 Army Mountain Time. Thank you so much, Kelly. Hello again and welcome. My name is Larry Eames. I am the outgoing chair of the HELP. I'm an accidental government documents librarian webinar series. And this series is brought to you by the American Library Association's Government Documents Roundtable. We thank you so much for coming. You will be muted during this webinar, but we encourage you to participate in the chat. If you don't see that chat window, you can click on the chat icon along the bottom of your screen. We also encourage you to add questions via the Q&A function throughout today's session. We'll save time for questions at the end, but we encourage you to submit them as you think of them. If there are any technical issues or technical questions, Kelly Wilson, our Zoom tech, is on hand to help. Feel free to chat with her. And worst case scenario, do remember that this webinar is being recorded. Be sure to stay tuned for our 2023-2024 slate of webinars. If you have ideas or topics that you would like to present, please let us know at the incoming chair's email address, which I am dropping in the chat now. And there will also be a short survey at the end where you can share your thoughts on today's webinar and future ideas for improvement. You can also see all of our webinars on our YouTube channel, where we encourage you to like and subscribe. Today's webinar is on the declassification of federal records and the establishment of the National Declassification Center. The modern classification system for federal records was established in 1951, when President Truman issued executive order 10-290, tripping over numbers a little bit. This order formalized the definition top-secret, secret, confidential, and restricted levels, and set guidelines for how this information was protected. This process has undergone many changes over the history. And despite successes, declassification continues to be a topic of interest with the public and with Congress. So with that, I'm going to turn things over to Andrea to introduce our speaker for today. Thank you so much. My name is Andrea Morrison. I'm at Indiana University in Bloomington. And I am a member of the Government Documents Round Table, Godort's Education Committee. And we are so pleased that David accepted our invitation to present this webinar and that help on an accidental government documents librarian series accepted our proposal. Watch for more declassification webinars in the future. So I'd like to introduce our speaker. David is a graduate of James Madison University. He began his career at NARA in 1991 as an archive technician in the records declassification division. After completing archival training, he worked as an archivist and team lead in the records declassification division. An archivist in the special access and FOIA staff, the mandatory review coordinator in the Office of Presidential Libraries, the super for textual records and tapes review on Nixon presidential material staff, and chief of the special access and FOIA staff. During his career, he supervised review of the Nixon White House tapes, was one of three members of a NARA panel established to determine if current technology could recover the 18 and a half minute gap, participated on a team established to review 9-11 commission records for release in 2009 and worked as a project manager on the interagency team that redesigned declassification processes for the National Declassification Center. In 2022, he was presented with a lifetime achievement award for a lifetime of achievement in furthering the mission of NARA by archivist of the United States, David Ferrero. He is currently deputy director of the National Declassification Center and the National Archives Liaison to the Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel ISCAP. Thank you, David, for being our presenter today. That's my pleasure. So I guess that's over to me then. I'm going to try to share my screen. I've got some slides. Let's see if you guys can see these. Can you see the slides? OK. We can see presenter mode. OK. Let me try it again then. All right. It's being difficult here. All right. I'm not used to Zoom, so maybe Kelly can help me switch over here. Yes. It'd probably best if you stop sharing and then redo the sharing. There it is. That's working there. Thank you. All right. Cool. I figured it out eventually. So as was previously mentioned, I am the deputy director of the National Declassification Center. I have been in this position for a little over 10 years now. I've been with the National Archives for over 30 years and performed a variety of functions with the National Archives during that time. So I'm here today to talk to you about declassification. And federal records. So this is a very brief definition from the executive order of classified information and what we're dealing with. So what we're focused mostly on are the top three categories there in the second bullet. Classified information is created to protect information that may be harmful to our US government system, to the operations of our military, to intelligence, to any variety of categories of information that may be useful to an adversary of the United States. The current executive order recognizes three levels of classification, top secret, secret, and confidential. And the definitions for each are there. Top secret is if it's released, it could cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security. Secret could cause serious damage. Confidential could cause damage. As mentioned in the intro, restricted at one time was a classification level, but that was removed as classification level in 1953. So if you come across documents that are restricted, most likely they are not classified anymore. So why declassify information? The declassification process is expensive. It is time consuming. It requires a great deal of expertise. In today's world, it requires IT systems that are up to date plus the ability to recover information that was created years ago on old and outdated systems. So why do we do it? Well, our Constitution says that we have as the public of the United States of America have the right to know what our government is doing. That right does not prevent the government from classifying to protect it indefinitely from the citizens. So that is the first and primary function of declassification is why we get this information out there. Release of historical records. You don't have a complete picture of what happened within a government during a specific situation, events, battle, any number of historical events. You don't have the complete record of what was going on, what was happening behind the scenes, unless you can get to those records that were, at that time, classified. So to fulfill the letter in the spirit of the executive order, and that is in the current executive order, that was new to this executive order, that no information shall be classified indefinitely. Despite what some agencies think, records, at some point, will be declassified and made available to the public. So to give you a little background on declassification, the National Archives has actually been doing declassification systematically since the early 1970s. Our earliest projects are 1973. So we started declassification back at that time. We were, as the National Archives, receiving classified information from agencies. As today, they don't have the room to store all these classified records. They want to put them in the archives because they are permanent records, so they move them to us as classified. We began a program back in the 70s of actually reviewing these records for release to the public. We were really the only agency that was doing it systematically. At the time, most of the agencies were responding to FOIA requests, Freedom of Information Act requests for access to records. That law still exists today. It was established in the 1960s, and that was the primary way that historians, the public, were getting access to classified information in the 70s and even up through the 80s. In 1996, President Clinton issued his executive order and introduced something called automatic declassification. With this slide, you can see roughly between that time period of 1978 to 1995, we were releasing about 257 million pages of records, previously classified records. And that's over a, what, 17-year period. We released 250 million pages. Once automatic declassification was introduced, and I'll get more into that in a second, over the next 10 years, we released 1.1 billion pages of classified records. So you can see that incentive, and now we're gonna get to find out why that happened. So when President Clinton issued his order, he established this idea of automatic declassification. So records upon reaching a certain age would become automatically declassified. In Clinton's order, it was a specific date. If you have not, as an agency, reviewed your records to determine if they are still classified, by this date, they will be declassified without review. So what we found was agencies were standing up declassification programs very quickly. That was not a priority up until that point. All of a sudden, now you're talking of the Department of the Army, the Department of the Navy, Air Force, OSD, State Department, CIA, DIA, NSA, all those agencies that didn't really care about declassification all of a sudden had to care about it because if they didn't do something, those records would be declassified on a date without their review. So agencies started pulling together declass programs very quickly. They started bringing in people from a variety of different offices without training and saying, sitting them down and saying, look at these records, you need to decide what's still classified. So it created a lot of issues. The other thing this order did is it, prior to this order, the National Archives staff was actually given the authority to perform declassification review. So as an Archives technician, when I first started, we were trained to do agency declassification review. Agencies would give us guidelines to say, if you can release this document as long as it doesn't mention X, Y, Z, and we were the authorities to make that decision. This order took that away and put the burden back on the agencies. And the agencies were now on the hook to do all that review. So it caused a very big shift in the priorities for declassification and how we were doing declassification at the time. But it also led to a lot of problems. So the biggest problem we ran into is we started getting a backlog of pages, declassified or classified pages that were eligible for declassification, but that were caught up in the review process. At the time the President Obama put his order out, the number was estimated at 408 million pages that were sitting waiting for declassification action. The reason that happened, this programs were stood up so quickly. The reviewers, so if I was an Army reviewer, I tend to think of Army because I think of them first alphabetically, I guess. But if I'm an Army reviewer, I was pulled in from a field command. I was told, sit down here, look at these records and make a determination. And here's the guidelines you have to follow to make that decision. I was trained on what Army information was sensitive. I was not necessarily trained on what State Department information was sensitive. So if I'm looking at an Army document, I've got to make that decision on my Army equity. So equity is an agency's interest in that document. But I wasn't necessarily identifying anything from another agency that would be classified. So we ran into an issue with lack of standardized declassification guides where you set up two or three D-class programs and nobody was using the same guides. It was all based on the training they'd received and whatever guidance they were given by the training coordinator. There was no coordination of review across agencies. So my information in somebody else's document wasn't necessarily being identified and protected. There was a lot of ad hoc decision-making. It happened most often in the agencies where they brought retired folks in. For instance, maybe like a State Department would bring a retired Foreign Service Officer in to do review. Well, that Foreign Service Officer knew what was going on at that time and they thought, well, everybody knew that. I'm going to declassify this information and it may not be declassified. So there was a lot of decision-making that was not based on the actual approved classification and declassification guides. And then as this time period ended, we started to see a lack of interest. As my agency started wrapping up the backlog of a review we had to do, all those resources we'd pulled in were starting to be sent back out to where they came from. So there was a decline in interest in the declassification world. So all this led to a lot of issues when we stood up the NDC. Under the 12958 order, which was Clinton's order, we were bringing into the National Archives 15 million pages annually. And that's an average. It was sometimes a few million pages lower. More often a few million, excuse me, a few million pages more. We were processing 10 to 11 million pages a year. So our 408 million page backlog was growing by four million pages a year. And that adds up very quickly. So with the resources we had at that time and the processes we were using, we would never have resolved that backlog. It would have continued to grow. In the red there on that slide, you can see our process at that time was taking seven to 10 years. Seven's pretty optimistic at that point from the time they came into the building. This cycle time started with, okay, we're starting the project, the declassification project. I tend to look at it as, we received these classified records in the building. And that's when my clock starts. So it was actually a lot longer than seven years before we were getting to these records out to the public. So it was a broken system. And so why National Declassification Center? As early as the Moynihan Commission in 97, the government was looking at ways to improve the declassification process. Everybody realized it was broken. Nobody knew how to fix it. And nobody was given the authority to fix it. Everybody was handling their own programs and that was their focus because those are the resources they had and nobody really had the authority to say to the whole government, this is what you need to do. This is how it's got to change. So Senator Moynihan was chair of a commission on the Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy Act, or law. So they recommended a National Declassification Center. That did not get a lot of traction. It was talked about for years, but it wasn't until President Obama ran for office on his openness and transparency platform that he picked up that idea and really pushed it forward. After he took office, he redid the executive order, which doesn't happen with every president, but it does happen quite often. There were orders with Nixon, Reagan, Clinton and Obama. President Bush 43 modified Clinton's order, but he did not completely change it. President Obama issued a brand new executive order. He changed the way we were doing declassification. He ordered the establishment of a National Declassification Center and he put a memo out that said, once this declassification center is established, it must eliminate the backlog at the National Archives within three years. So that really put a lot of pressure on it. By that time, we knew this was coming. There aren't a lot of secrets in the government when it comes to changes to processes and what Congress is going to do. So we knew ahead of time that this was coming. President Obama had indicated in his campaign speeches, we had gotten word from his NSC staff that this was coming. So we started about a year before the order came out, planning for a National Declassification Center. What's it going to look like? We were instructed to take charge of this and that's what we started to do. So under President Obama's order, it codified some things that were and centralized some things that were not necessarily centralized. The idea of referrals. So a referral is, as I mentioned earlier, if I'm a reviewer and I'm looking at a document, there may be information in my document that belongs to another agency. So in practice, what you would end up doing is having to refer that document and that information to that other agency to get their opinion on what it should have, what should happen with it. So you're looking at each agency that has somebody else's equity in their document contacting other agencies and trying to coordinate this. And as you can imagine, that would be chaos. So what he ordered was the National Declassification Center would be in charge of all referrals. So ended all of that, put that centralized in one location. He ordered the National Declassification Center to change its process to meet the requirements of the order and the implementing directive, which ordered that we eliminate the backlogs. We were ordered to develop a new and transparent declassification process to fix the declassification work processes. I like to describe the previous process as a, it's kind of a merry-go-round of referrals. What ended up happening was we had documents at the National Archives that were, let's say, belong to the Army. The Army would review it and say, well, we think it's okay to declassify, but the Navy needs to see it. And the Navy would say, well, we think it's okay to declassify, but we think that the Air Force needs to see it. And they would look at it and say, well, State Department needs to see this. And they would look at it and say, well, you know, NSA needs to look at it. And it would go around and around and around. And nobody would make the final decision because it's an Army document after all. They would send it back to the Army for a final decision. And the Army would say, well, you know, I didn't really get all the referrals here. I didn't get the information I need to make this final decision. So they would delay making that decision. And that's why we were waiting seven years for declassification to happen. So the new process was to eliminate all of that. You know, we can't have this continue. And we need to stop that, that merry-go-round. We were supposed to address electronic and special media and emerging other emerging technologies using data to try to coordinate what was happening between the agencies. And oh, it's not on there training, training was a big one. We were supposed to set up. Oh, it is on this. I'm sorry. I'm the third bullet training. We were supposed to set up training. And all of that, you know, the Army reviewer that wasn't necessarily trained on everybody else's, the NDC was ordered to set up a training program that would apply to all agencies and make that information available. So we would train the Army on what sensitive about Navy records, what sensitive about Air Force records. And we would make sure that all the agency reviewers knew what was going on across the community. So we wouldn't have these referral issues that we had in the past. So in response to the president's memo, we were given until December 31st of 2013 to eliminate the backlog. As I mentioned earlier, we had started looking at this problem beforehand before the NDC even stood up. And by the time the NDC stood up, we were within a week of establishing it. So within a week of that president's order that came out, the archivist United States announced the establishment of the National Declassification Center. And so then we had to figure out how are we going to do this? So the way we decided to do it is we entered into a partnership with other agencies. The person at our agency at the time, a gentleman by the name of Michael Kurtz was very experienced, was very knowledgeable and had a, an excellent political sense. And he knew that the national archives would not be taking seriously if we did not include all the other agencies in this program. So what he did is he pulled the groups together from all the different agencies and said, okay, here's what we want to do. We need your help figuring out the best way to do this. So he immediately got other agency buy-in. DOD had a program where they had Lean Six Sigma experts and black belts they're called. And they offered their services to help us create a new NDC process. Dr. Kurtz jumped on that opportunity. And we set up a process with the goals of improving the declassification, creating a library of guides, and creating this equity training, how we're going to do all of this. So this Lean Six, well, I love this quote. This is one of my favorite quotes of all time, Albert Einstein. Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity. And that's what we were doing. We had been doing declassification the same way for 30 years. We were expecting it to get better and it was not getting better. So we had to change it. And the Lean Six Sigma was the way we went about it. So this interagency group was established. I was the NARA project manager on this. I was assigned a Lean Six black belt who handled the technical Lean Six Sigma processes. And if you're not familiar with Lean Six Sigma, it was developed in Japan as a method of looking at manufacturing and improving the process. So we always think of any process that we're working on as an assembly line. So if you've got an assembly line, something is slowing down your production. So you need to identify what that area is and fix it. And once you fix that, then you step back and you look at it again and say, okay, did that fix the whole thing or did it fix one problem? And then you have to look at the process and say, oh, well, it created this problem. So now we're happy to go back and fix that. So it's a constant reevaluation and a really focused logical look at your process to figure out what's wrong and how to fix it. So it starts with data. Everything starts with data with Lean Six Sigma. So we spent months going to all the different agencies, learning their declassification processes, creating a process map not only for how agencies did declassification, but for how the National Archives did it. The process map we created for the National Archives was five pages long on legal size paper. It was massive. We had timelines in there. This process takes 10 minutes. This process takes two years. It was just this huge detailed process map that we created. And we actually traced the time it took for one box to go through the process and discovered it was about seven and a half years, assuming everything went well. And that was just undoable. So then we started looking at the process and how are we going to fix this? And the first thing we looked at was that cycle of re-review, that merry-go-round of re-review. And we realized that the records we're getting in at the National Archives have already been reviewed by the primary agency. And we're looking at every single document that's coming in again. And do we need to do that? And the decision was made, and it was jointly by all the agencies involved in this project management team, that we didn't. We didn't need to look at everything. That each agency believed, well, my review is perfect. We're doing a great job. So we don't need that. You guys don't need to look at our stuff. So what we decided to do was create a sampling process, a quality control process. So now the National Declassification Center doesn't actually do declassification of review, but we determined that the quality of the review was good. So if the Army sends us records, we say, okay, we'll see how you did. So we pull an interagency team together and we pop up with the boxes and it's this group can sit down. They look at it. They determine, one, did they do the review correctly? Two, did they identify all the agencies? And three, does it need any additional review? So we set it up and said, okay, you've got a five member team, six member team. It's open to any agency that wants to come do the review. You look at it. If anyone member of that team says the quality of the review is not good, that's review stops and it goes on to a more detailed review. So the idea was we really look at the quality of the review at the outset and determine what needs to be, what's done. What was done correctly the first time? So now we've got all these records that are done correctly. We thought, you know, maybe if we're lucky 50%, we'll start bypassing further review. And then anything that doesn't pass that first initial review gets a more detailed review. So what we found is by setting up this process and the idea was, okay, well, the Army made a mistake. They didn't do a good review. We're going to let them know. We're going to let them know that they're going to work on. And here's some training that you can take. And this agency is willing to brief you on their guide. So here's, you can learn. So the next time it's going to be good. So what we found was the agency reviews for, for a period of time when they first stood up were, were problems and we did have to send a lot of stuff back. But what we were finding is we were pushing 60, 60,000 people to do a follow up investigation review. So that's more than half of that backlog that we were working on. That is now done. And we don't have to mess with anymore. So we started tracing and analyzing and finding out what the problems were. And we started finding over the years, you know, over the last 10 years, we found that with the training we've provided. With the corrections we've made. And we've also found that with the continued interagency cooperation that we've built. That that number of records that's bypassing the review process. Is pushing up to 80%, 85%. So we're finding that all the work that we've done initially and getting all this together has really benefited all the agencies. They now have strong D class programs. They're bringing the records in the quality of the review is good. You know, occasionally we have some hiccups, but in the last part everything is going well. And the process is really working smoothly. So much so that, you know, this is, this is not common knowledge yet, but we had, due to COVID, our offices were shut down. So for, for about three years. We weren't able to do a lot of D class work. Prior to that we had set it up so that as soon as we eliminated the backlog, we had determined that any records that we received in one year. We were going to complete D classification QA on in the following year. So any records we see, we received in 2015. All the QA was done on those records by the end of 2016. So now a process that was taking 10 years is down to more like a year. Well, it's probably more like five years in a year. There was still the release piece of this, but we'll get into that in a second. So over the course of COVID, we ended up with a backlog this year. And we've been working that backlog off. Well, there's a new directive that came out by OMB this past year. It's called M1921. And it requires agencies to transfer electronic records to the National Archives electronically starting. It was supposed to be in 2023, but because of COVID it was delayed until June of next year. So instead of doing all the digitization, of course, the records, the agency started sending us all the records. So we had 20 million pages records we received last year, plus our backlog. We are very close at this point to completing that entire 20 million pages in just the first six months of this year. That's how smoothly our process is working out. So we've made significant improvements in the process. So the initial process improvement goals we all met. We increased the speed of the process. We made it more efficient. We did not affect the quality. We're able to improve the time. We're, you know, we're continuing to look at our process through those Lean Six Sigma eyes and trying to identify where the next roadblocks in our process are. So we've made all these process improvements. We've streamlined D class. We've facilitated quality assurance. We've implemented standard training. We have a standard training program that happens every two years. We've got supplementary training that we provide to agencies as needed. We're creating a library of declassification training videos that we can make available for newer viewers. If they come on between the two year period. We eliminated our backlog. So we've done a huge amount in the last 10 years and we've had a lot of success in the declassification world. So remember that five page map. This, this is a one page overview of what the national declassification center does. Can you see my cursor here? I don't know if you can see it or not starting at the top. Yes. Okay. Starting at the top left, the green. That's when the records are accession to the national archives. So now instead of sitting for years before we get to them, we start working on them right away. We determine if they're subject to review under the current order. We determine the level of review that's required. They go through the evaluation process, which is our sampling process. If that fails, it goes through a more detailed, which is our cat process. I'll describe those a little bit more detail soon. And then there's a requirement for DOE to do a review. And then it moves on to the index and the draw piece. So early in the process, our delay was in this left-hand, these four boxes on the left-hand side of this chart. That was our delay. It was taking years to get through this part of the process. And then it was taking additional years to get through this part of the process. This part of the process was working real smooth. We were indexing indexing withdrawal is the process where we take the classified records out of the boxes and put a placeholder back in and move those records to the open shell. So this part, this middle part of the process here was moving very smoothly until we fixed this part of the process. Now all of a sudden we're pushing hundreds of millions of pages into this indexing and withdrawal piece. So that became our new backlog. At one point, somebody estimated it would take us 100 people, 60 years to get through the indexing and withdrawal piece. And the problem we run into is it's a manual process. It's not something we can automate. So you actually have people sitting down there physically pulling documents out of boxes, capturing metadata, putting a placeholder back in the box. It takes a long time. So this part became the next target. And we came up with a unique process. And it had to do with our new push toward openness. We have a blog now. We didn't really talk about our process before. Now we have a blog. We answer questions. We encourage contact with researchers. And what we decided is, well, we can't get through everything. What is the top priorities? So we opened it up to the public and we said, okay, we're going to put a once everything completes the review part of this process. So after that first year, we're going to put a list out. And we do it now quarterly. We put a release list out quarterly. And those are documents by series that are eligible for public access. So if you can't get something by coming to the National Archives and they tell you it's still classified, you go to our release list and you send us an email and say, you know what? I'm really interested in these 10 boxes. We have what's called indexing on demand. So if you call to call us or send us an email and say, I really want access to these boxes. We say, okay, that's our next priority. And we can get through that usually in a few weeks, no more than, no more than a month. And usually if it's more than a month, it's less than two to three months. So now that process that was taking over 10 years for a researcher to get a record that came into the National Archives, you can get in 12 to 18 months now. So it's been a huge, huge improvement. We still continue to index the stuff that people don't ask for. But this is our top priority. And that was our fix to that roadblock. So then once it reaches here, it's separated out. Records go to the open shelf. If they're declassified, they go to the referral center. So if you remember back when the order was created, President Clinton ordered that referrals, all referrals be handled through the National Archives. That's where we do it. We have agencies that sit there on a daily basis, go through records and adjudicate their referrals. So the bottom part of this chart is all our FOIA and MDR. These are our special access requests provisions, which I'll get to in a few minutes. So declassification now is instead of doing a lot of review, we have a team that does quality assurance, which is the evaluation. A lot of evaluation teams. We have our FOIA mandatory review team that respond to specific requests for documents from researchers. And we have a division that does special media. So we're working constantly on audio recordings, video, motion picture, whatever we have, we're pushing through it. So this is a little bit more detail. As I mentioned earlier, our evaluation team is a sampling process. It's an interagency team. It usually includes a member of the intelligence community and sometimes DOE and any other agency that wants to participate. So when we're ready to do evaluation on records, we send an email out to the entire community and we say, okay, we're doing these records next Tuesday at nine o'clock. Show up if you want to. And whoever shows up does the review. Right now we're pushing about 90% or more. I think that's probably more, it's probably closer to 92, 94% that we're pushing through the evaluation process now. They're coming in. All that work that we were dealing with early on is gone. So there's a law called the Kyle Lott amendment of the Defense Authorization Act of 1999. And it was Congress's way to protect nuclear information. And it's a law that requires the department of energy to perform audits of all records, all previously classified records that were declassified and ready for public access. So it's their way of going through and double checking to make sure no nuclear secrets are getting out. So that is, it requires a page by page review. If it's not certified, it's highly unlikely, but then it also requires a review by the DOE. But the records that come in that have quality issues and now instead of sending them back to the agencies, we put them through this Kyle evaluation team process, which is a page by page review. Again, it's an interagency process. Agencies sit around the table and we found this is the best way because me as the army, I'm looking at a document that may have State Department equity and I can call over to the state guy and say, hey, you know, hey, Bill, is this still classified for you guys? And he goes, no, no, we don't care about that, you know, and we can move stuff through a lot faster. That is our more detailed page by page review. And this team also does special projects, which I'll talk about a little bit more in the future. Our processing release division is the indexing staff. They're the ones that take the results of all this declass review and put it, make it available to the public. As I said before, they take the classified out, leave the declassified in the box. So when you're coming to the National Archives for research and you look at a box that was formerly classified, you will get the actual box of records may not be the box we received because we do a lot of preservation work, re-boxing, re-foldering, that type of thing. But it will be the records as they were created in the order they were created. They will be brought to your desk in the research room. You can pull out one folder at a time and look through those documents. You can find anything that's still classified. There'll be a withdrawal sheet as we call it that tells you exactly what was taken out. Not a lot of detail, but it'll tell you what's been taken out. And you can then request that specific document under a FOIA mandatory review process. They also run the Interagency Referral Center and they do a QC process. So one of the concerns that the agencies had when we did the original project management team, Lean Six Sigma was, who's going to check the records at the end of the process? You know, once we've taken all the classified out, who's going to do a final check to make sure those records are still good? And that's where all the control team comes in. And then they do the release and the indexing on demand piece as well. Our FOIA MDR division does FOIAs and mandatorys if you're not familiar with them. FOIA is a law that was passed by Congress, but not all records are subject to the FOIA. So the executive order also has a provision in it for other classified records. So if records are not subject to FOIA, you can submit a mandatory review request for those records. And generally what happens is a FOIA is useful if you need to search. So if you've got 10 boxes that are not accessible to you and you want a document that you think is in those 10 boxes, you can submit a FOIA request. And the agency will perform a search for those records as well as the declassification. Mandatory review is a little faster. FOIA, what ends up happening for us, we don't have the authority to do the review on site. So if it's a classified document that let's say has a State Department equity in it, we actually have to send a copy of that document to the State Department. They make a decision and send it back to us. So it takes time. If there's equities from multiple agencies in a document, let's say it's an NSC document and they collected information on a battle strategy. So maybe they have Army, Navy, Air Force, some intelligence in there from DIA, maybe some State Department, it's got to go to all of those agencies for review. So it does take some time to get through that process. But once you get that FOIA request back, you can file an appeal with an agency. And if the agency continues to deny the information, your only recourse then is to sue the federal government and sue that agency in particular for release of that information. In this case it comes through us, so they sue the National Archives. That is your final resolution. Whatever the court decides, that will be your final resolution. And I will tell you that government lawyers are very good at making decisions or making arguments to the court that the world is going to end if this information gets released to the public. I don't necessarily agree with those government lawyers all the time, but that is their job and that is what they do. Mandatory review is a little bit different. It's for specific documents. So if you're looking at that box in our research room and you find a document that's been withdrawn, you can contact us. We will submit that mandatory review request. We'll get it out as quickly as we can. The agency that has one year to respond, if you do not get a response from us in one year, you can immediately file an appeal with the Interagency Security Classification Appeals panel. And that is an interagency panel that adjudicates that they're the final authority for appeals on documents requested under the mandatory review process. Prior to that panel, there was no authority. This is something else that Clinton's order established. So even if you do not appeal in that one year, no response, you can still appeal the final agency decision to the agency. They could still deny it. And then you're going to feel appeal to the ice cap again. So you always have an appeal right for, for whatever access request. They coordinate review and make the classified copies available to available to the researcher. They're the coordinators for indexing on demand. One of the new changes we made under the NDC is we actually put one of their people in the research room. So if you're in the research room and you've got any questions about classification, declassification, withdrawal sheets, whatever it is, we've got somebody that has research room hours and they will sit down there and talk to you. If we don't have somebody in there, we have an email box you can call. We have a phone number you can call. You can call us and try to figure it out. That's part of our openness thing. And we found that to be very successful. Probably our biggest issue these days is special media. One of the big problems is the formats. We have so many different formats. We've had, we have records going back in the classified world. Back to the, there's some in the 40s, but very few. A lot of them 50s, probably 60s and 70s on current. So that 50s, 60 year timeframe. So you're looking at 50, 60 years worth of technology that's, that's changed. We still have beta tapes. We still have open rail recordings. We have micro video, we have micro cassettes. I mean, we've got just about any format you can think of. We have found punch cards in our files. We have found a punch tape in our files. Just about any format you can think of, we have found it at some point. And that, that tends to be our biggest problem is how do we get this into a format we can use today? How do we make these large oversized maps available to the reviewers to make them available for the public? And that's, that's really the, the key to our declassification challenges. Because as I mentioned a little bit ago, we have the M1921. That's requiring agencies to send stuff to us electronically. So now we're getting electronic records. We need to figure out a way to do that. We've heard that some agencies are creating a petabyte of classified information per year. And how do you review a petabyte of information in, in a short period of time? So we're looking at different ways of doing that. AI is the new big thing that agencies are jumping on. They're trying to build AI systems that, you know, you can put all your electronic records through this AI program. And it'll say these records are classified. These records are not classified. These records, you know, we need somebody to take a look at and really explore what they, what they are and then help improve the AI process. We're still doing a lot of digitization, trying to figure out how to digitize on a large scale, microfilm, classified microfilm, you know, you can't take it down to the local reproduction group and have them do it because they don't have clearances. It's a challenge. So special media is our big declassification electronic records more specifically. We still have backlogs of FOIA and MDR requests. We're getting, not only do we have federal records, but we're getting all the classified presidential records in our, in our building as well. So we're taking on all of their backlog. So we've been making significant prox, progress against our backlog. Now we're getting a whole new backlog that we're going to have to address. So that's, that's been a challenge. As I mentioned, our training, if you want, I'll provide these, these slides if anybody wants them. But this just gets into our training. You know, we're trying to build a certification program for reviewers to say, okay, you've been through all the training. You're qualified to do, to different types of review. We're, we're trying to keep this training current and up to date. Declass guides are updated every five years by the agency. So we have to do something every couple of years just to make sure the agencies understand the equities that the other agencies have and understand even their own equities. I mentioned earlier, we've done some special reviews. We haven't done too much of that lately. We've been tied up with COVID and presidential records. But we've had some really successful projects, the Pentagon Papers. We did the first full authorized release of the Pentagon Papers in 2011. We did some work with the CIA on some of the oldest classified documents we had at the time they were from like 1917, I think, and it had to do with secret writing. So we, we, the CIA agreed to release a lot of that. We worked with them. We partnered with them on some, some really good programs on the Berlin Wall, which culminated in a public forum with briefings by a bunch of different agency representatives and discussions of Berlin, the wall, the creation of the wall, the years the wall was up. Those are available on our YouTube channel if you're interested in looking at them. We had a special request on the Katian Forest Massacre that came through Congress. It was a big push. It was a very successful project that we did. We did, we got a special request on human rights abuses in Brazil for a 20-year period from the 64 to 85 that the documents all ended up going down to Brazil to be used in trials of people that had committed human rights abuses. We found, you know, as our reviewers and our staff are going through the boxes, we find different series of collections. We found this, a visa, it was really interesting file. It was a file of visas from Shanghai. And what it turned out, it was Jewish refugees from Germany that had escaped Germany during World War II. And they made their way to Shanghai. And they applied for visas in Shanghai. And it was just a very odd thing to find, but that was a very interesting collection. We found treasures from World War II. It was a U.S. Navy command file that had all kinds of firsthand experiences of battles during World War II, which was really interesting. We did a big release on the Iran Contra... Iran hostage crisis. And then the Panama Canal. So we're always looking for other ideas. People have got ideas that we can work in. That would be great. And I know I've been rambling, but I'm trying to keep this so you guys have plenty of time for questions and I can stay on as long as you have questions. So if you don't have any questions now and you come up with some, my contact information is there. Our website is there. Our blog is there. Our email address. So hopefully you can reach us if you need to. And with that, I will turn it over to you guys for questions. And I just want to say thank you so much for that comprehensive overview of declassification and of these processes. I know I learned a lot, including some formats that I didn't know existed. That's not the most unusual. The most unusual format we ever found was, and I've never heard anybody that ever even heard of this before. We think it was a proprietary format that one of the military offices was playing around with. It was motion picture film. So we found this reel of motion picture film and we took it to our motion pictures branch and said, what do we do with this? And they looked at it and said, that's not motion picture. And we said, well, what is it? And they said, we have no idea. So we, we talked to a few people around and we finally got an answer from our electronic records division. Somebody at some point had used motion picture film to record electronic records. Huh. And we think it was a proprietary format that somebody was playing around with that never caught on. And they just threw this sample in the, in a box. And that was it. Wild. I love that. That's so cool. And we do have one question in the chat and it's, will these slides be sent out? It sounds like you would be willing to make. Of course. Wonderful. So we will make sure that those go out. I will send them to you. Maybe tomorrow. Perfect. That's perfect. Thank you. You're welcome. And we're starting to get some stuff in the Q and a. So one from Cass. I'm interested in the project MG. MGT chart. Did she hear you correctly on that? The, which project chart. Oh, a majority of materials are not indexed is the kind of clarifying. Question there. Yes. In, in, in a paper world. Yes. We do not index the stuff that we declassify. Anything that's classified, we do index and we have. At least the ability to search some. But the records that we put out in paper are not indexed at all. Most of the paper that we put out in the national archives is not digitized and is not easily searchable electronically. It's just a product of the volume that we get. We just do not have the resources to digitize everything. Now I will say that. We've been doing this for over the last, probably 10 years, the archives has been pushing to do more digitization. We're doing more online description that makes it easier for people remotely to, to do at least some research. In some series, but the records in the D class world, we only capture the metadata on those documents that we're keeping as classified so that we can go back and track them and keep intellectual control of them. Because we physically removing the box, we have to have intellectual control of those records. We have to have intellectual control of those records. We have to have intellectual control of those records. Okay, gotcha. And we have another question from the Q&A. Are these declassified documents discoverable via NARA's catalog? That is a good question. A lot of it depends on where they are in the description process. We don't do the description. That's a different unit within the archives. So probably not right away would be my answer that it will be in the description process, and they will eventually be in the catalog, but not immediately. Probably your best bet is to look at our release list and see what's being released. And if it's something you're interested in, reach out to us and we can figure out if there's a way to get that index and available to you. Other than that, you would probably reach out to a reference archivist and see what they can help you with. They would be better able to do some research for you. That's a good question. I'm going to start right on. And probably looking at the time, our last question. It sounds like presidential records are reviewed and declassified by a different entity normally. Is that right? And if so, which entity? So presidential records. Will be reviewed and declassified by us. Coming soon. We have some already, but we're in the process of consolidating. Prior to that, the each library had their own team. They would invite agencies to come out and do some review. There was a, a program for a little while called the remote archives capture program where we sent a scanning team out to archives or to the presidential libraries to scan the records. And they were put into a review database that, that was being processed. So it depends on the library. The older libraries are mostly doing things through the FOIA MDR process. The newer libraries were trying to get more of the, the scanning program doesn't exist anymore. They're sending all the records to us. So we're, we're trying to do more of the, the traditional federal records review process where we put them through a review and the quality control and see what we can push out. And then what we do is we turn those declassified documents back to the, the library. So. Right on. David, are you able to stay on for just a couple of minutes after wonderful. Just as we're starting to see people leave, I do want to let everyone know that there is going to be another webinar in this series that the education committee is holding on. You can hear from John Powers at 10 a.m. Eastern or 7 a.m. Brighton early Pacific on June 15th. So we encourage you to join the education for the committee for that webinar as well. And I'm also going to drop a link to a survey. In the chat. If you have ideas, if you would like to give us some feedback on this webinar, we would really appreciate that. So that link is available to you. So please, please give us that feedback. We really appreciate it. And then returning to some of the questions that we still have going on. Also from Cass heart and it just a comment. This creates the marketplace for databases. We libraries buy from vendors. Digital National Security Archive us declassified documents online. Does narrow ever use these tools. Occasionally. Not on a large scale. Not on the D-class side anyway. So what we'll do is specifically for. What we're in a, we're in a unique position at the National Archives, because we don't have any, we don't have equity in a document. So if an agency tells us something is still classified and we don't think it is. A lot of times we'll do research. One of my roles is on the interagency security classification peels family ice cap. And that is my role in that panel. I love that job. It is my favorite part of what I do. Because I sit on that panel and documents come to us. And we do a document by document review. Agencies on the panel will say, this is classified. And I'll say, why is it classified? They say, well, because it's classified. And I said, no, no, no, no. You guys released this in this format. So that, those forms, those really previous releases that we've count. We find National Security Archives is a big one. Because they do a lot of FOIA and MDR requests. We don't always see what they've got. So we can do searches and. Look at the previous releases. And we will go back and look at those and say, well, wait a minute here and you said this is classified, but why did you release this and this and this? So like I said, that's that is my favorite part of my job right now is doing all that work. Absolutely. We have another question. Can you tell us about receiving and reviewing phone records? So we don't get a lot of phone records. We only get permanent records of the government. So if it's determined to be permanent, then we will, we will get it. If it is temporary, there's actually no requirement in the current order to declassify temporary records. If you file a FOIA for it, they have to do it. But that makes it a legal action at that point. So they have to do it. But if it is determined by our records management folks that these that the phone records are not classified, then we do not get them. And it depends on the agency. Each agency has its own schedule that determines what is saved and what is permanent. So, you know, we work with the agencies to create those schedules. If the records come to us, then we do it. But if we don't get them, we don't have a process for it. Gotcha. Right on that said, the Nixon tapes, there's a lot of phone conversations in the Nixon tapes. So I do know that for a fact. He did record a lot of his phone conversations. So, and we handle those as audio recordings. Gotcha. I believe that's going to take us to the end of our questions. And thank you, Key, and for that correction in chat. I misspoke. It is 10 a.m. central. So even a slightly less bright and early Pacific time. And then you are getting a lot of love in the chat, David. Thank you so much for, for giving this presentation today. We really appreciate you joining us. My pleasure. And huge shout out to the education committee for proposing this and making this happen. We really were excited to put this on and we really appreciate you coming and speak with us today. Thank you. That was my pleasure. If anybody has any questions, feel free to reach out. Yeah, absolutely. And I'm just going to drop that link. To the survey again. And again, we really appreciate y'all's feedback. As we go. So thank you so much everyone for joining us and thank you again, David. My pleasure. Thank you, David. You're welcome.