 And thank you for joining the PIDB virtual public meeting. Please note that all audio connections are going to be muted throughout this conference. Before we begin, please ensure you've opened the WebEx Participant in Chat panel for your associated icons located at the bottom of your screen. If you require technical assistance, please send a chat to the event producer. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. With that, I'm going to turn the call over to Mark Bradley, Director of the Information Security Oversight Office, and the Executive Secretary of the Public Interest Decosification Board. Please go ahead. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today and welcome. As you can see, we're still working virtually. Hopefully this will end soon. It looks like we're on the right track of the country with the epidemic or pandemic under control. Now, we're not only doing this on WebEx today, we're also streaming live over NAR's YouTube channel. We've got over 1,000 people today watching, so we are very excited. We had such an enthusiastic crowd who wants to attend. Before we get started, I'd like to update you just on a bit of Information Security Oversight Office business. I anticipate delivering ISOO's annual report to the President in June. Clearly, the pandemic has had a deep impact on the Executive Branch Information Security Programs, and that's going to be the focus of our report this year. If nothing else, I hope it again serves as a firing call how badly this system, meaning the classification, declassification and information security systems need to be modernized. As always, the report will be available on ISOO's website for public review. I think all the ones I've been involved with, I think this one will be the most interesting to read. Now, let's talk a bit about today's meeting. This is the first public meeting for the Board's new Chair, Ezra Cohen. Ezra was appointed to the Board and designated as Chair by President Trump in January 2021. Before his appointment, he served in senior leadership positions at the Department of Defense, the Intelligence Community, and the White House, brings his experience in military intelligence and national security to the Board. It's also the first public meeting for Ben Powell and Michael Lawrence, appointed by the President in October. And Paul Noel-Critian appointed by the President in December. They have all had distinguished careers in intelligence and national security. So again, welcome all, and we are delighted to have you on the Board. During the course of our meeting today, please take the opportunity to submit questions or comments directly to the PIDB email address. And that's PIDB at NARA.gov. Again, PIDB at NARA.gov. We have reserved time for questions, answers, and comments after our speakers. I know we've already received scores of questions, so if we don't get to your question today during the allotted time, but we will post all comments or questions on the PIDB blog, Transforming Classification, along with a response. And now Israel Cohen will kick off our meeting. Ezra? Thank you, Mark. Welcome, everyone. I'm honored to have the opportunity to serve on the Public Interest and Classification Board. I have long followed the Board's work. The Board performs a critical function in the pursuit of increased government transparency, which includes modernizing our classification and declassification system and advocating for maximum public access to the historical government record. It is in seven months since our last public meeting, and we have a lot of information to talk about today. I'll run through our agenda. First, we'll kick off with the Archivist of the United States, David Carillo, who will make some remarks. From there, we'll have, we have two very distinguished speakers, Jamie Guerrilla and Sue Abselico, who were both part of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, also known as the 9-11 Commission. As we approach the 20th anniversary of the mass murder attacks on the United States, the Board felt that this was an opportune time to learn more about the Commission's records and advocate for the expedient public, public access to these documents. After we hear from the speakers, we will discuss the Board's letter to President Biden. Next, we will have several new Board members who have joined us since our last public meeting, as Mark mentioned, and we will introduce them and give each of them an opportunity to make some comments. We will then conclude our public meeting by listening to your comments and answering questions. It is not too late to submit a question, as Mark mentioned. You can do so by emailing, again, the address is pidb at nara.gov. We will have staff monitoring the inbox throughout the meeting. The agenda and the biographies of our guest speakers can be found on our website, and I invite all of you to both visit our website and sign up for our Transforming Classification Blog. Okay, so let's start with the archivist of the United States, David Ferriero. Thanks, Ezra, and greetings from the National Archives Building in downtown Washington, D.C., which sits on the ancestral lands of Nacotch tanks people. I'd like to welcome and thank the 9-11 Commission Member Jamie Gorellick and Executive Director, Phillip Salico, for speaking at this important meeting today. The records of the 9-11 Commission are part of the collections in our Center for Legislative Archives. Legislative Archives staff are charged with preserving and making these records available to the public, and, like me, they believe that access to these important records help promote a better understanding of what led up to the attacks that happened on that terrible day. I'd also like to welcome PIDB's newest members who are participating in their first public meeting, Michael Lawrence, Paul Noel Kratien, and PIDB's new Chair, Ezra Cohen. Welcome to all of you, and I look forward to working with you. While the pandemic disrupted our operations as it did all of government, I'm proud of how our staff reacted to this challenge. We've reprioritized and reimagined our work. Although our research rooms and museums have been closed, we added and upgraded our online presence. Our education staff developed new resources to support teachers and aid virtual learning. We increased public engagement on YouTube, Live, and other platforms. We added more authors to our book series and created a Young Learners Program. On History Hub, our staff continued to answer thousands of questions from researchers. Online, our catalog added over 120 million digital objects attached to item and file descriptions. We received over 163 million monthly views of our records on Wikipedia. Meanwhile, we are also sticking to our roots with our museum starting to reopen this last weekend, and with Research Room Pilot starting next week. There are three important projects I'd like to quickly highlight. Today first, the National Archives is on track to publicly release the 1950 U.S. Census next year on April 1st. In preparation, our staff scanned almost 8 million population schedule pages. We've added online programs on genealogy, and our staff is completing additional archival and IT work necessary to improve the user experience when the census is released. Second, the National Archives received legal custody of the Trump presidential records on June 20th of this year in accordance with the Presidential Records Act. It was a tremendous amount of work under difficult circumstances, and I commend our staff for rising to the challenge to transfer physical materials during a pandemic. The process to transfer over 500 terabytes of electronic records is complex and remains ongoing, ensuring compatibility of formats, then verifying its authenticity as time-consuming and requires close collaboration with White House Information Technology staff in order to allow us to ingest this data into the National Archives Electronic Records Archive. And third, last month, the National Archives received letters from other federal agencies in accordance with the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992. My staff has already started to review their request to continue to postpone the public release of certain JFK assassination records beyond October 2021. This work will continue through the summer, and we will carefully evaluate each request. As archivist of the United States, my responsibility is to make recommendations to the President based on the strict standards established in the Act. I take this responsibility very seriously and believe firmly in the Act's ultimate objectives to make all of the records in this collection available to the public. The mission of the National Archives is to drive openness, cultivate public participation, and strengthen our nation's democracy through public access to high-value government records. In short, make access happen. Let me close with an optimistic note. Despite the recent challenges, all of us who work at the National Archives believe democracy starts here. I'm pleased how our staff across the country has reprioritized work so that our users can still receive information electronically and access important government records virtually. But I'm also looking forward to a return when I can welcome the American people in person as they use our research rooms and visit our exhibits to learn more about our great nation and our democracy. Our facilities are slowly and carefully reopening in accordance with local conditions and guidelines put in place by the administration. This progress will continue, and I'm looking forward to more of our museum exhibits and research rooms opening in the coming months. Thanks for joining us today. David, thank you for joining us this afternoon. David is leading the charge to modernize the government record-keeping practices and promoting improved public access to record-keeping National Archives. He also is a longtime supporter of the PIDP's work, and is very interested in everything that the board does. As we're highlighted for us this afternoon, this year marks the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York City and on the Pentagon on September 11th, 2001. I am pleased that we have a unique opportunity to discuss the historical significance and access status of record relating to the terrorist attacks upon the United States on 9-11. We have two distinguished speakers this afternoon who served in the 9-11 Commission. Commissioner Jamie Gorellick and the 9-11 Commission Executive Director, Professor Phillip Zellico. They're both accomplished public servants who have excelled in the private sector and in academia. The full biographies can be found on the PIDP website on the page for this meeting. We're first here from Jamie Gorellick. In addition to her work on the Commission, Ms. Gorellick has also had a renowned career in the federal government serving leadership roles in the Department of Justice, Defense, and Energy. Jamie, on behalf of the board members, we are pleased to have you join us today. Lori George, please. Mr. Chairman, I'm very, very glad to be here and I congratulate you on this. What are the efforts that you're making? I would say at the outset that it has been 17 years since the 9-11 Commission completed its work and during that period of time, the cicadas have all been buried in the earth and they are re-emerging in Washington as we speak as they come back every 17 years. So I think this is somehow a symbol of re-emergence and transparency and light that this board is trying to help shed on hard issues. I was, as the Chair noted, a member of the Commission. Phillip, who you'll hear from in a few minutes, was our esteemed Executive Director. We had excellent staff. The Commissioners were supposed to be part-time and sometimes I was part-time, but for a lot of it I was more than full-time. Probably because of my legal training or otherwise dug into the facts, maybe more than some of the others and there were plenty of facts to say grace over. We looked at, I don't know, easily over a million documents. We did somewhere in the neighborhood of 1200, Phillip will correct me, interviews. Suffice it to say that this was the broadest, deepest look at the national security apparatus of this country that we've ever had and we've had some pretty deep and broad looks. So what is the relevance or the possible relevance to today of the records that remain classified and not released to the public? So I would try to answer that in the form of four questions. One is, and I think the first and foremost question would be how did the different elements of our national security community relate to one another and was there anything that inhibited close coordination and effectiveness and then to ask are there structural issues that were resolved and are there structural issues that have not been resolved? The 9-11 Commissioners formed themselves into a group called the 9-11 Public Discourse Project the purpose of which was to help get our recommendations enacted and over the year after our report was issued in 2004, we did that. We were pretty successful in having a bipartisan acceptance of our recommendations, all but one, I would say achieved that status and weren't active and it won't surprise you that the one that wasn't enacted was a recommendation that went to the oversight structure in the Congress. The Congress was really good at accepting our changes with respect to the executive branch, not so much as to itself. And after that, we got together periodically to see how our recommendations had been implemented. So I think it would be helpful to the American people to look back at what we were worried about. Obviously a lot of it is in our report, which I think is still used in colleges and universities today. But some of the underlying records I think would be of use as they documented the debates that we had. And that leads to the second question, which is how has the Director of National Intelligence worked out? We've had several of them now. I think it's fair to say, and Ben Powell was the general counsel for the first cohort of them. I think it's fair to say that each one of them did the job in a different way. The offices were organized in a different way. The sense of purpose was different. So I think it might be helpful to look at our deliberations as to what was envisioned by the Commission. What issues were we trying to resolve? And how do the various iterations of the DNI comport with what we thought needed to be done? The third is a little more of a global question, which is whether there are lessons to be learned about the differences between the first draft of history and the truth. And you might want to study the story that was first told to us about the plane that was heading for the capital, United 93, and how the Air Force said it was tracking the plane and was prepared to shoot it down had the capital been threatened. And NORAD testified that it was ready to intercept American 77 and United 93. Both statements turned out to be wrong, whether they were intentionally false is a whole other question. But the people who gave us those stories had ample opportunity to gather the facts. It wasn't like they were talking to us just off the top of their heads. And yet the presentation of organizations as really on top of things turned out to be wrong. And that has some lessons as we think about a COVID commission or a January 6 commission or any look back. I am now, despite being an optimistic person, I also should be counted among the skeptics when I hear these first drafts of history. And then the question I'm sure that this board really wants to look at is, are there particular bits of history yet in the archives that would be especially enlightening? And I know Phillip is much more familiar with what has been declassified and released and what is not. But I would say that our memorandum, the one that Phillip and I were asked to do for the commission as a whole upon review of the presidential daily briefs would be most interesting. There were two drafts. Phillip I think only remembers the one that he led the drafting of. I also remember one that I led the drafting of. His was the one we ended up briefing the commission on because mine was not permitted to be released. But the interesting story to me about that memo was that what we did was we looked at all the data we had from the intelligence community, particularly the CIA who led the briefing processes for the executive branch. So we had all of that. And so the question was how was all of that distilled and presented to the president and the most senior national security officials? That I think is a really interesting question because the senior most decision makers can only make good decisions if they are getting the real story and the decisions that the briefers make about what to include and what not and how they phrase it and not, I think are really important. Second are interviews with the two presidents, President Clinton and President Bush. We interviewed President Bush with Vice President Cheney at their request. There were some factual issues about whether the vice president had actually consulted President Bush on a shoot down order. That would be interesting. The Bush administration's attitude toward counterterrorism with respect to the Clinton administration, the reasoning behind its decision making on administration actions and retribution for the coal bombing which took place in the Clinton administration but right toward the end of it. And one could construe the coal bombing as an opening shot that culminated in the attacks of 9-11. And there I think one of the questions is what was the effect of the presidential transition on our ability to address the bombing of the coal and what perils are there as we are moving from one president to another, particularly from one party to another. I think the question of the degree to which the CIA actually warned the NSC whether there were warnings above and beyond the actual presidential daily briefs would be very interesting. I have a personal interest in the Department of Justice and I would think that the details on whether John Ashcroft did everything he could to fight terrorism would be interesting. What was the nature of the disagreement that we heard about between the FBI and Attorney General Ashcroft in the first part of the Bush administration? I think it would be particularly interesting to see the progress that the FBI has made on the journey to more effectively addressing foreign terrorism. And then last, the only witnesses that we wanted to hear from whom we did not hear from directly were the detainees at Guantanamo. And I think looking at the CIA's decision that we could not do that would be of interest. So that's my list. I'm sure that Phillip has a more comprehensive list but maybe between the two of us we can inform your recommendations in some helpful way. Thank you. Shall I go ahead and start? Thank you, Jamie. Now I'm pleased to introduce Phil Zelicow. He served in senior roles at the Department of State and the White House before serving as the Executive Director of the 9-11 Commission. He now wears several hats at the University of Virginia, one of my alma mater. He serves as the Director of the Miller Center for Public Affairs. He's the Dean of the Graduate School and both is a Professor of History and a Professor of Governance. Phil, on behalf of the board members, welcome. We look forward to hearing your perspective on this discussion. Please take the floor. Thanks very much. And I'm glad to have the chance to appear before the Public Interest Declassification Board and the interested members of the public. The historical value of the 9-11 Commission records is, I think, obvious to anyone who thinks that the 9-11 episode itself is historically significant. Jamie Gorellic did a good job of introducing this subject to recapitulate what she went through. What I will stress is that the Chair and Vice-Chair of the Commission, Tom Cain and Lee Hamilton, felt very strongly about the public release of the Commission records. They and we did everything we could to try to be sure that those records would be made available to the public reasonably soon after the Commission finished its work. They're not with you today, but I'll say this. Tom Cain is an even-tempered person. But if you want to name one subject that can get him riled up and angry, talk to him about the release of the 9-11 Commission records because he is upset that those records 17 years later, while the cicadas have been in their long sleep, that the records have shared that life underground in so many cases with them. So in our view, all these records should be made available really. Now to just be very strategic about it, the Board has asked us to identify some records to focus on the release of which might be the most strategically or historically significant since there are hundreds of records that have not yet been released. And the list that she presented is a list that I agree with. Number one, the document that she and I prepared that is an authoritative summary of the high-level intelligence about the alkyda threat and terrorist threat available to the President of the United States in the three years before 9-11. We insisted on and got access to all the presidential daily briefs related to that subject for those three years. Also, we were able to compare those with another high-level intelligence document that at that time was usually called the National Intelligence Daily, which had a wider distribution. And we finally wrote up a summary of that material that is 7,000 words long and quite rigorous and concise. Cain and Hamilton themselves went into the records to verify that Jamie and I had done an adequate job of representing them. That 7,000 word memo was then shared with all the members of the commission who reviewed it very carefully. And then under the agreement that was negotiated with the White House for the access to these records, we believe that the copies of that memorandum will return to the National Security Council for their safekeeping. All these records were actually accessed in the Executive Office of the President in one of the Executive Office buildings. So that is an authoritative summary of the intelligence about the threat that was available to the President of the United States in writing and to other top officials in three years before 9-11. That's valuable. And having prepared that document myself, I can tell you there's nothing in that document I think that could not now be safely released. Second, the record of our interview with President Bush and Vice President Chang. I was the note taker for that meeting. I drafted the record. I got all the other commissioners to give me their notes. I then shared with them the memorandum that I'd written up to see if they agreed that the meeting had been accurately represented. It's a very detailed memorandum quite extensive for that meeting with Bush and Cheney. I understand there was a parallel record that was created by the NSC's lawyer, Brian Cunningham. And both of those records should be available and be released. They are, I think, provide some real insight about the attitudes of above all Bush because Bush did most of the talking in the interview. Also, the commissions, the records of the commissions interview with former President Bill Clinton. If one is interested, we also did an interview with former Vice President Gore, which I think is historically not as significant. The interview with former President Clinton actually was both written up as a pro summary and I believe was recorded and at least transcribed at least in part. So that's a fairly extensive record and has some historically valuable material in part perhaps for things that were not set. If you go below those three records, there are a whole series of memoranda for the records and other documents that might be adventurous. I'd especially single out our records of our interviews with former CIA Director George Tenet with the NSC Director for Counterterrorism Richard Clark. We did three interviews with Clark, all of which were written up quite extensive documents. The head of the CIA bin Laden unit, Michael Scheuer, various cabinet officials and both the Clinton and Bush administrations and so on. On the detainee issues that Jamie mentions, our records have quite an interesting call it back and forth where we were attempting to obtain more and more information from the CIA about the detainees. The detainees of interest to us, Jamie made us slightly misspoke. She alluded to the detainees being at Guantanamo. At that time they were not at Guantanamo. At that time they were at CIA black sites and the existence of these sites had not yet been publicly revealed. And we actually wanted to directly examine these people ourselves. And actually the staff felt very strongly about that, made that argument. Ultimately the commissioners decided for their reasons not to insist on that and not to subpoena or file other legal action to get access to the detainees, but instead to go along with an accommodation in which the commission would put in its questions for the detainees. The CIA would ask those questions, relay answers back to us and we would go through that process. It is worth noting in that context that one of the other recommendations that the Bush administration did not adopt was our recommendation to end the CIA black sites for the detainees and to bring the detainees under the rules of the war and treat them in accordance with the law of the war under Common Article 3 of the different Geneva Conventions. In 2004 that was also a recommendation that the Bush administration was unwilling to accept. It did finally, by the way, have to accept that recommendation and follow that policy in a series of decisions at the end of 2005 and during 2006. I was involved in those arguments from another perspective. So that's all I'll cover for now. What I want to do for the board then is simply stress. The significance of these records, the impatience of Tom Kane and Lee Hamilton that they have not been released after all these years and strategic suggestions to the board that if you wanted to focus on a handful of absolutely critical records that should help break the log jam, we can itemize a few and have done so for the board's benefit. Thank you. Thank you, Jamie and Phil, for joining us today and providing us with your insight into the value of specific records in this significant collection. You've offered us new perspectives on the important content of still classified commission records and suggested that there are within this collection critical records that should be considered for prioritized classification review. I also want to thank you, Phil, for especially highlighting the intent of the chairman and the co-chairman of the commission. And that's really very important. The board has been collecting information on the status of the 9-11 commission records for the past few months, including learning about the importance of good archival practices and some of the challenges the National Archives and U.S. government face in processing this large collection for declassification of public access. As you can imagine, as many of the records were in paper form, the search for some of the records you mentioned today and the processing of them will be a challenge. We also learned throughout our process of the complexities involved in, as I said, processing records for declassification. So next I'd like to transition to talk about the letter that the board sent to President Biden last week. Beyond introducing the function of the board and the new administration, the letter also addressed the critical need to modernize a classification and secrecy system. Our letter containing three key points was based primarily on our 2020 report, A Vision for a Digital Age. And the three points are, first, our secrecy system is outdated and in danger of failing. The current system does not adequately support our national security professionals, protect our democracy or provide adequate transparency to the American people as we heard today from Jamie and Phil. Second, we highlighted recommendations from that report that align with the President's objectives to transition to a modern digital government including the integration and use of advanced technological tools and information systems across the executive branch. And third, we offered to meet with the President's senior staff to provide assistance and expertise as they begin to address some of the modernization challenges we have already discussed today. We plan to publicize the full letter in the near future both through our blog and on our website. Now we'll move to member comments. In the last year, several members rotated off the board and I'd like to publicly thank them for their service and their hard work. Jamie Baker, Trevor Morrison, and Ken Weinstein. Thank you for all that you did. I'd also like to thank Alyssa Starzak for her service in the interim chair of the PITB for the greater part of the past year. We've had several new appointments since our last public meeting, as Mark mentioned in the beginning. Paul Noel, Kretien, Michael Lawrence, and Ben Powell, who were appointed by former President Trump, and Congressman Trey Gowdy, who was appointed by House Minority Leader McCarthy. We will now turn to the members of the board to make comments on the PITB's objectives or pose questions or comments to our guest speakers today. So with that, we'll first turn to Alyssa, our chair of America. Thank you, Adra, and I'm so glad to be here today. And thank you both, Jamie and Phil, for coming in to talk about the 9-11 commission records. It's obviously a historical year, not just because it's the case. So I really do appreciate the willingness to come in and talk about it. We share your interest in getting the records to be classified, and obviously it's the 30-year to do it, that this is it. So we really do look forward to figuring out how we prioritize those records and encourage their decloptification. I also want to turn to something else that we've been talking about a lot at the board, which is just the modernization of classification systems. And I actually think in some ways our 9-11 commission conversation really sort of highlights the need for it. I think the challenge of even finding documents has been striking to us, trying to find the right records, even for something that's a very discreet collection like the 9-11 commission. There have been some challenges along the way. And I think that for us, when I sort of look at where we are going as a board and where we have been, it really is the striking need to modernize our systems for both classification and declostification so that we can find records, ensure that they're released to the public in a much more robust way than we've been able to do in the past. Manual systems just don't work anymore with the environment that we have now and the digital architecture we have now. So those are sort of from my standpoint, priorities for the board that we'll continue to look at. And I think I will turn it over to everyone else for comments as well. Thank you, Alyssa. Okay. Now we'll turn to Congressman Gowdy. Yeah, Ezra, I just also want to thank Jamie and Phil for their service to our country in particular and specifically with respect to the 9-11 commission. I worked in the state and federal court systems and then was in the legislative branch for a little while. I've always been fascinated by the tension between and the need for both access and security. So my interest in serving on this board is trying to strike the right balance between access while also preserving national security and I could not be more thankful for this chance to work with you and other experts. Thank you, Trey. I appreciate it. Ben, go ahead. Ben Powell. Thank you and wanted to thank Jamie and Phil for their very important comments. I think the records remain continuing relevance today as we go on 20 years in Afghanistan and Afghanistan continues to be a place of continuing importance and relevance to the national security conversation as does Al-Qaeda, offshoots of Al-Qaeda and understanding the foundations and importance of what happened on 9-11 prior to 9-11 and frankly after 9-11. As Jamie noted, the transformation of our intelligence community and the continuing national conversation we have about that. I'm very pleased to join the board and contribute to its important work. I'm certainly heartened by the interest shown in the board's work. We have more than 1,000 registered today and watching online on the YouTube broadcast. I think it shows that there is an interest in the board's work. I won't repeat what Alyssa said except to endorse the declassification of records and the challenges. It's only going to become more challenging given the exponential growth of digital data without a corresponding increase in technology to support the review and declassification of these records. I look forward to contributing to the board's work and happy to join it. Thank you, Ben. All right, now we'll turn to Michael Lawrence. Thanks, Esther. Much like the CATES that have been gone for 17 years, it's been 17 years since I've worked with Jamie and Phil so it's good to see both of you again and look forward to working with you and picking your brains further on that. I'm just wondering, either of you, can you provide maybe to the board some suggestions in working with the intel agencies to release some of the information that they have and techniques that you have used in dealing with them during the commission to help free up some of that information to give us a glide path to success? Phil, it might be useful for you to talk about the process that we use to get our report out. As everyone on this board knows, if you try to if you write a memoir and you try to get it cleared it can take forever to get it out. And I thought Phil was masterful in doing that and this board might gain some insight from the process you use, Phil. I wish it could. We use the process of pre-publication review. From a legal point of view then, our stance was that all of our material was presumptively unclassified presumptively unclassified but that we were obligated to give administration officials a chance to review it to see if they agreed with that judgment that was part of the that goes with the security agreements to access the information. And so the pre-publication review process in which the presumption is that the material is unclassified the burden then is on the holders of classified information to make an assertion that something no is classified and needs to be withheld. The situation you're in right now for the declassification of these records is just turned around. They are taking to position now that these records were created at the beginning which is true and that they are therefore presumptively classified and that you then have to make the push on them to insist that actually they should be unclassified and basically then inertia runs in their favor. So the only way in which you persuade them to declassify these records is by calling sufficient attention to them that they then put the time and energy to bother to declassify them. There are cases where there are actual legal requirements that records be declassified after a given period of time. In some cases that statutory requirement works reasonably well and some agencies are compliant. In some cases agencies simply flap the law for example the behavior of the Department of Defense with respect to the foreign relations series that's published by the State Department's I will say that the CIA in general and on many issues does endeavor to be compliant with the law and the current director of the CIA Bill Burns is quite conscious of history and historical responsibilities and some of these classification issues since the CIA has lead custody on a lot of the records of interest for our request. I think actually tactically the best way to approach this is to go right at Bill Burns and he'll get it and I think he'll understand the significance of this he is very well equipped to do the necessary balancing act on these records I don't think in this case and for these records it's a very onerous or time consuming task. So what I was actually suggesting is that this board figure out a way to switch the presumption on a greater proportion of the records which you could certainly have done for example with the 9-11 commission you could have said these records are presumptively declassified after a period of time maybe 17 years Yeah but you might need a law to do that Yes you might Yes you might need a law to do that but that is what I'm suggesting because when the presumption was reversed we were able to tell our story pretty well with some I would say deft editing Well that was very helpful thank you Philip and Jamie and it's actually a perfect transition to Paul Noel who has a lot of firsthand experience with the publication review board at the CIA Paul go ahead Thank you Ezra and thank you Jamie and Phil for your work on the commission we appreciate it I'll just summarize my background I came from the Department of Justice where I litigated FOIA and private GAC cases and then I moved over to the CIA where I did a lot of declassification work and prepublication review work and it's important work and we should release as much as we possibly can for the American people to see I look forward to working with my colleagues on prioritizing what we can expect the government to release and I look forward to working with the administration on this as well Thank you Thank you Paul Noel Last but not least Congressman Tierney and thank all my colleagues for the hard work they do and that means past colleagues as well as the current ones that are newly appointed but I want to thank the staff too because they do just an absolutely fantastic job of supporting the work that the PIDP does and I think what's interesting and heartwarming for somebody like myself and I think Trey Gowdy mentioned it as well is to see the focus of this board and all of its members realizing that the real grind should be toward releasing these records whenever it's possible to save under our security constraints and just to make sure that all those government records see the light of day I would adopt all the things that all previous members said on that but I would just add that on September 9th of last year 2020 I had the opportunity to represent the PIDP before the senate select committee on intelligence and we were talking mostly about the records and the need to have them declassified and the importance and how it's often neglected as an issue but the fact that the security classification declassification system needs serious reform we've done five reports in the last dozen years and all of them come to the same conclusion that modernization is something that is definitely needed the number of records and the work that it would take to digitize them it's just impossible to do without new technology being applied and modernizing the system I stress to the senate there's a critical importance of there being sustained leadership to make sure that that gets done somebody has to drive the change and there needs to be an executive agent somebody that will actually go in and coordinate the across the federal government effort at this aspect I testified at that time and I believe it's still with the recommendation of this full board that the director of national intelligence the office of the director of national intelligence would be the appropriate agency to do that it's the one agency that has the knowledge it has the experience it has all of the sensitive equities that are applied in this responsibility and it has the resources and the stature to get people to cooperate and move in that direction that is on the intent of the board that is our hope that we get to the modernization and bring in new technologies all with the effort and the end result of making sure that as much as is absolutely possible sees the light of day and the public is allowed to see what's going on in that government what has gone on in the government thanks to our colleagues and thanks to the staff and thanks to today's two witnesses for their lighting testimony as well thank you congress maternity I'll just make a few comments and I have a question as well first I'm looking forward to the opportunity to examine also examine the use of technology to modernize the classification and declassification system in the United States we must modernize to protect our national security and support our democracy this is an imperative the process we use to classify declassify and safeguard information remain largely the same as when president Truman first enacted them in 1951 when secrets were still created on paper and stored in combination states there is widespread agreement that this system is at a breaking point as the variety and volume of digital data increase exponentially classification declassification and information management policies and processes have not kept pace and no longer meet the needs of national security professionals who require rapid and agile information sharing and dissemination to keep our nation safe along with the other members I look forward to providing support to the president of the United States and his administration in addressing this challenge now one of the things that the board has recommended in the past is training and so for Damian Phil I'd like your take on whether or not classification training looking forward here as we continue to encounter historical events that events that will have historical value do you think that classification training and greater emphasis on keeping information unclassified at the start going back to that presumption will help as future commissions or committees take a look at records I just have a brief comment and then Phil might have a more substantial one anybody who's ever worked with classified materials looks at them and knows that different standards have been applied to the very same information I mean you take two documents that are covering basically the same underlying data and they are classified either one is classified and one is not one is classified at a higher level than the others for no apparent reason so getting some uniformity at the least would be very helpful Phil? Yeah look I think some training would be great it's not very hard training the really only a few key principles to keep in mind one reputation and embarrassment is not a sufficient reason for classification it's not a legally permissible reason for classification two, most reasons for classification actually have a very short time usually people classify things that could indeed damage the national security if they were released at that time usually the time and circumstances that create that sensitivity pass really fairly quickly sometimes in a month we're usually for sure by the time an administration has left office with very rare in particular exceptions that might have to do with sources and methods which by the way are rarely identified with enough specificity in most documents to be of interest in this context so the half life of time the system by which the records are created semi-automatically classified is so cumbersome and crude that people who create these documents are not in a position to dial and calibrate this very well and then the third point is that the basic standard for classification is would the release of this document damage the national security of the United States so a good way to think about it is if this document were published in the Washington Post tomorrow would that publication actually damage the national security of the United States and actually that's a big that's a pretty high standard not will it be embarrassing not will it be awkward not will it be a nuisance but would it actually damage the security of the American people and that's a pretty high standard to meet actually so people are trained to that basic standard and with these other considerations in mind I think it might facilitate the the declassification process a lot of the declassification process is plagued by a shortage of people who are trained and by the different predispositions of the people having to do the declassification reviews which are often contractors and retirees and some are disposed to open this and some are not but it's the function of this board in a way to insist on the public interest a little more in these cases I could, I would I usually agree entirely with but having had responsibility for classified operations that justice and defense and for classified information and energy I'm not a sanguine that is such a hard standard to meet that there would be damage to the to the national security of the country and I can tell you that Bill Clinton and Janet Reno wanted to say that as a top line they wanted to declassify as much as possible of what we held and the arguments over single pieces of paper went into hours and if you multiply that by the number of pieces of paper over which the most national security agencies have to say grace that's a lot of time and energy so I would urge you to be practical as well as you are thinking about how to make more apparent to the American people what their government has and has not done thank you Jamie and Phil I appreciate that insight and certainly something as the board continues about its business with making these sorts of reviews especially when they're requested by members of Congress which is within the board's remit we certainly will keep those types of things in mind now we're going to move on to our question period we're going to turn it up to respond to comments and questions from the audience that we've received in our email box staff have been monitoring our email box during the meeting and they've received several questions and comments Robert would you like to read the first question please certainly the first question that I have is I am a declassification reviewer we are always short of resources that means staff and technology what do the we do the best we can what can the PIBB do to help get us the resources we need thank you Robert Alyssa would you like to take a first crack at answering that question that is a big issue for us we certainly recognize some of the challenges and that's actually one of the reasons for the question of technology so we both have the reality of the explosion of digital records as Ben said but also the fact that declassification operations are generally our staff unfortunately so our goal is really to think about tools and what we did actually in our report from 2020 was to look at exactly that so encouraging more advanced technology thinking about ways that we could access using technology and then potentially moving forward what does that look like can we use things like the technology modernization fund to encourage payment for those systems how do we make them consistent across the government all of those things are things that we are looking at I think our goal really is to come up with a mechanism to try to come up with possible decisions on declassification and classification and we think technology can play a significant role in expanding that that doesn't mean that it is the end that we're going to have automatic declassification by machine there will obviously be human reviewers but you can certainly expedite that and potentially expand consistency with technology so that's generally our hope and it's certainly something that we've been encouraging we certainly have plans to engage with the branch and with Congress on that issue and moving forward thank you Alyssa Robert can we move on to the next question please very good there are several questions here relating to the Kennedy assassination record in that sense it looks like the question is when will they be made public they are now very old and there is no excuse why the CIA keeps them secret what would they be do to support the declassification and release of these weapons all right I'll take that one and this is following up obviously on the blog post that we made two weeks ago now in response to the letter that we received regarding these records so and first I'll just acknowledge I know that this is a summary of several questions obviously we're not going to get through we've already received 50 questions since the event started but we are going to post responses to the questions we can't get to today on the blog let me just say that we understand as a board your frustration I want to commend the archivist for his comments earlier in this meeting and we are pleased that the National Archives is acting to support the maximum amount of declassification possible lately the board has not studied this issue it was however included as a recommendation in our 2014 setting priorities report however the board will meet with the archives to learn more about these records and to do so before the October deadline that's set by the declassification on this issue so that we can make informed recommendations to the president Alyssa is there anything else you'd like to add here no I think that's a good summary I think that certainly something that the recommendations are the key from our standpoint that's something we can continue to explore all right thank you Robert let's move to the next question sure in addition to the items of interest from the 9-11 commission what other records would the board like to see prioritized for declassification okay Paul Noelle do you want to respond to this you're on mute Paul Noelle although I just joined the piddip I know it has long advocated for prioritizing the declassification of records for certain ones that are more historically important like the State Department does with its foreign relations of the United States series in 2014 the piddip asked the public to suggest topics that we should prioritize they're still interested in hearing what the public says about priorities and what's really important historically if itemizing some of the 9-11 documents helps get it out faster or get a portion of them faster I think we should consider doing that obviously there are resource constraints in the declassification field that not every agency has a big enough staff to work on this but I think we do need to prioritize this as much as possible and if we can also get smaller documents out at the same time of documents I think that's good all right thank you Robert let's move to the next question what can the piddip do to speed up the review of 9-11 commission records okay Michael can you take a crack at this one sure I think the first issue is working through the two challenges including the antiquated review process that still exists across the executive branch the second one is the lack of secure connectivity to accelerate the pace of the declassification clearly our speakers today highlighted the historically important documents that are contained in the commission report the board has received a briefing from the archivist as mentioned before for legislative archives W. Bush library they're clearly engaged and working their process from their end from my perspective addressing the challenges of the antiquated review process the lack of the secure connectivity and prioritizing the 9-11 documents are a fundamental start to speed up the review process of the 9-11 records thanks for the question thank you Michael Robert let's move to the next one President Biden recently included in additional $1 billion to the government's technology modernization fund the TMF given that PIDB's last report focused heavily on the need to modernize the classification and declassification programs and to implement technology to support that process does the board see value in agencies using the TMF to bridge the gap thank you Congressman Gowdy thank you for that question among other things it's a chance for the OD&I to lead executive branch wide change this fund is particularly well suited to help agencies who have limited funds so they can develop solutions to improve classification and declassification in theory to work with national archives and the national declassification center to review electronic records using automated or technology assisted review this is particularly important when the archives is reviewing terabytes of classified presidential records it can also help the national archives modernize electronic record keeping practices across government which has the effect of improving discovery as well as accessibility of electronic and digitized records thank you Tray Robert let's move to the next question since the digitization of information has progressed in the years after 9-11 what should the government be doing now with new technologies to make current historical records like those created by the 9-11 commission previously easier to locate and access and then move forward Alyssa I think you're best situated to answer that one I'm sure happy to answer that and it actually follows on really well from Tray's question I think you know one of the things that we have been thinking about a lot are whether you can use things like machine learning and AI to actually identify records and then also help in the classification and declassification so thinking about that a little bit what we've seen across the government is that there are some projects out there that actually look at using technology to improve declassification decisions and so I think as we look at that process our sense is that if you could expand those to a larger portion of the government so we've seen this department of energy for example sort of pilot projects if you could expand those across the government you actually could potentially make a significant difference I think for us though one of the big challenges is again the reality that the government is dispersed and records are dispersed and so we really do need a single point who can help the development of technology having consistent technology across different agencies potentially so one of the things that we recommended in our report in 2020 was having an executive agent as I think it's in reference already and we suggest that the DOD and I because they can then look at different technologies and think about how those technologies interoperate across different agencies because that is actually critical to figuring out this question and what you want in theory if you are looking for a declassification of a set of records is being able to search across agencies in a way from a declassification standpoint as well so having consistent decisions across agencies requires having some sort of system that does take into account what's happening at other agencies so that's maybe a little bit of a long answer so we think that there is a very important role for technology in even existing records but then as I think it's in reference also in future records the more we can do now the more we will use the process for declassification down the road so it's really critical to start putting technology in place right now Thanks Alyssa I have a kind of a related question to this can you describe the form of the records that the 9-11 commission generated and collected? The commission first of all collected records generated by other agencies or other people which it took in we made various document requests we accessed many many records to in the agencies where they were originally lodged where we used their databases and worked in their files we did this at CIA we did this with the Executive Office of the President we did this a little bit with the Justice Department and FBI records and Summit NSA but we also brought a lot of other people's records in-house and those were then either returned to agencies or became part of our records we of course have our own emails to each other and lots of records internally in the staff both paper and email for all of our important interviews we recorded those interviews in what we called MFRs memoranda for the record which were designed to create some institutional memory you can get a very good feel for the kind of records we relied on looking at the footnotes to the 9-11 commission report in that respect so in the case of the records here these are all, so these are paper records the MFRs of course they may be backed up electronically in some way and then there are successive drafts of the commission report too and different drafts being circulated back and forth at different stages of different chapters which are hard to piece together and records related to the relevant staff and all of that the bottom line then is that our core records are these MFRs and here and there there are internal memos we sent to the commissioners for example we sent memos to the commissioners about various document access issues including the detainee issues that Jamie mentions Jamie also alluded to the problems of presentation by the Air Force and the FAA of what happened on the morning of 9-11 the commission actually created a referral to the Department of Justice and IGs on that issue that was a written document one could access so there are written documents emails MFRs some documents obtained from other agencies I would add a couple of comments when Philip mentions that we review documents into two it means that these documents for the most part did not leave the relevant agencies so if you were really trying to piece together what we saw you would need to go to each of the constituent agencies and see what you could reconstruct that becomes pretty important when you look for the records for example that Phil refers to having to do with the presidential daily brief that was a record of the Bush Administration National Security Council and presumably it is found there rather than in our records second I think one of the interesting sets of records would be the staff reports the way we structured our factual findings if you will is that the staff made for us often in public in the public setting of our hearings and then we had hearings on those and those we didn't adopt in total everything that the staff reported or found but they were real-time findings that could be of interest he mentions a referral by which people should understand was meant a referral for potential criminal prosecution certainly investigation by investigative agencies that had and have those authorities and the last thing I would mention is we were on an incredibly tight timetable at the end and the actual packing up of our information which included whatever the individual commissioner had was I wouldn't call it chaotic but it wasn't exactly the most orderly process and therefore I mean certainly there were not clear filing systems integrating documents across across people so you know that's just one thing for you to think about is if there are records that are being shipped to the archives that there be some time in which to do that properly so that they can be searched in the future thank you both that's very helpful to our search as we begin to search for some of the records that we identified today what to move to the next question Robert lots of questions here would the board comment on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on agency declassification program I'm happy to discuss this okay great go ahead sure so the board has not we've not formally taken a look at the impact of COVID on the declassification programs but I think in our interactions with agencies and observing the rules for instance the archive has largely been almost entirely remote and not permitted to go to the office during this time period agencies have had differing policies on access to their facilities but of course particularly in the beginning largely restricted to mission essential personnel because of the impact so one would of course is going to expect that this is not going to help with the backlog of the Cops sky documents it has certainly impacted the board's work we have not met in person since congress reauthorized the board in December of 2019 and as mentioned we have five new members and none of us have met in person because of the impact of COVID so we look forward hopefully to getting back to more normal operations and getting back to in person I think this does also yet again emphasizing the need for agencies to have electronic tools and communication systems and technology to be able to proceed with their work whether it's in a challenging setting like COVID or even under normal operation so I think this there will be some lessons learned from the COVID situation and hopefully once again emphasizing the need to modernize these systems thank you Ben Robert let's move on to the next one I'm sure I'm looking at the clock I hope we have time for at least two kind of detailed questions here the first is what efforts are being made to apply existing technologies like better network connectivity between agencies or even artificial intelligence for locating and searching records to address the backlog in paper records is there anything that the White House the executive branch can do to adapt information technology to deal with old paper records thanks Robert okay John do you want to take a crack at this sure I sense a theme coming up there when it comes to me maybe it was the same problem we've been banging for a while but that's a good question but we don't really know the answer to what we do know is that the inspector general with the intelligence community actually had an investigation for the lack of connectivity between the intelligence communities information act components and I think that was started in 2018 and we're not sure yet of just all the progress that's been made or not made on that we also know from a briefing that was given by the National Archives that the National Archives and the National Declassification Center they'll act secure access so as a beginning the most basic premise of this whole modernization effort is that everybody needs to have a system that allows them to have secure technology so they can communicate with one another and they can do that electronically that's part of it after that though I still think we come back to the same notion that somebody has to leave this effort and so the director of national intelligence we think surely could lead and should lead across the agency effort that would modernize all the technology and then support a more effective and efficient classification so yes actually connectivity is very very important but it's more than that as well thank you and I'll just quickly ask Phil or Jamie this is the 9-11 report kind of hinted at this connectivity problem between the different agencies anything you want to kind of steer us in the right direction with or anything I hate to frustrate you that 17 years later we're still encountering the same problems but we I'd love your opinion on this I mean my sorry go ahead Phil my impression is the connectivity is much better that a number of fusion centers have been created it's still a little collugy when you see multiple monitors and multiple computers on people's desks but they're patched together reasonably well I think the movement to cloud technology particularly if the technologies can talk to each other will help a lot and allow agencies that are a bit behind to skip some generations that they've missed in general the situation has gotten better the creation of the National Counterterrorism Center was a huge step forward in the terrorism case it was a fusion center it pooled a lot of domestic and foreign information really fruitfully and I think has worked pretty well over the years we argued that need to know needed to be replaced by the mantra of need to share what happens then is the pendulum oscillates so then everyone said need to share then you get the Snowden case and people are worried that we're sharing too much that people are getting access to stuff they shouldn't get access to and handing it to Wikipedia and then there's a reaction back there are different arguments about how to control digital accesses now using technology in more refined ways which by the way I think is a fruitful way to look at this so that you leave digital fingerprints when you access information and people who want to review the propriety of access can go back and do that so in other words I think the technology gives us the ability now in a way that didn't exist as much in the 1990s to do need to share in an appropriate and controlled way as long as people are purposeful about what it is they're trying to do and who needs to be in the conversation. Thank you Phil and Jim I appreciate your insight Robert I think we have time for one last question. That's great if I can summarize to do justice to just one more question someone asked as a researcher on the topic of 9-11 I have submitted several mandatory declassification requests for the declassification of records in this collection over over several years very few have completed the MDR process would the presenters or the CIDB have thought somehow to navigate this process and break the log jam in the declassification process. Well I'll make a few comments and then turn to Paul Noel for his take and I look you know again the board is here to advocate for the maximum release possible under the regulations and certainly hearing this type of feedback is very important to us and it demonstrates the key public interest in making sure that there is maximum release and that these records that Jamie and Phil describe in depth see the light of day and knowing that there's a sticking point in the process is very very helpful to us obviously take stepping back level to a bit of a strategic look at it this points at a general problem with the antiquated nature of our system that applies to other historical issues and so of course we're looking at advising President Biden on systematic changes that need to be made as well. Paul Noel anything else you'd like to add? You're on mute. Paul Noel you're on mute. You hear me now. Sorry. Normally the MBR process is for executive agency and some of the 9-11 commission records are all of them are in this sort of hybrid situation with the legislative archives rather than the executive branch and so I'm not sure how the MBR works with those documents I'd have to look into that but yes the MBR process in general is pretty backed up so it doesn't surprise me that this is not proceeding fast through that mechanism. All right great and we'll just endow it to the staff we're going to take a look at that as well as part of this process so we've run out of time first off Robert thank you for monitoring the email inbox and for reading through the questions obviously there's still many questions that we haven't been able to get to and as I said before we'll be posting answers to these questions on the blog and a website so if you still have a question you can send it to the PIDB email address that we mentioned in the beginning but I'll give it to you again which is PIDB at narrow.gov Thank you all for attending our virtual meeting this afternoon and most importantly thank you to our speakers who were so generous with their time and to the ISU staff who make meetings like this possible. Thank you very much.