before because sub sub subcommittees would actually give reports so we certainly want to encourage that and I also want to add that I also saw a lot of synergy I hate that word it's my least favorite I'm also going to use it among the subcommittees in this last term and the term before so to the extent that there was overlap on subject matters subcommittee co-chairs would be talking to each other and communicating and collaborating on overlap areas so there's always that possibility Alexander did you want to say something no that's okay okay alright so how are you feeling about the decisions we just made today is everyone good everyone have any heartburn over anything okay no heartburn this is Kirsten I just wanted if we could go over these again who is co-chairing each of the committees sure so here's what I have I have Linda Fry and oh Michael Morrissey Michael Morrissey for the process subcommittee for classification I have James Stoker and Kristen Ellis for technology I have Allison Dietrich and Jason Garts and for legislation I have Patricia West and Cal McClanahan great thank you I just wanted to make sure can I get that right guys everything good so Alina alright any last comments that anyone would like to make or questions or thoughts that they want to share before we turn our time over to any public comments or questions that folks may have who are watching us out there in virtual Alina it's Patricia Patricia West may I just ask a question about the subcommittees so I do have a little bit of heartburn over the subcommittees only because I was looking for a subcommittee that could be devoted to you know helping address the previous committees you know recommendations and in looking in this spreadsheet I see a lot of people you know were interested in a lot of things that we've touched upon in the past so you know is the thought with these four subcommittees you know I could see maybe the process subcommittee technology and the legislative subcommittee could certainly look at the past committees recommendations maybe underneath each of those subcommittees have a working group that can you know try to implement or address those past recommendations is that kind of part of the thought process in having these four subcommittees Patricia to me that sounds like it makes a lot of sense because I think there's a lot of folks who have weighed in and said yeah we're really interested in this issue and then of course Kirsten and I were very quick to comment oh well that's our recommendation number five so I think there's definitely a lot of overlap I would ask each of the subcommittee co-chairs to talk amongst themselves and when they are drafting up some kind of mission or vision plan to ensure that they're also going to be working on past recommendations would that give you a little less heartburn I would have loved just to have one subcommittee to really kind of babysit those previous recommendations but I think at least three of these four subcommittees could perhaps help move along some past recommendations you don't think that the classification subcommittee because I don't think there's been any past recommendations on that at least not prior to the election Kel is raising his hand last comment so Kel and Clinton in the C I think that a way we might be able to do that pretty easily without forming a new committee is to sort of form two people you know Roger and someone like this their entire job is to coordinate the working groups outreach or whatever you want to call it implementation and marketing and they wouldn't have a committee of their own their committee would be all the other people who are in all the other committees who are working on these issues so they'd be co-coordinators for marketing or implementation or something like that any other reactions to that comment and it sounds like there's room for compromise and shuffling around a little bit in terms of issues that we're all looking at I don't think anything is said in stone so I guess I am urging all the subcommittee co-chairs to think about strongly so this is my pitch on behalf of Patricia also a pitch on behalf of myself is the director of OGIS 22 recommendations is a lot so any help you want to give us I know that I would appreciate also speaking on behalf of Bobby I think he would appreciate that so we definitely need the help so that would be great okay so I don't see anyone else raising their hand or waving frantically at me with that I do want to turn to our section of the meeting where we hear public comment we look forward to hearing anyone who's stuck around this long any comments or ideas that they would like to share so Andre I would like to ask you to open up our telephone lines at this time and provide instructions for those of you who are calling in and listening in to ask a question press pound two on your telephone keypad you will hear notification when your line is unmuted at that time please state your question alternatively you may submit a written question by selecting all panels from the drop down menu in the chat panel click on the question in the message box and send again pressing pound two on your telephone keypad will indicate they have a question open the lines to the public looking to the phone lines for any raised hands we have one raised hand please go ahead caller state your name thank you my name is Edward Hasbrook and I am a freelance journalist and a consultant to several of those regular users of FOIA one for whom FOIA is essentially completely broken and dysfunctional but two who does not have the resources to litigate and so agencies know that they can with impunity ignore me even if they are not of bad faith there is still an incentive just because of prioritization to ignore those who are not likely to be able to litigate and I think this committee has a particular responsibility to raise a voice on behalf of the vast majority of FOIA requesters who are never going to be able to litigate I could go on at great length but since this is your first meeting and your agenda topic is supposedly the prioritization of tasks I want to I want to limit myself to one point which is what I think should be your highest priority because it does not require legislation and I think you might actually be able to accomplish something that is to push for implementation of the provisions of the 1996 E FOIA act requiring production of records in any form or format in which they are held and in which they are readily reproducible despite having been on the books for more than 20 years this provision has been almost entirely ignored tools such as FOIA express have been procured and deployed even though they are incapable of satisfying the statutory mandate and should have been excluded from consideration as not meeting the bid specifications agencies have made no effort their first step in processing responsive records typically is to take the responsive files they use this rhetoric of documents I urge you to purge documents from your vocabulary most of the records that I and others are requesting are not in document form they are digital files. They take the responsive files and the first thing they do is they substitute newly created pdf documents for the responsive files and everything else they do treats those substituted pdf as though they are the responsive records which they are not. A starting point toward implementing I think many FOIA offices would process records properly in native format if they were given guidance and a ready tool set and workflow for how to do that that could apply to a lot of different types of records the most obvious sort is email where email is again screen shots which is effectively redacting in the client because it only shows some of the headers then they put them into paginated pdf's they aggregate an indeterminate number of email files into one pdf if you get the emails in native format you can import the emails into an email client like thunderboard or you can import them into a cloud based email client like a gmail account and then use the robust tools available in those email clients for searching and mining and making use of the responsive records. A first step should be giving agencies guidance their FOIA officers should know in what file formats email is actually served stored on their email servers they should have tools readily available for redacting and releasing email in the file format in which it is served on their servers beyond that reproducing records in native format should include guidance for for example how to produce a record of an agency a Facebook account how to produce I'm dealing with an agency now that is about to be disbanded next week and it's said that on the dissolution of the agency they're going to delete all their social media accounts they're going to delete the event-bright account they've used for keeping track of participants in their meetings they're going to delete their zoom account they have Google analytics tracking cookies on their .gov website which enable Google to produce reports for them as to who's visited their website what would a report of a Google analytics account look like there should be readily available templates for how to produce records of these kinds of outsourced account in native format that FOIA officers have available again this book has been on the books for more than 20 years there's been no movement the tools have completely ignored it you should start with tools for redacting and producing email messages whether it's in .mdx files or .eml files whatever file format they're stored on agency email servers that will also make searching a lot easier because what happens is agencies will go into they'll test the search out to individual users who will go into their email clients and try to do searches email is typically stored in ASCII text what should be going on is they should be doing of the servers for the text strings that people are looking for but until they start thinking of the responsive records as the actual files and understanding something about the file format in which records are stored rather than focusing their mind on these substituted PDF documents we're never going to move forward please please look you don't need new laws we've got 20 year old laws that nobody's even started to implement so work on the Epoia amendments of 1996 starting with email thank you oh I believe you are muted hi sorry that was me talking to everyone and saying thank you for your comments and that might be a great topic for the technology subcommittee to to take up so I'll add that to your list of things to consider I'm going to turn to Martha Murphy our deputy director from OGIS do we have any questions or comments that came in on the chat during our meeting that you want to tell us about sure first off someone just asked if the public comment section will be transcribed or made part of the record and yes the entire meeting is going to be transcribed and we will be releasing the transcription as soon as possible on OGIS's website regarding Tom's comment does the advisory committee need and I believe this had to do with perhaps not waiting until the end of the advisory committee to put out all of the information that we're gathering does the advisory committee need to make recommendations early this cycle relating to Fermi and the use of technology that was the first question do you want to field that question yeah I mean you know my answer would be we need to do it if we're going to participate in this area we need to be timely and so I'm not sure exactly where things stand with Fermi now but I wouldn't wait until 2022 to respond to on things like that okay thank you the next question was what happens to the records management subcommittee work will their recommendations be split amongst the new subcommittees for follow up as opposed to Patricia's point which was making a little returning members want to comment on that I guess one thing we could do this is Bobby from DHA is that once the committees have done their vision and they considered which of the prior recommendations they would be looking into and you can see if there's any gap James go ahead no I was just thinking so my thought is basically a question of whether we are going to review all prior recommendations by all of the previous committees or whether we're going to be selected I think it might actually be a good idea to be selected and to take on with some of them it's nice that we're finally for the first time going back and looking at prior recommendations but it would be a little bit of a shame if we had a dedicated subcommittee this time and then we didn't do it again for six years I think we would be setting a nice tradition if we could integrate this into the work of the subcommittees and set a precedent for future committees going forward to do more of the same work so that every single time at least some of the previous recommendations could be looked at so any other questions okay yeah one more actually a couple more one is someone wrote Scanners for All Agencies More Attention to Voyage and Transparency Historically Congress has been team-solutioned to recognize the needs of agencies in this respect how can the public help you with that okay, Kel would like to address that I can answer that no I don't work in an agency this is Kelman-Clemahan I have dealt with Congress a lot on this very issue and that's the solution you know if you want Congress to pay attention to FOIA you have to get Congress to pay attention to FOIA and as trite as it sounds you do that the same way you get Congress to pay attention to anything even if it's not writing your congressman you know write a blog post tweet about it do something that will get noticed to it and if you see something if you see something say something if you have a particular story you file a FOIA request this is our response it took forever because you know they were running it on a 1996 scanner or they printed it out on dot matrix paper because they couldn't burn CDs or something like that go talk about it draw attention to it the more attention you draw to it the more people who actually talk to Congress you know whether be in their committee form or like me as an advocate going into Congress we can point to what you did we can point to your stories and say look the people want you to do something about this Cal also since you're volunteered now to be the co-chair of the subcommittee on legislation maybe that's something you can add to your toolbox those things you want to look at okay Martha anything else you said you had one more so some of the folks who are watching this on YouTube wanted to know what phone number to call in and so I just wanted to explain there were two methods to access this presentation one was to register in advance and then you'd have access to the phone to call in on YouTube unfortunately you don't have that opportunity but feel free to type something in the chat we are monitoring the chat you've got a couple minutes otherwise you certainly can get in touch with us after the meeting and we'll be happy to forward the information on to the FOIA advisory committee I will I'll ask Kirsten to please give us the email address for that this is Kirsten the email address is FOIA-advisory-committee at nara.gov and Alina we have one last question that maybe not the last but we have another question that's come up and that is which subcommittee will address requirements and auditing of electronic reading rooms and other public facing tools and before I throw that out there I just want to say that one of the assessments that OGIS is currently working on and we hope to publish in the near future deals with electronic reading rooms and posting documents on those reading rooms so stay tuned to OGIS and then again the question which committees will address requirements and auditing of electronic reading rooms and other public facing tools my two cents process and technology could both be looking at those but just throwing that out we hope to think about okay Martha you're good on any other comments or questions on chat there's one more question I'm not sure which about the EPA on the OGIS release date but I'm sorry I'm not sure the release date on what I think it was the report that I just mentioned on posting documents to reading rooms yeah and we're hoping to post that gosh I would say certainly in the next month or so so stay tuned for that and by the way that is the result of a recommendation from a prior FOIA advisory committee actually the 2016 to 18 term of the committee so maybe only up 29 recommendations left so many of them have already been addressed that's true that's all the comments that I saw okay that was all that I saw Alina thanks Andrea I just want to ask if there's anyone else on the phone line that wants to ask any questions otherwise we'll wrap it up we are not seeing any hands raised at this time just as a final reminder pressing pound two on your telephone keypad will indicate that you have a question pound two going once going twice three times no hands raised okay well I just want to close up I'm trying to very much be respectful of everyone's time to apologize for all the technical difficulties we had today I promise you it normally does not happen so this is definitely an outlier and we probably rushed through a couple of the topics but I feel like we've got a lot of work done today so I hope you're all feeling very good about everything we've done here together today I want to remind the subcommittee co-chairs of your homework assignment and I want to ask all the committee members to volunteer and get the bowl rolling because our next meeting is not until December 10th I believe and I'm fairly confident we're going to be meeting virtually again on December 10th it's a Thursday and the time is going to be 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. and I want to thank all the committee members today anyone have any parting words or last comment that they would like to make this is where we all say goodbye no I'm seeing lots of shaking the heads of hell well thank you again for joining us today I hope everyone and all of your family stay safe healthy and resilient and we will reconvene December 10th so with that we stand adjourned thank you and that concludes our conference thank you for joining and using AT&T event services enhanced you may now disconnect