 Welcome. My name is Andrea Matney, coordinator of the Know Your Records program. Know Your Records provides information on how to access federal records at the U.S. National Archives. Today's presentation is a forum for the Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel, also known as ISCAP, and it's to update the requester community and the U.S. government declassification professionals on ISCAP's work over the past year and the outlook for the coming year. Before we begin our presentation, I have several tips for you. For those of you who have joined us here in the audience, in the theater, please hold your questions until the end, and we ask that you please use these microphones that are in the aisles. For those of you who are joining us online, welcome. If you want to participate, you can also ask questions by logging in to the YouTube chat, type your questions in, and we will ask those questions for you on the microphone at the end of the presentation. Also on this YouTube page, you will find the presentation slides. You can download those as a link from a link. There's live captioning, and there's also an event evaluation. I'm hoping you'll complete that at the end. I also would like to bring your attention to the posting policy for the National Archives. Go ahead and please log into our chat to ask questions. I am now turning the program over to the Information Security Oversight Office Associate Director, John Powers. This is going to be tough for me because usually I like to run around and talk all over the place, but here I will stay put today. It's my job to welcome all of you here in person as well as on YouTube. Thank you for joining us. I think we'd like to say that we have learned from last year where we ran out of dial-in space in capacity to now allow for everybody to participate, either virtually or here in the McGowan Theater. This is our third forum. Thank you all for joining us. We partnered with the Know Your Records program, so I'd like to quickly thank Andrea Matney, who runs this program, and Linda Frost, who is doing the closed captioning and transcribing this program for us, as well as the very, very competent AV staff who always comes to our aid at ISOO, Jamie Atkinson, Julie Reed, Jason Winston, Alexis Van Dyke, and Brian Ciprile. So thank you guys for your work. So it's my job to kind of serve as your emcee to start. I'm going to welcome you first, and then Mark Bradley will come up and say a few words. He serves, of course, as our ISOO director and as the executive secretary of the ICAP, and after that we will have the ICAP staff will get up and give a few presentations, which will take up about 40, 45 minutes or so, and after that we hope to have a very good, robust, moderated discussion. I look forward to your questions, as does the staff. We look forward to comments that you have too that could make this program better for next year, so please do use the Survey Monkey tool that Andrea talked about at the beginning. We do ask that if you do have questions, you must sign in to YouTube and log in and ask your questions via the chat. So please do log in. Please also be mindful of NARA's posting policy, which you'll see when you log in. And we'll go from there. So what I'd like to do is introduce Mark Bradley, our ICOO director. He has served in this role since 26 January 2016. Before that, he actually served as the ICAP member for the Department of Justice in the National Security Division. He has a long career of thinking about transparency and truly protecting our nation's security. He served on Senator Moynihan's staff as he thought about the commission for reducing and protecting security secrecy. And he's about to publish his second book using declassified records. So he is also a practitioner and user of the declassification system. So with that, let me turn it over to Mark for a few words. Good afternoon, everybody. This is John Sitts. This is our third ICAP forum. When I became director, I thought it was important to be as transparent as possible. And that's what this forum here is aimed at doing. We will show you everything we can about the inner workings of the ICAP, about the number of cases we've got, the amount of resources we've devoted to them, and also some proposed reforms or things to think about as we move forward. In a nutshell, the situation is as follows. The work is going up, the resources are going down. We need to figure out a way to be more agile, more nimble, quicker at doing the appeals, but also probably to a little more ruthless in the appeals we select to hear. I think the mathematics of running in that direction. Anyway, before we get into that, let me speak about three people here. First of all, John Fitzpatrick, who was my predecessor at ISU and also on the ICAP, has retired from federal service. John's last billet, as you can see, was at the NSC, actually he's not there, but he was at the NSC as one of the senior directors of records access and management. He was a tireless advocate, I think, for getting as much information out to the public as it could possibly be gotten. I mean, John was a true public servant and a true ally of this office and a true ally of the ICAP. And again, we'll sort of miss him. He's succeeded right now by Ellen Knight of my staff. She's the acting director and we know we shall see. We've obviously, she's in a very demanding position at a very demanding time. So we will keep you posted on John's successor. Bill Carpenter, who sits there, is on detail now to the NSC. Bill was a mainstay of the ICAP for years. You can see the dates here, especially as a team lead for almost nine. Any of you who've had the pleasure to work with Bill knew he was a scholar and a gentleman, a really tireless worker and again, a real true believer, I think, in the ICAP's mission. And although he's on detail, we still think of him as one of ours. And we still have a very close partnership with Bill. We rely on his judgment and his advice. So anyway, thank you, Bill, for your work for us. AJ Lutz, another one. AJ, I like to think of as kind of the lynchpin of the ICAP. He was the one who prepared all those, not Hemingway, more tostoy and briefing books that we provided every meeting. Hundreds of pages of documents done by hand, which again kind of underscores technology or lack thereof with the ICAP. But anyway, he was another scholar, gentleman, and just again, a true public servant in the best sense of the word. Just a tireless, tireless worker. And one who never lost his enthusiasm for the work or the importance of it. So again, as you can see, I mean, we're down two members of our staff now or no longer dedicated soldiers working on the ICAP matters. So anyway, as we go through the afternoon here, John said about 45 minutes presentations of slides will show you exactly where the numbers are. And then I hope for a very robust discussion and questions. Not only from the public, but also from our government allies here. I see several of you here, staff members of the, or the liaisons of your agencies to the ICAPs. You too know some of the challenges that we face. And I'd be curious to hear your suggestions on how we can improve the ICAPs work, because in my view, it's actually a body that works. And it actually produces something and it produces at a pretty high rate of release. And you have a much better chance with the MDR getting things released and you do a four year request. The key point though is how to preserve it without killing it. I mean without overwhelming it. And that's basically what's happening to it now. It's the water is over the dam. So how do we get that water back in, get it off the walls and get it so we can manage it? So that's, again, that's what the point of this forum is, is to be frank, to be candid, but also to seek ideas and solutions to what we're facing. So anyway, without further ado, John. Okay, so before we get to the main show, I wanted to quickly give for folks, there are a few folks here that don't know exactly what is the ICAP and what does it do? And I thought it would take very quick just a few seconds to say that this is a interagency panel that does not represent their agencies but represents the president in his constitution and statutory duties to protect our nation's security. The first came about in 1995 through President Clinton and both President Bush and President Obama continued the activities of the ICAP. And President Obama expanded its mission to include that fourth function. I'm not going to reread the functions that are here, but President Obama did add a fourth function. And the reason he did that is because he wants to make sure that, well, to be of true value, he wants the ICAP to help inform agency declassifiers so that they don't continue classifying the same information after the ICAP has made a decision. It's meant to inform folks. I also put up a slide here and published here the ICAP bylaws. So for those of you that want to know how the ICAP actually operates, how it works, this is the implementing directive about how the ICAP actually works. You can find it on the ICAP website and it goes into all of the details about how we do our work. And then lastly, I think I talked a little bit about Mark early. He's kind of dual-hatted, both as the ICU director and as our executive secretary. That said, he has no vote. His main role is to ensure that the meetings operate continually, functionally, that they progress. He works closely with the chair of the ICAP to determine the agendas of the meetings. And then put the staff to make sure that the meetings, we are ready for them and that we have worked to perform so that the ICAP can come to informed decisions. He's also, of course, responsible for maintaining the ICAP website, too. So who are these people that are actually members of the ICAP that represent the president? Well, there are Ellen Knight at the moment from the National Security Council. Gary Reid from the Department of Defense. Lionel Kennedy, who took over for Mark Bradley as the member for the Department of Justice, and I'd also like to quickly note that he is also the serving as the vice chairman. And since the chair, John Fitzpatrick, retired, he is serving as the acting chair as well. Eric Stein represents the Department of State. Bill Fisher, who's the director of the National Declassification Center, represents the National Archives. The Office of the National Director, Patricia Gaviria, serves as their member. And the CIA only has a voting member in matters related to the CIA. And that is Brian O'Neill. Now the tough part comes, where I want to talk a few minutes about both some of the challenges that we're facing as well as some of the opportunities that we are seeking to find. So first of all, we had two lengthy shutdowns that total about seven weeks this year that affected our ability to work. The second thing, of course, like all government agencies, we do have some staff constraints and budget constraints. We have a very small but very dedicated professional staff who work and perform multiple tasks, although they do focus on the ice cap. They do perform other essential work for the Information Security Oversight Office too. And I also wanted to note that obviously if you have looked at the appeals log for the requesters and also for some of the government classifiers, you'll notice that the appeals log continues to gain volume. And that is that the number of ice cap appeals continues to grow. Its growth has become significant over the past several years. And I also want to emphasize that just as the National Archives, the Information Security Oversight in the ice cap are experiencing resource constraints, so too are all of the agencies that we work with who often have multiple assignments are pulled away to do a rapid request for Congress or other assignments. They too also have significant resource challenges that affect their ability to process information. What does this mean? This means that we're having fewer meetings than we did. And we've gone back to the 2012 model and we're having one meeting a month. It's a very productive meeting, but it is one meeting a month. But we also do have a few opportunities and I think the staff in this room is one of the big reasons. And that's not just my own staff, the ice cap staff who are very experienced. They're very dedicated. But so too are all of the agency liaisons that participate in this meeting. They come prepared, they work hard, they work tirelessly. They're experts in what they do. They have years of experience, just as our staff does. And they're able to do multiple things all at once. The second thing is that we have started to adopt technology. We have a long way to go, but we are now able to communicate with all of the agencies between meetings securely, electronically, which is a small step forward for man and the ice cap. But it is a step. The third thing I put on here too has to do with oversight. And Evan will talk about this a little bit more in his presentation. And that is that our office ISU is taking additional steps to try to do more oversight to ensure the quality of training that agencies have about their declassification rules, processes, procedures. And certainly, they are conducting training in a very detailed way on their new declassification guides, which are significantly better than they were five years ago. And this is something that Evan will get into. And the last thing I want to say about an opportunity is that all of us, whether we are agency declassifiers, whether we are ice cap liaisons, whether we are ice cap members, or whether we own this staff, we all do believe in the importance of government transparency and our democracy and our democratic tradition. But we also believe in the importance of protecting what truly needs to be protected to ensure our safety. So with that, let me turn it over to Evan Coran. Evan is serving as our team leader and is really managing the ice cap along with Meredith Wagner and Eugene Kim, who are really the force behind the work that happens day to day. So Evan. Thanks, John. As John mentioned, my name is Evan Coran. I'm on ice cap staff. This past year, as has been our historic norm, the majority of ice caps work has been on mandatory declassification of review appeals, which we refer to as MDRs. The ice cap posts the results of these decisions online. I'll talk about that in a bit. In addition, the ice cap this past year spent quite a bit of time working on declassification guides and in responding to a request from the National Security Advisor to assist the State Department in getting final declassification decisions on a set of documents in need to fulfill its legislative mandate to publish the formal relations of the United States or Fruse series. As many of you are aware, the Fruse is one of the most definitive compilations of declassified documents that the United States releases. Their publication has a wide impact on the research community. I'll talk about each of those items in a few minutes. First, I want to draw your attention to the fact that there are no classification, there we go. There are no classification challenges listed on our list of activities this year. We did not receive any valid classification challenges this past fiscal year. Let's take a look at MDRs first. There are three ways MDRs come before the ice cap. An agency makes a decision at its internal appeals level and the requester appeals that decision to the ice cap. Or two, the requester doesn't get a response from an agency after one year of initial, from their initial request. Or three, the requester doesn't get a response from an agency after 180 days on the appeal of the agency's initial response. Please note that per ISO notice, 2013.03 agencies must continue to process MDRs that have been appealed to the ice cap. Let's take a look at the MDR data for this past fiscal year. First, the good news. Ice cap received 60 new MDR appeals from the public this past fiscal year. This is 46 fewer appeals than ice cap received in the previous fiscal year. We believe this reflects the requester community having a better understanding of the backlog and being more selective in what they appeal. Now for the bad news. The ice cap decided only 24 MDR appeals in the past fiscal year. This is down from 37 the year before. These appeals consisted of 88 records totaling 465 pages. Based on the challenges John discussed earlier, we expect to review fewer appeals this fiscal year than we did last fiscal year. That said, the ice cap staff members and liaisons remain deeply committed to doing the best we can under the circumstances and processing as many ice cap appeals as possible while retaining the same quality review as we have in the past. We wanted to give you a bit of historic comparison with past years. And arbitrarily picked FY 2010 because it was last year ending at a zero. As you may see, the ice cap numbers are way down and the backlog is way up. As we've done in past years, we'd like to also give you data on the results of ice caps decisions. This is the FY 2018 data. I'll show you on the next slide the FY 2019 data. In 2018, the number of firms is slightly lower than the historic norm of 25. As you can see, this fiscal year, the number of firms is significantly higher than the historic norm. The ice cap remains committed to the same high quality reviews and gives every document strenuous consideration. I dug into the data as I suspected there might be a lot of questions on this particular piece of data. And most of the firms from the past fiscal year were among the oldest ice cap appeals in the backlog. 31 of the 41 were documents appealed by William Burr in 2011 or 2012. The other 10 appeal firms were spread between four other appellants. Of the 41 firms, the vast majority were on nuclear related topics that required extensive consultation and deliberation. Here's the statistics for the ice cap since it started in 1996. The ice cap is committed to making sure every appellant's appeal gets adjudicated. Before we go into the prioritization process, we thought it would be important to give some context. These are the three appellants that have received the most pages decided on. As you can see, Mr. Ravnicki and Mr. Pesavento have by far received the most pages in the past five years. And then there's a significant drop off to Mr. Burr. One of Mr. Ravnicki's appeals dated from 2009 and was both very complex and very voluminous. It was the CIA history of the U2-A12 Oxheart program and was a historically very significant release. While these three prolific appellants receive a large volume of pages, the ice cap is committed to adjudicating all appeals. We've developed a prioritization plan designed to aid all requesters. So we take the age of every appeal into consideration and we are deeply committed to make sure that the oldest appeals are adjudicated. In addition, we consider the type of appellant. First-time appellants may be prioritized over frequent appellants. We also take into consideration whether or not the appeal would result in a declassification breakthrough. And among appeals of this nature that we've reviewed have been records related to the 9-11 commission and the Rwanda Genocide. We also take into consideration the size and complexity of appeals and we have had frequent requesters self-prioritize some of their appeals and we do take this into consideration. Finally, I also want to note we take into consideration the type of appeal. Classification challenges are very rare. As you know, there was none this past fiscal year and when they do occur, we do prioritize them. So I want to walk through how the appeals adjudication process works. Staff processes and evaluates incoming appeals. Staff requests responsive material from the agencies. Staff prioritizes the trace briefing books and distributes those briefing books to the liaisons. The liaisons then discuss the appeals at meetings. And I should also note that the liaisons are basically a deputy level to the members level that John had discussed earlier. During the adjudication at meetings and in between meetings as well, the agency liaisons consult with specialists at their agency and the staff consults with specialists at other agencies as well. They also evaluate the case based on prior official releases and we may bring in a subject matter expert where helpful to inform the discussions. Once a decision is made, the staff record it and then there's a 60 day period between decision and release where an agency had made appeal to the president. Once that period is passed, the ICAP staff prepares the release and sends it to the requester and the decision is also posted on the ICAP website. As John mentioned, the ICAP website is an important part of the ICAP's work. It is the fourth function of the ICAP's duties and ICAP is required to inform the senior agencies officials and the public of its decisions. This means that the decisions of the ICAP have broader impact than any one appellant but are able to be used by other researchers and advance future declassifications decisions. The ICAP posts any declassified in part or in full document on our website and we also conduct a 508 compliance review to make sure that the documents are accessible. The ICAP also maintains that appeals log, these are updated quarterly and it contained the appeals active during the current presidential administration. We strongly ask appellants to consult the appeals log first before contacting the ICAP staff because responding to individual appellants is taking time away from reviewing documents that are under appeal. We've undertaken several reforms trying to improve the process and get through the ever increasing backlog. As John, as I mentioned earlier, we've developed a prioritization process. As John mentioned, we are working to improve the use of technology to expedite ICAP's work. In addition, we were lucky enough this past summer to have two interns that had part of their time contributing to the ICAP staff. They didn't have security clearances so they couldn't work on appeals themselves but they reached out to the appellants and sought to confirm that the appeals before the ICAP are still actively in the researcher's interest. We were hoping to, this would help cut down the backlog and focus it in on the highest priority appeals. Unfortunately, no requester wish to withdraw their appeal. In addition, ICAP in the last year has spent significant amount of time working on declassification guides. This is an effort. Well, first this is also one of the four functions of the ICAP and in addition, the ICAP undertook very strenuous review of these declassification guides in hope that we could approve the front end and prove what the requesters get from the initial review before they ever make it to the ICAP. In addition, I'll talk about this a bit more later, ISOO is issued, ISOO knows, 2019-01 which is an effort to help make sure that we get the referral process which we all know is a significant part of the backlog at agencies between the requesters receiving the document, requesting the documents and getting it from agencies. So we could tighten that process up. So 23 agencies submitted declassification guides that they wished to get approved this past review cycle. These are the same 23 agencies that had them prior to the cycle. The liaisons made a decision at the start of the cycle that no guide would be approved until the ICAP had initially discussed each guide. This was an effort to maintain increased consistency across guides. Throughout the process, ICAP sought to tighten what was authorized to be exempted from declassification, tightening the referral process and improve the consistency throughout the guides. The ICAP has completed all the guide reviews and all guides have been approved as of August of this past year. The guide review process took a review based on the following criteria. Was the damage to Nash security of the information element is released? Is the foundation of anything being able to be classified initially or remaining classified? If it doesn't meet this threshold, it has to be declassified. Also, we looked to make sure the information elements in the guides that were approved for exemption were specific. We wanted to make sure that agency level reviewers had a clear ability to understand what the limitations of what could be exempted are and that only information that would cause damage to Nash security was being exempted. In addition, we wanted to make sure every information element met standards in executive order. And so we held agencies tightly to those definitions. In addition, we looked at whose information the information was because we wanted to make sure that agencies only exempted information that they were the experts on. And finally, as I mentioned before, we looked to see if we could use the guide process to increase the clarity of the referral process and prevent the backlogs that occur during referral. Every declassification guide starts with the same standard guidance. Use professional expertise not to exempt items that would not damage Nash security. Conduct additional research to achieve informed declassification decisions. Take into account information officially released previously. Only exempt the specific information elements ISCAP has given you authority to exempt and only refer to agencies information they have the authority to exempt. I know this seems like basic process of how it should be working all along, but we've all seen the reviews where information that no longer damages Nash security is being exempted. The ISCAP is determined to fix a problem at the front end and reduce the need for a requester ever to appeal to ISCAP. Requester should get the best quality review on their first appeal, a first review. They should also include any review conducted under automatic and systematic declassification programs. Part of the challenge we also recognize is that many agencies lack the resources to achieve this. By the ISCAP putting this guidance in writing in every declassification guide, agencies now have the policy mandate they can point to in the budget process to request the resources they need to get the job done at the front end. Standard language was also included in every declassification guide establishing the MDR and FOIA B1 exemptions on any information over 25 years old must be done in accordance with the exemptions authorized in their declassification guide. That means that if the information is over 25 years old, it can only be exempted if there's an ISCAP-proved exemption in the agency's declassification guide. I like this graphic because I think it really helps illustrate the two elements that have to be met before an agency can exempt information. To exempt information over 25 years old, agencies must be authorized to exempt it in an ISCAP-approved declassification guide and the reviewer must be able to explain how the release would damage national security. We recognize that significant reason that MDRs take as long as they do is that the referral process is what it is. As a result, the ISCAP used the declassification and re-approval process to tighten the referral process and reinforce the limitations on when information should be referred. Referrals must be done in accordance with the executive order. The conditions that must be met are the information must originate with another agency or the predecessor agencies or affect the interests or activities of that agency or predecessor agencies with respect to classification. The information must reasonably be expected to fall into one of the exemption categories and this also means they have to be in the declassification guide as approved exemption authority for the agency that's receiving the referral. And the agency must be eligible to receive the referral as identified in ISUNOS 2019-01. All of the guide state reviewer should take into account additional previously officially released, information previously officially released by the U.S. government. This is the first time a clear list of what is an official U.S. government release has been put into policy guides. This provides clarity to agencies that they cannot continue to hold national security information that has been previously officially released by the U.S. government. Once information has been officially released by the U.S. government, continued classification is prohibited as doing so would fail to meet the damaged threshold. Information previously officially released by the U.S. government includes information declassified by ISCAP, U.S. government publications, U.S. government websites, testimony before Congress by U.S. government officials, testimony in judicial proceedings by U.S. government officials, U.S. government filings and judicial proceedings, prior authorized declassification actions have been released to the public and statements by the president, the vice president or in White House releases. All of the declassification guides also includes standard language establishing a common approach to compromise information. Compromised information results from the unauthorized disclosure or release of classified information. Compromised information is not automatically declassified because of its unauthorized disclosure. Information released pursuant to an authorized official U.S. government release is not compromise information. The U.S. government analysis of compromise information may also be classified depending on the information in that analysis. To exempt compromise information that is older than 25 years old from declassification, the following conditions must be met. There must be an ISCAP approved exemption for the information element that was compromised. The information must be within the date range approved for that information element. The information must not fall into one of the categories in section 1.7 of the executive order and I'll be discussing this on the next slide. The rear must be able to describe the damage to national security information caused by disclosure. So you'll note in the last slide I mentioned section 1.7 of the order. The section states under no circumstances shall information be classified, continue to be classified or fail to be declassified in order to conceal violations of law, inefficiency or administrative error, prevent embarrassment to a person or organization or agency, restrain competition or prevent or delay the release of information that does not require the protection in the interest of national security. Basic scientific research information not clearly related to national security shall not be classified. This is extremely important provision of the executive order and is a provision on ever classifying this information. If a reviewer comes across this information that falls into one or more of these categories it should never have been classified and must be declassified. Information falling into one of these categories also is grounds for a classification challenge by a cleared holder if they cannot otherwise get the information declassified. The executive order establishes the nine categories of information that remain classified past 25 years. The sixth category which is colloquially referred to as X6 has a serious harm threshold which is higher than the damage threshold that exists for the other categories. The ISCAP focused on making sure that the serious harm threshold was met when approving agency declassification guides. Thus the X6 exemption category is an area you will see significant changes in the current declassification guides compared to past guides. As guides were being considered for re-approval there was the State Department Defense Department working group working on both X6 and X9 issues that result in significant narrowing of X6 particularly 50 X6 exemptions authorized for OSD and DOD agencies mill depths and components. Many previously approved DOD components declassification guides that included X6 and X9 information elements now will refer that information to OSD and or State Department. Another area where significant changes occurred in the declassification guides was X9. During the re-approval process it was noticed that many agencies had been misunderstanding what the X9 exemption was for. The executive order states, specific information nor lease of which should clearly and demonstratively be expected to violate a statute, treaty or a national agreement that does not permit the automatic or international declassification of information in 25 years. This is not to be used to hide violations of treaty. This is exempting specific information that a statute, treaty or international agreement states should not be automatically or unilaterally declassified 25 years or later. There is now standard language in all guides requiring the citation of a specific section of statute, treaty or international agreement that states that the information should not be automatically or unilaterally declassified when using X9. Both ISCAP and ISOO are paying particular attention to how agencies are training their personnel to implement the newly approved declassification guides. Last month, the National Declascation Center which we also referred to as the NDC held a training symposium where over 300 declassification professionals were trained in the new declassification guides. ISCAP kicked off the symposium with a training on the national policy that underpins the new declassification guides and the cross-cutting changes to the declassification guides. In addition, ISCAP worked with the NDC to conduct oversight of agency presentations before they were given that symposium. ISOOs also will be conducting in the upcoming fiscal year a training review of the training material that agencies are using to train their guides to their staff to make sure that the trainings are following the new declassification guides. Mentioned this earlier, ISOOs released a new notice, notice 2019-01. This is a significant improvement on past notices where we are focusing increasingly on where the specific information elements, which are the categories of information that each agency may exempt and for what period of time. So that when agencies are referring information, they know not to refer information that an agency does not have the authority to exempt. In addition, in this notice, there's a section that has a table of the date each guide was approved so that any reviewer can check to make sure they are using only the approved ISCAP version. So ISOOs conducting extensive oversight of declassification programs, among other things, we check to make sure that agencies are using the current version of their declassification guide when ISOO does on-site reviews. ISOO also conducts declassification assessments of agencies, including reviewing the sampling of their decisions. Now that the new guides have been approved, ISOO will strictly make sure that the information exempted meets both the damage threshold and the ISCAP approved exemption to their declassification guide. And also, as I just mentioned, ISOO will be conducting oversight of agency training material to make sure that the trainings that they're giving their staff align with their new declassification guides. And that will be coming in the next couple of months. Okay, as I mentioned towards the start of this presentation, the ISCAP also spent significant time this past year working on assistance to the State Department on the formal relations of the United States series or Fruse series. This came about because there had been delays in one of the publication volumes. And so the National Security Advisor asked ISCAP to help make sure that there was decisions made on those SEV documents that were delayed. The result was ISCAP decided on declassifying in four and part 60 documents that are going to be published into the Fruse volume. These are some resources that are very helpful as you work on both ISCAP or MDR issues. So you can find the ISCAP decisions on the link provided here. We also maintain a list of the MDR contacts at each agency. There's also a training on the MDR process that's available on our website. And then there's a link to the ISOO notices, the ISOO puts out, including the one I just mentioned. And here's our contact info if you ever have issues that you wanna reach us. I'll now turn the symposium over to John Powers. Okay. Thank you. I'm gonna turn the program around just a little bit because I do wanna give you kind of a little bit of what the landscape looks like outside of ISCAP a little bit and what's happening both in the world of ISOO and also in what's going on at agencies as well. And I think that this is a really important part for you to just help understand what else is going on. And so what I wanted to do is kind of talk about, first of all, the classification system itself. In the last two years, our office, the annual, the Information Security Oversight Office has sent the president an annual report that addresses the challenges that we are facing. And that is that the current classification system is simply not sustainable in the environment that we now operate. We the government now operate and you the public now operate. 10 years ago, the current executive order President Obama signed. At that point, it was a breakthrough order. It was really a revolutionary order with what it wanted to do. But even so, in the next 10 years, life has changed in the government. The way that we work has changed. We are a fully electronic government that is gonna be required by the National Archives to maintain its permanent records electronically only in the next few years. And this really does have an impact on the classification system that the classification system simply cannot keep pace with how we are working both exponentially with the data that is created as well as the various forms that data is created. The current executive order does inhibit information sharing. And it really is a challenge to ensure that different agencies work with one another and also with state and local partners and also with government contractors so that there must be a different way. And these are some of the things, the items that our director noted and highlighted in our most recent annual report. And on the declassification front, simply put, agencies are struggling to keep up. And they are still living in a paper world 25 years ago, although the electronic world is fast approaching and we are right on the precipice of a disaster where we are going to see all of a sudden massive information of electronic data that requires declassification as well. We don't know how to do that yet. We have not invested in the technology that we need to. The processes that we currently use for paper do not translate to electronic records. We cannot have six to eight eyes reviewing pieces of paper just as, and we certainly can't do that with electronic data. And I think for those of us in the government who work on FOIA, on declassification, on public access matters, it is apparent that we cannot process those requests the same way that we always have. There simply is too much information. We have to have a different way to do this. And then of course we look at the way that how much this is going to cost. We know that government is going to be leaner in the future. We need to figure out new ways to be more effective and more efficient that will allow us to maximize those few scarce tax dollars that we are given. And so what our office, the Information Security Oversaw Office, has been advocating is that we really must as a government invest in technologies and invest in policies that support technologies that includes the use of artificial intelligence and learning mechanisms to support declassification that happens automatically. And if we look at it in a whole of government approach, recognizing that information from the intelligence communities happens and occurs in state department records and in other non-intelligence agencies. So there has to be a whole of government approach to changing and finding solutions to some of these problems. So some of the things that we've talked about, our director has talked about, are ones that may seem controversial on its face. Some of these are changes that the Public Interest Declassification Board has advocated beginning in 2012 in one of its reports and has continued since. We've thought about the idea for the ICAP and we're very interested in your solutions and your ideas, which is why this forum is so important. One of the things that we had thrown out and suggested is maybe perhaps to make the ICAP more Supreme Court-like and to perhaps include a public member to increase the transparency. Is there a way that we can really force agencies to better prioritize those records or value? And I highlight Steve Aftergood's secrecy news column from today where he said, well, why is it that we are declassifying hundreds of thousands of pages that no one looks at? Maybe there is a better way to prioritize these things. These are some of the ideas that are percolating and we certainly want your opinion as well. At ISOO, the other thing that we have noticed as we were conducting our annual reports and that is we really did see the way that government was changing and we looked at the information that we were collecting as part of our oversight mission and we quickly realized that the information we were collecting is also perhaps obsolete and that we need to rethink the information that we collect and how that we collect it so that we can do and improve our oversight in a purely electronic environment. So this is where I'm asking for you, both you all are our stakeholders and I know at ISOO here, as we are going through our own effort to modernize the data that we collect so that we can improve our oversight and also so that we can inform our agency seniors who represent us in the interagency policy committees who are trying to figure out how to modernize this executive order to make it meaningful in a digital environment and maintain the transparency that our citizens require. We are going out, we are meeting with agency representatives at all levels and seniors to security professionals, practitioners, systems designers. We're also going out to meet with stakeholders outside of government, so civil society groups, the NASA security archives, public interest groups and other constituent groups like the American Historical Association and the Historical Advisory Committee. These are folks that have interest in the classification system, both inside the government and outside the government. And we are hoping in a transparent way, we intend to provide some of our initial results for public comment this coming year too. But at the moment, I think we'd like to have some of here some of your suggestions and oversight. And this is probably the best time here to say that we do want your comments, your advice, your suggestions. Certainly we're here to answer your questions too. If you are online, please make sure that you have logged on. If you are here in the studio, there are microphones on either side for you to ask your questions. We do ask again, please try to limit your dialogue in the form of a question or a quick comment so that we have time for all. We do have a good amount of time, so we're looking forward to a robust discussion. And what I'd like to do, I think at this point, is let me invite Evan Coran to come up here with me and share the stage and the microphone. And then we would be very happy to take your questions. And with that, let me start with Andrea, who has somebody from online. Thank you so much for your presentations, both of you. I do have several questions that have come from our online audience, but before we begin to hear from that audience, please know that I have hired staff until the half hour, so we are gonna have to end at 2.30, so we still have plenty of time. So let me start with some basic questions that have come from our online audience. And then I'll go back and forth with the audience that's here in the room with us. So the online person asks, are the date, how are the date ranges determined and by whom? How are the date ranges determined and by whom? The quick answer, as far as declassification goes, the date ranges are specified in executive order 13526. President Obama was the first president to really delineate what happened after information was exempted at 25 years. And the initial 25 year period goes all the way back to the very first order where this was a requirement in 1995 under President Clinton. President Obama expanded that to three different categories of 25, 50 and 75 years with thresholds of ever and higher threshold as to what could be exempted at those time frames, all of which had to be approved by the Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel. Thank you for that detailed answer. Let's go ahead and move to some of our online, in theater audience. So we have a gentleman over here to my right. Jim David, Aaron Space Museum. I have several questions. I'll start with this one. What is the status of the possible rewrite of the executive order? Well, it's certainly, I will say that it is something that the Interagency is thinking very long and hard about. It is something that in the last two I sue any reports to the president. It is very clear that something new is needed. What that will look like, we don't know. And when that will happen, I would say that we also don't know other than that the Interagency Policy Group is working and they're making some progress. Also, I think one of the questions that they had tasked us with is really to reform our data call so that as they begin to make decisions as to how to modernize the order that they have real data to reflect what is happening. So I think that there is, part of this is being driven by the, by I sue's need to really kind of reform the way it does its data collection. So it is gonna be an ongoing but longer term project. We have a question online. We have someone who would like us to go back to automatic declassification after 25 and 50 years. Do you think that would ever return? We have automatic declassification after 25 and 50 years currently in the order. So the issue, I think the questioner may be asking is, is it something that happens automatically without review or does it do agencies review it? Most agencies have determined based on their record keeping practices of the past that they would like to have eyes on documents for the most part before they reach the automatic declassification. But some agencies do make decisions based on the record series the information's in to let automatic declassification occur. And that's an agency by agency decision. We have a gentleman standing is believe Michael. Would you like to go ahead and ask your question please. Michael Bender Air Force Declassification Office. Our D-Class guide was effective 30 April 2019. And normally they're reprocessed every five years but before five years is up they're gonna need a 75X. In addition, on Friday we went to a meeting called by an Air Force Organization at the Pentagon and they told us that oh, we wanna have an annex in your D-Class guide as soon as possible. So if we do a modification to our D-Class guide does that change the date five years from, let's say next year or do we have to make it come up when everybody else's D-Class guide comes up? So Michael thanks for the question. Agencies can submit changes to their declassification guide at any point as information reaches the thresholds and they recognize there's a need for some revision. It does not change the cycle date because the ICAP would like to keep all agency guides in the same cycle to maintain consistency. Okay, thank you very much. Let's go back to our online audience. I personally think this one's interesting. It's about AI. So how much of this process utilizes automation and or AI to assist in verification of accuracy to current guidelines? Sure, that is a really good question and right now it's up to agencies as to how their declassification processes work. I know that there are some agencies that do use some form of basic automation to help them with their declassification reviews but most don't. Most still rely on eyes on page and again we're still for the most part in the paper world and so the review would occur paper to paper as opposed to having them scan the record and then reviewing electronically. The challenge will become greater when we finally get to the born digital category where it may be a little bit easier to use AI and also hopefully policies will be in place to help support that. But most agencies currently it is a eyes on hands on review. Thank you. Evan, did you want to add anything to that? No, I think John got. Okay, and I did want to add AI. I apologize, AI is artificial intelligence for those of us who didn't catch that. We've given us a lot of thought and what we hope in the future would be to have guides that would be so exact that we could upload them and AI automatically would begin to declassify. I mean, that's where the hope is because the volume is so great that we can no longer rely on human beings doing this. So the key is gonna have to make these guides as precise as we can make them. So that's the ultimate goal. Thank you for that additional information. And I'll add another real quick one here is just to say that for some agencies that have very technical missions or for some components of agencies that have very technical missions, that may be the first step and it may be easier to do because of the requirements of that program. So it depends on the agency but I think we are seeing that there are some agencies that have very technical responsibilities that there is at least the possibility of doing this. From the chat, are there any changes being considered regarding the declassification of restricted data 60 to 70 years old? So restricted data is outside of the executive order it's governed by the Atomic Energy Act and so that's a entirely different process outside of ISCAP but there is a panel that does regularly look at new data for declassification in the RD realm. So questions on that can generally be directed to DOE and OSD who lead up that effort. Sure and I'll quickly add to that really quickly to say that yes it's the Department of Energy does have some very specific regulations in 10 CFR 2001 I think that goes with the how you actually request information to be reviewed for declassification that's been marked as formally restricted data or restricted data. 10 CFR 1045. All right also from the chat, where is the best place to find what information cannot be disclosed to the public and exactly why it has been determined to be withheld from public knowledge? There's no list of what has not been disclosed to the public. Agencies have to only exempt information that falls into nine categories of exemption and that's in the executive order 13 526 section 3.3 B1 and so that sets narrow categories of information and then from there agencies make their submission to the ISCAP to determine if they can exempt information in their records and ISCAP reviews that very closely. Also from the chat, for old FD 302s, FBI only conducts B1 declassification actions leaving the rest to NARA. For researchers, this is maddening. Can ISU instruct agencies to complete reviews before sending to NARA? You know, I don't know. That's the quickest and the easiest answer there. I think we'd love to hear a little bit more about it if you would send your question via email to isuatnara.gov. We'd be happy to kind of engage it a little bit in a little bit more detail and find out some more information. All right, one more from the chat. Will the AI algorithms for D-class have publicly audible, auditable code? How will FOIA litigation work with AI? Most judges don't have a technical background. Believe it or not, I think that most judges do have a very high interest in using artificial intelligence means to do discovery. It may not be done in the FOIA world, perhaps, but certainly in terms of civil litigation, you are seeing more judges require really detailed compliance justifications of how the defendant did its search to comply with the discovery request and really does go into a lot of details about that. Additionally, I would say within the FOIA realm, although I am not a FOIA professional, I would say that judges, certainly from reading cases, that judges definitely are starting to have much more robust FOIA delivery dates and are required more records to be reviewed within those time frames. But other than that, I think the Department of Justice, I think is probably the better forum for OIP for that questions. I do know that there are some, the same folks that were at the microphones are still at the microphones, so I don't wanna maximize the online folks too. And why don't we go back to Mr. David? I'll start, Mike. NRO has on its homepage very interesting 2015 review and redaction guide. Of course, it's sanitized. So my question is, what would be the easiest way of making accessible to the public these what, 23 declassification guides that ISCAP recently approved? And related to that, and this is something that has been raised previously, and I know it would require review and sanitization, but all the file series exemptions of the however many agencies that have them. So a number of declassification guides are themselves classified. This was to allow agencies to get into the level of detail necessary to make sure that things that did not need to be classified were not classified. And so getting all of those 23 guides, I don't think is something that is likely with given their current classification level. They are subject to the same requests as other government documents, but again, I'd say about half of the guides themselves are classified. If I could just add to that real quickly. Why can't the ISCAP make these documents public? Well, the ISCAP is a creature of the Presidential Records Act is considered a presidential body. Its records are governed by the Presidential Records Act, and therefore it is not in our purview to release any of these records other than to the degree we can information about what we have done in the final decisions that have been reached. It's up to every agency whether to release its guide or not or historical guides. I know that that's something that the NRO has a history of doing in releasing. It's in a highly redacted form, it's guides, but very few other agencies do, but that would be a FOIA request project for folks. Does that apply equally to file series exemptions? I don't know who exactly has the authority over that set of documents. So file series exemptions are also presidential documents, so at least at the ISCAP level, they are an ISCAP function. ISCAP does approve file series exemptions. In the last about decade, we've cut the number of file series exemptions approved in about half, reducing about half the agencies that had them as well as the agency that did have them. Their numbers also reduced by about half. So it's a lot less than has been in past years. Many of those file series exemption requests are not themselves classified by various from an agency to agency. Okay, a couple months ago, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence sponsored a one day course on classified equities for the intelligence community. And there I learned for the first time that the FBI has embarked on this process study to see if they can develop tools for automated declassification review. It was the first time I'd heard about it. This is a suggestion that I have made to Bill Fisher, Director of the NDC, and I'll make it to you that there needs to be a central point of contact for all government agencies that can disseminate information about the status of automated review studies looking at that. Everybody points to somebody else and it really can't be in DOD, it can't be in the IC. It really argues for being within NARA or one of the parts of NARA. Thank you very much for that comment, Michael. And I would say certainly at ISU, we also do get requests from agency of who else is doing something. And likewise, get to go to briefings from agencies that are either planning or actively involved in pilot projects to test technologies out. So it's a great comment, I appreciate it. Thank you. But? I'll say it at the moment that I appreciate it and I know that this is something it is something that is under deliberation. Okay, if you don't mind, I'd like to go back to a question from our online audience. So if you're wondering how do you ask a question online, and you log into YouTube and just simply type your question into the chat and we'll ask the presenters for you. So the question is, regarding the ICAP log, once an agency has submitted materials to ICAP in response to an appeal, what is the protocol? Is there still, how long is the review wait? It very much depends on the appeal. So the ICAP staff is dedicated to make sure as many appeals are processed in any given year as possible and to do it as expeditiously as possible. As I mentioned in our prioritization plan, we do take serious and strong consideration to the age of the records, but we also note that in the oldest records that we have, many of them are from frequent appellants who've already gotten a significant amount of volume and we wanna make sure everyone has a chance. So we do sometimes prioritize appeals from first-timer appellants or something that would have a very significant impact on the larger open government or research community or historical community. It's a, there's no firm time, we wanna just get through them as quickly as we can. And sadly, I'll just say, I know that Evan had this slide up, we have a backlog of about 1,200 plus cases. So the answer is, the immediate answer is not soon. But when we do get to it, it will be done in a very informed way. But the answer is it is at the moment, a very, very cumbersome and lengthy process. Do we have another question from our theater audience? Last one. I've got one. Not meaning to make trouble, but in section 3.1b of the EO, there are four categories of individuals that are authorized to declassify information. And I just don't see ICAP listed there. So I'm wondering where in the executive order ICAP's authority for declassifying information comes from? It's actually in section 5.4, which I think is the ICAP section where the president gives the ICAP the authority to do this. So they are exercising the president's authority, but it all comes from that section. Mr. David. This is really a records management issue and I know it's outside your purview. But when you can, can you lend your expertise and wait to finally, after decades and decades and decades, getting permitted classified records out of the federal record centers and out of the agencies themselves to the National Archives after their retention periods have run. For example, DCI files from, I'm just picking 1947 and 1948. They're all over 70 years old, whichever ones are permanent, they're not at the National Archives. No one knows when they're gonna get there. I know they can't be released without page by page, probably line by line review, but there are a lot of researchers that would like these records that should be at the National Archives and aren't at the National Archives for various reasons. Thank you for that. And I'll say that I certainly will bring that forward both through our interagency process and through my great colleagues at the NDC. Those would appear to be, at least in that instance, be records of extreme historical interest. Correct. In keeping with the prioritization, existing prioritization plans and a few others that we are under discussion, I certainly will bring that forward. Thanks. Thank you. Oh, Michael, did you have one more? Well, I just wanted to second the praise that was bestowed upon Bill Carpenter, his positive intensity, his second to nobody in the declassification community and thank you, Bill. And I will third that as well and also for AJ as well. At this time, we do not have any more questions from our online audience. I'm looking around at our theater audience and I don't see anybody jumping up. It looks like we might have come to a natural end to our discussion. So thank you presenters, John and Evan. Today's video recording will remain available on YouTube as part of our growing Know Your Records playlist. We value your opinion, so please take a few minutes to complete the short evaluation on behalf of the National Archives and our presenters. Thank you for joining us. This concludes today's program. Thank you.