 Welcome everyone. As you said to the mandatory declassification review forum, I will now hand things over to Bill Carpenter, Senior Program Analyst. Thank you. Welcome to the 2023 NDR conference here at the National Archives. So we've got a room full of people here in the Jefferson Room. We've got people participating remotely through the WebEx program. We have our ISO director, Mark A. Bradley. We have a panel of government MDR professionals. We've got William Burr from the National Security Archive and we've got a period of questions and answers at the end. So we'll be taking questions from you all. We'll be taking questions from the remote participants and we'll be running right up until 230. I'd like to start by introducing Mark A. Bradley. Mark A. Bradley has been the Director of ISO since 2016. He serves as the Executive Secretary of the Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel and the Public Interest Declassification Board. He's the Chairman of the National Industrial Security Program Advisory Board and a number of other boards that are just as important. Previously served as the Director of FOIA Declassification Pre-Publication Review of the National Security Division in the Office of Law and Policy at the Department of Justice. While at the Department he served as the Deputy Counsel for Intelligence Policy and the Acting Chief for Intelligence Oversight. Before joining DOJ, Mr. Bradley served as a CIA Intelligence Officer and Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan's Legislative Assistant for Foreign Affairs and Intelligence Matters as his last legislative director. He co-drafted the legislation that established the Public Interest Declassification Board. Mr. Bradley remains a member of the District of Columbia Bar. He worked as a criminal defense lawyer at the District of Columbia defending indigents accused of serious crimes. He's an author. The Society for History and Federal Government awarded him a very principled boy, his biography of Soviet spy Duncan Lee. It's 2015 George Pendleton Prize. The best book written by a federal historian. And my personal favorite is Blood Runs Coal. Here's a 2020 book on the Jolonsky murders and the battle for the United Mine Workers of America. He's a five-bit cap of graduate Washington Lee holds an MA in Modern History from Oxford where he was a Rhodes Scholar, JD from University of Virginia, and he's retiring in June. So with that he has some comments which I'm excited to hear about what's happening in declassification and is one of his final acts. Thank you. Thank you, Bill. Gracious introduction. Yeah, I spent most of my federal career on boards. You can take that for what it's worth. I mean, it's not... Anyway, thank you all for coming. We started doing these in 2017, I think. And we're running quite well in COVID hit. And then we got knocked off our wheels as so much else did in the federal government. So I'm delighted to have these back. We started them because I thought that the Interagency Security Classification Appeals panel, the ICAP, is one of the crown jewels of declassification. And if it's about openness and you all should know more about exactly how it operates and its inner workings and also its challenges, especially the latter. I've been involved with the ICAP now for 20 years. I was the DOJ's sitting representative. I've been the acting chair for a number of years and now I'm the executive secretary. So I've got a pretty good idea about what it does. And I can honestly say this, that I have never been around a more hardworking group of public servants and legal ASONs who actually staff the board. They do most of the work. And I can say this, not only as executive secretary, but also as a taxpayer, that I've never seen a group who's more dedicated to its mission. And I think we're all very lucky to have such first-rate people. In fact, several of them are sitting in this room. That said, as wonderful as the ICAP is, it's got challenges. It's got massive challenges. Right now, the backlog sets at about 1200 cases. Interestingly enough, about three requesters are responsible for three quarters of the backlog. That's a bit of a problem, isn't it? Because I think when the authors of the Executive Order that created the ICAP never envisioned it being a, how can we put this, a cottage industry or a monopoly for this just handful of requesters. I think it was meant to be much bigger than that and play a much bigger role than that. You know, originally it started out as an opportunity to mostly get documents out of presidential libraries. And then as FOIA declined, I don't mean decline, decline. I mean, it became more absorbed by so many applications for FOIAs and also so many court cases that MDRs became a more viable way to get material. And actually, frankly, you have a better chance of getting releases under MDRs than you do a lot of FOIAs. So I take my hand off to the savvy requesters who have found that route. The problem is, though, it's become, again, a captive audience for, and we spend a lot of resources and a lot of time serving a very small community. I, as Bill said, I mean, my time is running short. I leave my federal service on June 30th and retire, and I promise never to file an MDR or another FOIA. I won't. The only thing I'm taking from my office is this cup, so you won't be looking for me. But that said, I mean, how do we make the ice cap into what I think it should be? One obvious reason, one obvious reason, one obvious answer to that is to give it more money. It takes its money out of NARA. It goes to NARA, then it goes to ISOO, which I'm the director of, and it takes its money out of ISOO. Now, we provide most of the administrative support for it. I would like to see agencies who sit on the ice cap actually contribute more in terms of resources and funding actually supported, especially in technology. Bill and the ice cap liaisons have made tremendous strides in using other agencies' technologies. We've been able to actually do some of our meetings remotely, and I think, Kerry, I think if I'm right, the ODNI actually has hosted some. So, I mean, we're reaching into more of an us instead of just ISOO doing this stuff. But funding is critical. Again, I don't have to tell you where we are as we rush towards the debt ceiling. Generous interpretation is going to be one hell of a fight down to the finish. And if one side has its way, we'll only get a 1% increase in funding for the entire federal agencies across the board. That's not going to carry the mail for NARA or the ice cap. But if we do get, how can I put this, a more clear-eyed view of the problem? Again, there's been, since I've been involved in this kind of work, I've never seen such scrutiny as this past year over classification and declassification. It's some of it's because I'm on a lot of those modes because what's happened in Delaware, but it's brought a lot of attention to it, and especially up on the hill. Now, that's good and that's bad. Some of the ideas are better thought out than others. But almost the first question I get whenever I appear before one of the committees up there is, what do you need to do your job more effectively than the old bureaucrats answer? I need more people and I need more money, right? So we need that. We need more technology. More systemically, though, there is a move afoot. It started last June to overhaul, reform, change Executive Order 13526. That's where the ice cap is located. That effort is still ongoing, not as quickly as I would like, but it's still out there. And I have told the NSC in my annual report to the president, telling them again, in this my last annual report, I'd like to see the ice caps authorities changed. I'd like to see it have the ability to refuse to take cases. Right now, most of these cases come from federal agencies who fail to honor the time commitment that they're supposed to address appeals. And quite frankly, there's no incentive under the order for them to do that. There's no punishment. There's no downside to that. So it seems to me the ice caps should be like the Supreme Court having the ability to turn down cases. I would like to see it focus on cases of the highest public interest and of the greatest historical significance. I would like to see it become a board whose decisions have precedent. Once they are decided, that's it. They are just like the Supreme Court decision. They are the law of the land in declassification. But we're not going to re-litigate this again. These decisions have been decided and that's it. Done. Finished. Game set match. I would also like to see something that I have fought for for a number of years. And I go back and forth on his chances, but I would like to see a member of the public sit on the ice cap. That's a pretty radical idea. That member would be somebody who's willing to go through a full background check, just like the rest of us who have clearances, who sign in a non-disclosure agreement, and who are willing to abide by that agreement. But to come into the purpose, and maybe only a limited purpose, of helping the ice cap decide what historical documents were the greatest significance for the American people to know. And I don't think that as good a job as the government historians do, and the government representatives on the ice cap, that we couldn't benefit from having the public weigh in more on what the American people should know. I think it would elevate trust in the board. And I think that it would add a fresh set of eyes to a different kind of problem. Way back when I used to practice in front of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and even that court now has cleared lawyers from the bar who come in and argue special cases or special points before the court. And these lawyers, as I say, go through the background checks, they sign the NDAs, and they are of enormous benefit to the court to bring another perspective then on the Fourth Amendment. Why we can't do that on the ice cap on historical records, I don't see why we couldn't. I think it would be a real step forward. Now, the devil's in the details. Who would that person be? How would you select that person? Would it be somebody from the American Historical Association? Would it be from something else? I don't know. Those are granular details. Luckily, I'll be down in the Chando Valley and not going to have to worry about. But anyway, I would hope that that idea of having the public participate more in the ice cap would be something that would gain some traction. I've never lost my fundamental belief in the American people as arbiters of their own future and their own constitution and their own liberties. And I think probably the best way to do that is to get them fully engaged in the process. So with that, I bid you adieu. I've had a really interesting career, but I'm ready for something else. And with that, Bill, I'll turn it back over to you. Thank you very much. Before we get to our panel of agency MDR folks, I'll give you an ice cap update. Ice cap has been working away throughout the pandemic. I'll give you an idea of what we've done, what's coming forward, and what the issues are now. For those of you who don't literally can breathe, ice cap is the Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel established under Executive Order 13526. Six members plus one, plus one is CIA. Six members starting around the table where we meet every month. Department of Justice, Central Intelligence Agency, State Department, National Security Council, National Archives, Office of Director of National Intelligence, Department of Defense. Four functions and four functions only. It's unusual for a week to go by where I don't get a question from somebody in the world asking the ice cap to do something. We have four functions established under the orders. Appeals of classification challenges, authorized folders of classified information are expected and encouraged to challenge the classification information coming across their desk. The highest appeal level is the ice cap. Only handful of these come our way each year. Declassification exemptions. An original classification authority out there in the government has the authority to classify information for 25 years. Keeping the classification of information beyond 25 years requires approval from the ice cap. This is expressed in the form of a declassification guide. Mandatory declassification review appeals, what we spend most of our time with, what we spend most of our time today talking about, and then the fourth function, appropriately informed, the public and senior agency officials of ice cap decisions. There's the provision in section three, agencies using, shall consider the decisions of the panel in conducting reviews under automatic, systematic, and mandatory review. So as a result, it's important for the ice cap to make its decisions known. We do that through a website. We post five, but we post Americans with disability act compliant versions of our declassified documents as we can. We also have status law. So those of you, everybody can download every quarter and update its listing of each active appeal that the ice cap is dealing with. Productivity, 2020-22. I returned the ice cap staff in the summer of 2020 after a detailed National Security Council for about a year and a half out of the only person allowed to come in in the office. We processed ice cap appeals electronically with agencies also who had limited time in their classified areas to do work. But we did it. 2020, we processed two appeals, three documents, 214 pages on Soviet space and an Air Force oral history. Completely remotely. 2021, another remote year. Six appeals, 43 documents, almost 2,000 pages, including significant releases from 9-11 commission. Center for legislative archives, a collection in this building. A history of telemetry also out of the National Security Agency. How do we know about Russian rocketry? Telemetry. 2022, a time where we were getting back into in-person meetings as well as coordination electronically. 21 appeals, 137 documents, and over 1,700 pages. Significant three appeals out of the Clinton Library. We started to post these up on our own website very recently, but they're also available at the Clinton Library. These are documents from the Clinton administration regarding Victor Boot, the Soviet Russian arms tracker. Very interesting stuff. New stuff, stuff that we haven't dealt with before. DOD, intelligence community, National Security Council information. Bush Cheney 9-11 commission interview. Never released before. Sitting president and vice president, talking to a presidential commission about the terrorist attacks in 2001. Very little redacted. Very little redacted. High public interest in this one. Mr. Bradley talked about this idea of the ICAP focusing on appeals of high public interest. We've been trying to do that. The most important thing that we can do as the ICAP staff is identify documents that allow the ICAP to spend their time in the most impactful way. Outlook for 2023. Year to date, we've got decisions on nine appeals, nine documents, almost 1,000 pages. Korea policy review from 1969. President Nixon told his government, review our policy in Korea that resulted in a two-volume work, decided upon two different appeals out of the office of secretary of defense. Those are being posted as we speak. Hearts and minds. Oh, that's a particularly favorite of mine. It's been a long time on that. It carries, she's shaking her head. It's a terribly important document. So the US government agencies conduct, they have historians, they do classified history. This mystery was published in 1999 on CIA support to US organizations, anti-communist organizations during the Cold War, National Student Association, American Friends in the Middle East, entities like that. Very little has been officially declassified on CIA relationship to these organizations before. Now a lot more has. So you'll see that it was released. So one's hearts and minds, but oh yeah, 60-day appeal period. So that won't be released until the end of June. But decision's been made. And unless an agency had appeals that decision to the president in the next 50 days, that will be released at the end of June. It takes a lot of time. 9-11 commission interview with Prince Turkey bin Faisal, Saudi intelligence chief, classified confidential. As you can imagine, it's an interesting document. Some significant foreign policy implications. But yeah, so the head of a foreign government's intelligence organization talking to the US body about terrorist attacks in 2001. Not been released in any form. It will be released soon. So number of appeals remains low. We have seen, we saw in 2015, 16, 17 spikes in the number of appeals, valid appeals, coming to the ice cap from a handful of requesters, Department of Defense, command histories from decades and decades, from combatant commands, from regional command. Every last one of these being requested, one year deadline hits, appeal to the ice cap, valid appeals. That stopped. We're not seeing that. The last couple years, handfuls of appeals coming in 2023. So far, eight appeals, Christian, eight. Yeah, not very many. So the pipeline is, it's as if appellants understand that the ice cap should do what Mr. Bradley said it should do. Decide upon those appeals really, really matter. Let the agencies, for example, continue to process those appeals, even if it takes, those requests, even if it takes years. Number of unresolved appeals remains high. We still have our backlog. It's in our spreadsheet. You can see where they're coming from and how long it takes. Our prioritization processes really haven't changed that much over the last several years. We post on our website the principles that the ice cap staff use to prioritize appeals. We do care about older appeals. We do care about Mr. Revnitsky's appeal. From decades ago, Louis B. Nichols-Hawks requested when they were in the custody of FDI. They're now in the custody of the National Archives being processed by the National Declassification Center. His appeal is valid. His appeal is for the material that remains classified after processing. We will work on that. We care about the type of request. That one requester who really needs a document, that document that's the key to understanding. Let's, as an example, CIA support to U.S. anti-communist groups during the early Cold War. It has an impact not just for that requester, but for everybody who cares about U.S. Cold War history. We look for appeals that have gone through the agency, the complete agency appeal process. Appeals that have gone through the CIA's review board. They've, what's come out, the request and appeal process is as clean as the agency can make it. That's something that the ice cap will prioritize. Nonetheless, we do see appeals, highly complicated appeals that haven't gone through the agency appeal process that we might prioritize. So it's a complicated process. But it's what we get paid to do. Christian, next slide. Schiffgear's a little degree classification guide updates. This is of interest mostly to those agency people in the audience. Those people who are responsible for conducting review, automatic mandatory and systematic review. Those folks have known that the ice cap reviews declassification guides every five years and requires an update every five years for these milestones of automatically classification at 25, 50, and 75. The requirement under the implementing directive to review this stuff every five years is a requirement for agencies to do that review. That agency internal review to make sure that you all understand your authorities and make sure you've got, you don't have new weapons systems that require an exemption. Agencies only need to come to the ice cap if you've got new exemption categories. You've got a new weapon system that's going to be due for automatic 25 or 50. New exemption milestones. You've got a program that's now turning 50 years old that's so sensitive. It requires that extraordinary exemption at 50 and perhaps 75 years and we know that that exists. Or agencies that haven't needed to have an automatic declassification program until comparatively recently. It might have only been founded 20 something years ago. So they won't need to do automatic declassification until their records come due to automatic declassification. Those are the people who need to come to ice cap. The ice cap has spent time in the last couple months reviewing updates from the office of secretary of defense in the department of the army. Looking for new milestones, new exemption category elements that they need. So those have been approved. We will update our ISO notice that lists those agencies that have exemption authority at these milestones. The OSD will be updated, army will be updated, and perhaps others. We'll look out for that. Any questions, you can contact me about what your agency needs to do. We have an ISO notice that explains this that explains that every agency does not need to come before the ice cap during this review cycle. It's kind of inside baseball, but it has implications even for the researcher community, because you all need to know what agencies have authority for exemption at these different milestones. We can be as open as we can. Next slide. Mr. Bradley also mentioned that for the ice cap to have as much impact as it possibly can, its decisions need to have precedent. Its decisions need to be followed at agencies. Remember that fourth function of the ice cap, appropriately inform senior agency officials in the public of decisions. How will we know that the ice caps decisions have impact in agencies? They'll know through oversight. They'll know by ISOO people going to agency programs, asking them if there's a process to incorporate ice cap decisions in their declassification guidance, asking them if they use these processes. For years, I and my colleagues at the Information Security Oversight Office had an oversight program for agency automatic programs. We collected information. We requested data from agencies about their auto declassed programs. We had trips to agencies. We looked into the work. We looked at the outcomes of the reviews, bad referrals, missed equities, things like that. Over a decade, that kind of that oversight process improved automatic declassification outcomes at agencies. I think agency people will agree that in 2015, the reviews coming out of agencies were better than reviews in 2005. An oversight program for mandatory declassification review processes at agencies will collect information about MDR processes, share best practices across the government for MDR, and encourage agencies through the oversight process to use ice cap appeals during their review. Now, you'll see if you look into old ISOO reports. This is the annual report to the president that ISOO has been doing for a very long time. The ice cap report has always been a part of that. But the reporting of mandatory declassification review numbers, you'll see there's only ever a handful of big players here. DoD, enormous player for MDR. This past year, 11,000 requests in 2022. That's 21. I've got the numbers. And thousands and thousands. It's orders of magnitude above others. National Archives are big players, certainly because of the presidential library system, the National Recarification Center. Below that, State Department, big one, CIA. Other agencies, handfuls, handfuls of numbers. So we'll only be focusing our oversight process on those agencies with significant MDR programs. So by definition, that will be in DoD, the various entities under DoD. State Department, CIA, and National Archives. That's our goal. That's a long-term process. And what we know from the oversight process is coming in like auditors or coming in like inspectors is not overly helpful. Working with agencies to gather information, understand what their concerns are. That's where oversight has its most impact. So that's what we'll be doing. Myself and my colleagues will be contacting agencies this summer gathering information about MDR programs and working out an oversight progress process for the coming years. Next slide. So agency MDR program, the panel. I am happy to introduce my panelists. If I can find my bios, which are over here. They are here somewhere. Where the heck are they? Ah, here they are. They're in front of me. Stephanie Oriabore. In order, you'll be hearing this. Stephanie, she's the director of Archival Operation Division in the Legislative Archives, Presidential Libraries, comma, and Museum Services Office of NARA. She's responsible for archival policy development and oversight for the Presidential Libraries and the Center for Legislative Archives, which includes supporting their declassification program. She's also responsible for the administration of the Gore, Cheney, Biden, and Pence Vice Presidential Records. She began her career as an archivist at the George H.W. Bush Library and has more than 20 years experience with providing access to Presidential and Vice Presidential Records. Moving down the line, Don McElwain currently serves as a supervisory archivist and director of the classified FOIA slash MDR Division in the National Declassification Center. It's the NDC and has since January 2010. He directs a staff that processes access to manned requests for classified federal and transferred Presidential Records in the custody of the National Archives. He previously served as an archivist in several NARA units and began his NARA career as an archived technician in 1999. He served as an instructor for several courses, including Managing the Life Cycle of National Security Information, the Modern Archives Institute, and the Introduction to Archives for Archives Technicians. Kerry Lewis. Kerry currently serves as the Deputy Chief of the Information Management Office, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. She has 15 years experience in Information Management, Policy, and Declassification, and has previously served at the NSE and the Department of State. Kerry served as the ice cap liaison for five years and in that time represented three agencies, Department of State, NSE, and ODNI. Finally, with J.D. Smith, I'm glad you made it on time. Thank you. I was very worried. John D. Smith currently serves as the Acting Chief of the OSD, that's the Office of Secretary of Defense, Records and Declassification Division. In his role as Acting Chief, he serves as the Program Manager for the OSD Records and Information Management Program and the OSD Declassification Program, which includes OSD Automatic Declassification Review, the OSD Joint Staff Mandatory Declassification Review Program, and the DOD Foreign Relations of the United States Declassification Review Program, and the DOD NATO Declassification Program. He's an Information Security Information Access and Records Management Professional with over 15 years experience with the Department of Defense. Mr. Smith also serves as the DOD member of the U.S. delegation to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization Archives Committee. We have a number of questions for you all, but we'll talk about them before we talk about the questions. What do you want to say about your programs? Okay, well, I'll go ahead and get started. I'm here representing 15 presidential libraries as well as the Center for Legislative Archives. Our holdings include a vast number of collections including presidential papers, vice presidential papers, donated collections, and the records of the United States House and Senate, as well as the records of legislative agencies and commissions. As part of the National Archives, our core mission is to provide access to archival records entrusted into our care. NDR Mandatory Declassification Review requests are just one slice of the big pie that is access at the National Archives and at the presidential libraries and the Center for Legislative Archives. However, it is a bigger slice at some of our libraries because it is the only avenue by which the public can request records at those libraries because they are donated collections. But without diving deep into the different types of presidential records and the access rules governing House and Senate records, I just want to talk a little bit about how people request NDRs at the libraries and how that affects our backlogs and how we process those records. For the most part, people are requesting records, classified records and holdings at the presidential libraries and at the Center for Legislative Archives based on our withdrawal sheets. When archivists on staff have processed a series, a collection, and have identified material that is classified, instead of serving that, we of course serve withdrawal sheets. Our savvy researchers take the time to look at what's in the open file as well as those withdrawal sheets and that really allows them to pinpoint key records that they are truly interested in versus more of a phishing expedition that you see with FOIA requests. But that's not the only way that our researchers are accessing and pinpointing records for mandatory classification review requests. Some of the libraries have proactively released their folder title inventories of key series and collections in their holdings. And what has happened is that researchers have gone and said, I want this folder and this folder. And that can represent hundreds of documents. And so what is one NDR request is a massive endeavor for the National Archives and the equity holding agencies to handle the declassification of. And then finally, though this is not the only three ways, there are citations in government reports that our researcher community rely on to also identify classified records for which they want access. So government reports like the 9-11 commission report where the commissioners had pulled resources from across the government and then cited those in the final report. We do have our researchers who sit down open those reports and are studying the footnotes and will contact the Bush President George W. Bush Presidential Library as well as the Center for Legislative Archives to access those records. And so all of that to be said that we do have backlogs at the Presidential Libraries and at the Center of Legislative Archives. Some of those libraries have fairly small backlogs. The Obama Library has less than 10 NDR cases in its backlog versus the Reagan Library that has more than 7,000 cases in its backlog. And there's a lot that goes into that. One, as I mentioned, the ways that people access NDR to NDR and they do not have a large portion of their collections available to the public. So there aren't withdrawal sheets for researchers to be able to then file NDR requests. And because of that sufficient specificity requirement of the NDR that prohibits a lot of NDR requests versus a library like the Reagan Library that has a massive collection that they have done quite a bit of review and release. And so you have those withdrawal sheets and the file inventories and so their NDR backlog is quite massive. But also what goes into those backlogs and what we definitely want the researcher community to understand is that we have very little onboard declassification guidance authority at the presidential libraries and at the Center for Legislative Archives. Even though we know that information has been declassified in some ways, we ourselves cannot take that authority without consulting with the relevant equity holding agencies. And for some of the records in our holdings, they are incredibly complex with multiple equities. And so instead of looking at a memo and saying, oh, I just need to refer this to the State Department, get a response from the State Department and then I can proceed with releasing, I look at a memo and I see that I have to refer to the State Department, to CIA, to OSD, to FBI, a whole gamut of agencies and departments. And so once we do that, those go into those agencies and departments backlog of consultations. And so it is just a cascading effect of the more equities, the more complex a record, the longer it's going to take for it to be go through the NDR process and then be produced. And there's one other thing that is very unique to our presidential libraries, Reagan Ford. And that is the Presidential Records Act. The Presidential Records Act was passed in 1978 and it affirmatively declared that records created by the President and his staff and the Vice President and his staff are government records and are to be transferred to the National Archives at the end of the presidential administration. Part of that is that in the five years after the end of the administration, those records are not subject to NDR or FOIA requests. But at that five-year mark, we are accepting requests. And so we process them like we process other requests at other libraries. The one difference is that the Presidential Records Act requires a 60 working day notification period in which we inform the former representatives of the former president and the incumbent president that we intend to release records. And in that time period, they have an opportunity to review any records we are proposing to release and make a determination on an assertion of a claim of executive privilege. So on top of all of the process that we have to follow in terms of consulting and referring records to equity-holding agencies before release, we also have that added notification period layered on top. So that also does affect how long it takes for an individual NDR request to be processed. And when you have a backlog of 7,000 requests, that becomes amplified in a somewhat frightening way for our researcher community. But I say all of that to say that we have an incredible, dedicated team of archivists, archives specialists, and archives technicians who truly know these collections. And they have worked with them. Some of the archivists on our teams have worked with these collections for multiple decades. And so they really do want to partner with the researcher community to help them identify the records that are most salient to their research. I say that saying that that backlog that we're dealing with is not a reflection of the dedication and the commitment of the people who consider this their life work. And with that, we are now partnering with our colleagues at the National Declassification Center. In 2018, the National Archives decided to consolidate all of the classified holdings of the presidential libraries, as well as the vice presidents records that are in that my office is responsible for in the National Declassification Center in College Park, Maryland. The purpose of this was really to leverage the successes, the process and workflows that the NDC had established in addressing its automatic declassification backlog and turn that machine basically towards these collections. And so in late 2019, we started moving those classified holdings from the libraries. And currently, and this is where I have fun is trying to list all the libraries. Eisenhower, Kennedy, Ford, Carter, George W. Bush, Obama, and the Trump presidential records are all now at the NDC. And unfortunately, COVID-19 intervened because we had moves scheduled in 2020 to be with all of them to be complete at the end of the summer. But we have now resumed those moves and we anticipate that we will move the remaining holdings from the five libraries in my office to the NDC within the year. And I know I just said we have talented staff that are now going to be physically separated from their collections, but I will say that it is truly a partnership. And for those collections that have already been moved, we have worked very closely with the National Declassification Center. We have established firm lines of communication. We have also established SOPs to to make sure that nothing slips through the cracks and the expertise at the libraries are not lost, is not lost as the collections are being managed and administered here in the D.C. area. We hope to build on that. And Don and I are often in communication about the challenges presented by consolidation. But what I would say to the researcher community is that it is not a concrete wall now between the libraries and the NDC and that we are working together to partner to move those backlog, reduce those backlogs as much as we can. And one other thing to note is that you will still be going to the lot. You can still go to the libraries. You can still file your NDR request there. And all of those records will be released at the libraries. It's not that they're staying here. And the thought is that this move of the classified holdings is temporary and that once those records are declassified, they will be moved back to the libraries. And I just want to end this with speaking to your say whatever you want to say. I wanted to talk about the three wishes I had for declassification in NDRs. The first one is a commitment of resources, staff and technology to handling born digital classified records. I know that we have a lot of our backlogs that are represented here are really reflective of textual records. But that is the tip of the iceberg. And we have been dealing with electronic records since the Reagan administration. And the fact that the archivist, the Clinton library to handle a NDR for classified email have to print out an email, send it and refer it that way and serve it to a requester. That's problematic. We should be able to move our declassification process forward. And what that takes is truly a commitment of time and resources to focus on that and not just the declassification process, but focus on it from point of creation and records management through the declassification process. The second thing is I would say just build on the communication channels with researchers. I just encourage the researcher community to see us as allies and partners in their research. We are not trying to withhold anything. And what we are our core is to connect people with records. And so really trust us that we are trying to do that to the best of our ability and the best of our knowledge and expertise. And then the final thing is more declassification authority for the National Archives. The process I explained of identifying the equities and then having to refer all of those, refer records to all of those equities is time consuming and cost prohibitive in many ways. And I think that we can approach this in a smarter, more streamlined way. And that's all I have. Thank you, Stefan. Thank you. And I'll start out by saying it's been a really great learning experience and a great partnership working with our friends at the Presidential Libraries and in particular, Stephanie. I think we were handed a big deal and then COVID came on. And as a result, things got slowed down. But if it wasn't for the wonderful cooperative spirit between the libraries and some of the NDC staff, I think we would be a lot further behind. Again, I'm Don McOwen. I run the FOIA and MDR shop at the NDC. Our team's mission is similar to that of NAR, which is to process access demands for security classified archival records. How do we do that? My vision and what I try to instill in my whole team is to build on the work of the NDC and now Presidential Libraries who have done systematic review to build on that work and to be recognized as honest brokers between researchers who have the right to ask for their government's information, especially historical archival information, and those equity holders. We want to be partners with the agencies as well. And again, we're looking at historical archival records. And I can't stress that enough that even the most recent libraries, even the Obama Library, these are records that are at least five years old, going back to some of our federal records from even the late 40s and early 50s, going back to the oldest library that we currently have, and that's the Eisenhower Library, with hundreds of open mandatory requests. We would like to see agencies, when we send out consultations, look at those consultations through that historical lens. The fact that ISU makes declassification guides available to declassification professionals, I think is a valuable, but possibly even underused tool in processing mandatory review requests for historical archival records. So my team currently is 12 archivists and archive specialists. I have two vacancies, and we have been approved to hire five additional new people in the coming year. So that means 19 people when we're fully staffed to handle the backlog of federal classified FOIAs and mandatory review requests, and presidential. And as Stephanie pointed out, we're on track to transfer those other big libraries, and those are some of those backlogs are substantial to process those. I see a lot of what we do as a service. Again, as Stephanie pointed out, we don't have a whole lot of authority to declassify anything. I think one of the ideas behind the presidential consolidation was to leverage the resources here in the Washington area to allow our agency partners who have people on site in College Park. If not, make decisions on is this their equity to help us triage that. And again, in my dawn's perfect world and a beautiful sunny day, we would not be sitting there at a copy machine or a CD burner, sending physical media consultations to agencies. We would be able to send that through what's it term of art, the high side or classified networks directly, because we're getting more born digital. We're digitizing more born paper. This going back and forth the print scan, print scan is a waste of resources. Why can't if I've got a document that needs to go to carry into JD, why can't we leverage technology that exists, the speed up that consultation? Why if OSD has someone on site at archives to already participating in the systematic review projects of the NDC, that by the way, make my life a lot easier, why can't that person render a judgment on whether that really needs to go to OSD FOIA or whether that can be classified. So those are kinds of things that I look at. So our biggest two goals in the NDC classified FOIA and mandatory review shop this year is one the same goal we've had for the last 12 years that I've been involved in this division. That's to reduce our backlog of federal FOIA cases by 10%. We have met that every single year. This year is going to be a challenge as agencies are coming out of COVID and they have their own backlogs to manage as well. There was a time when my office was responsible for nine of the 10 oldest existing FOIAs in the federal government. We were able to clean that up. Now my understanding is when Nixon and Reagan and Clinton FOIAs come to the NDC, Stephanie will be handing me back some of those 10 oldest of the federal government. But that's okay because we've already built this really cool relationship and have battle tested. She mentioned these SOPs. We had to develop SOPs before we had actual work going back and forth and we have battle tested the SOPs. We've continued to improve on them. In fact, it was just a couple of weeks ago. We had a meeting with all the presidential liaison, library liaisons and their partners at the NDC. So the good news for the research community out there is we talk to each other and we can hopefully help you narrow, refine your requests so you can get that out the door. And then the other goal that we had which fortunately we've already met is to log all of the transferred presidential cases into our tracking system, what we call the address system. That's our tracking review redaction system in the NDC. It's not surprising that every library did things just a little bit differently. Fortunately, most of the libraries when they transferred their records to us, they transferred mostly Excel spreadsheets and we were able to massage those and load those into our system. But for those, the 12 people I've got working for me now and the 19 people I hope a year from now, I can say they've got working for me. It's still a big backlog. Let me see if I can find the backlog numbers here. So up until the end of the subject, I'm sorry, what? We lost audio for a moment, but you're back now. Thank you. Okay, I'm back. I will talk loud or talk more closely into the microphone. I'm rarely accused of being soft spoken. But anyway, thank you. I'm back. I have to get my train of thought back on track. Backlog. So we've had this backlog. We've been reducing the backlog. Our current federal backlog of open FOIA and mandatory cases is about 760 cases split roughly 50-50. The inherited or transferred presidential cases, once we got them put into our system, which was really a major task between my archive specialists and our IT support people, we have about 10,000 open cases and over 9,000 of those are open mandatory declassification review requests. So going from about 350 mandatorys to over 9,000 is a daunting challenge. And I like to use a baseball analogy. We're going to play the game the best we can with the players I've got on the field. And I will also say that my staff is a staff of what I would consider all stars. But as most of you all know, you need nine players on the field to field a complete team. I've got all stars, but I feel like sometimes I'm fielding seven. So just to give you an idea of some of the challenges that we're facing. However, I think working cooperatively with our agency partners, working with our friends at presidential libraries and trying to leverage resources. If you're already in the building and we're asking for an opinion on, does this need to go to your agency for consult or even better? You know, we've got some agencies that are willing to give us a decision because the agency FOIA and mandatory review shops don't want to be bombarded necessarily, because they've all got backlogs too. So if we can use technology in the future, if we can use already on site resources, I think we can get those declassified and maybe redacted records back to the libraries, declassified and redacted federal records out to you guys, the research community. And as one of the pillars of NARA, whether you're the presidential, whether you're the federal side, we can do a better job of making access happen. And I look forward to questions from everybody. And I'll turn it over to my friend, Carrie Lewis. All right. Hello. First of all, it's good to be here. And it's good to see so many familiar faces out there. So as Bill mentioned, I work at the ODNI and we have a unique situation, I think in terms of the MDR process, in that we don't have a huge backlog. And I think part of that is due to what Stephanie talked about with the public access requirements under the executive order. So I see our ODNI records are pretty highly classified. We don't typically talk about them much. So it's hard to identify a record to request. So what we find is requesters typically either request records that were created by a different agency in our files, or they mine through congressional reports or press briefings to identify either topics on which they request reports or what have you. But it's a fairly limited universe of records, which are typically requested. Our process is essentially the same as what my colleagues kind of described. Maybe we would do a search for the records, compile everything, do an equity recognition review, identify all of the many agencies. And this is where ODNI is a bit unique in that we sit at the top of the IC. So almost every product that we produce is derived from sources from a variety of different agencies or a host of different agencies, which require consultations with pretty much everybody. So we can identify the record, we can get, we can do that equity recognition review, and then the minute that we shoot it out to the agencies, we kind of lose control, right? And then it's up to the agency to which we send it to, to do their process, some of which we've been informed on occasion can take, like they'll tell us right off the bat, like we'll get this back to you in maybe a year. Right. So it's one of those things where we cannot do much until we have those perspectives back. And I think the other unique thing about ODNI is we're fairly young, right? We come to fruition really in 2005. And so we are still operating under a classification guide, a security classification guide, as opposed to a declassification guide, which as Bill mentioned, kind of hits the scene and becomes the authority once a record turns 25. And once that happens, I think that the criteria shifts, right? Like in terms of what is considered to still be sensitive past that, that benchmark. So oftentimes, you know, we do what we can to reduce as much as we can and to provide as much out to the public as possible. Being cognizant of the fact that the vast majority of the products that we produce are highly classified records. I guess the one key challenge that we have, or there's a few key challenges that we have, and a lot of it echoes, my narrow colleagues had mentioned, is, you know, being able to share information in a fast and efficient environment. We live on essentially the high side, as Don mentioned, and getting information to be able to share with our State Department colleagues or DOD colleagues who live on a secret level network, it can be challenging to be able to do that in an electronic format, right? So again, to my colleagues points, it requires printing things off and putting them in snail mail and hoping that it gets received sometime in the next two months. And then once it does waiting for that, you know, waiting for the confirmation before we can even start really tracking it with another agency, which makes kind of emphasizing the necessity to get stuff back a little bit challenging or requesting prioritization a little bit challenging. So that is a challenge that I think supersedes us all, right? Like it's one of those things that is costly, it is extremely laborious, and it requires all agencies to kind of, to make a huge cultural shift as well as a technological shift and an infrastructure shift that, again, is very costly. So we run into that barrier, we run into the challenge of butting up against agencies who have backlogs, which are extraordinary. And so getting agencies to prioritize our one request, even though it may be small, or it might be tiny, typically, the knee jerk reaction is no, you know, you're in a queue and you'll get it when we get to that stage, which is understandable if at times a little bit maddening. And then I guess the other thing they kind of, we face in the ODNI is oftentimes, once we receive everything back, it become, it initiates a negotiation process. And I think that, especially having served as an ice cap liaison for, for the last few years and really being part of that deliberative process in which we engage on a very minute level, like on a word-by-word or sentence-by-sentence level to try to slice redactions down as much as it is possible to do. And, you know, once we get those consolidated redactions back, making sure whatever is possible to release is actually reflected in that record, again, can just add time. Because the minute that you go back to an agency, it's like, sure, we'll get to it when we're done with these other things, right? But it's hard to provide a justification in advance. It's hard to anticipate what another agency will consider to be sensitive and then provide an argument ahead of, you know, ahead of the curve to help that process along. So oftentimes, it's really a process of you wait until you receive the redactions from another agency, you look and see what they took out, and if there is any room for negotiation, if there's any way to say, listen, this, you know, information on this was released in the press or it was released by the White House, can we, can we release that in this, in this context? Again, it's time consuming, but it is one step that at least I personally feel is warranted to ensure that we do get information out into the public domain. Other than that, like really what we do really reflects the processes I think that have already been and discussed and just being mindful of time, I would like to at least cede some time to my, my OSD colleague. Thanks, Carrie. Stephanie and Dawn. Hello, everyone. I'm glad to see such a high turn out here and hopefully in virtual land for this event. I'd like to thank ISOO and Dr. Carpenter for the invitation and opportunity to speak at events like these, which I hope are provide opportunities for discussion with the public and the promotion of transparency and understanding of the declassification activities of the US government. It's very important and informed citizenry. Again, I'm JD Smith. I'm the acting chief of the OSD, so Office of Secretary of Defense Records and Declassification Division. I reside, my office resides within a DOD component called Washington Headquarters Services and we're in the Executive Services Directorate within the DOD component landscape. I have supported this office in one capacity or another for the past 15 years. And as such, we serve as the program officer as mentioned as the OSD records and information management program. So the records office as well as the D class office for two OSD level programs, which is the OSD automatic declassification review program and the OSD and joint staff mandatory declassification program. We have two DOD wide responsibilities and that is the DOD foreign relations of the United States declassification review with our partners at the Department of State. And also with our partners at the Department of State, we serve as the DOD NATO declassification program. We also serve as kind of the lead coordinating office as designated by the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security for department wide or DOD wide or agency wide activities, declassification activities such as the Argentina declassification project and the DOD zone El Mazote declassification project, which we concluded earlier this year. So a lot of a lot of hats. We do this with a staff, a total bill of staff of seven government personnel, seven. And one of which my boss, Ms. Lou Zortiz, who is the OSD agency records officer was recently promoted. So we will be back filling positions and doing a lot of position moving. But I'd like to caveat further from here on out that my responses are not representative of the entire DOD or of the US government. For perspective, I only serve as the program manager of the OSD and joint staff MDR program. There are 20 plus others in the Department of Defense alone, all their own individual programs with program managers like myself. And I'm sure they don't want me speaking on their behalf. So I would like to really caveat this as well. I am representing the Office of Secretary of Defense in this capacity and not DOD writ large. I do not represent DOD writ large. From a statistical perspective, to give you all some perspective, our OSD JS MDR program currently sits at about 2600 active cases and about 137,000 total pages. We also have mixed media, such as videos, audio, etc. All mixed media types, which are comprised of direct requests from public requesters, as well as referrals received from the interagency partners and NARA in the presidential library system. For historical perspective, our program's active high case watermark was sat around 6,700 cases in 2015. We had a concerted effort to apply resourcing money, personnel, contract personnel, and since then we've worked that down. I'm very proud to be a part of that, that 2600 figure that you see today. So it proved to us that with investment and prioritization, backlogs can get handled. But that does take senior leader intervention. So lastly, also from a transparency and declassification determination perspective, historically our program maintains an average declass in full rate of 70%. So that's historically for our program. So we do release a lot more than you think for those public requesters out there. It's just some requesters actively request highly sensitive war plan, nuclear war planning type documents that will be and continue to remain protected in redacted and sanitized form. To conclude, I want to leave the audience with this sentiment here that the folks that work for our program are extremely passionate. We are hardworking professionals that deeply care about the customers, which is the US public. We deeply value our position as being on the front lines and the vanguard of transparency, of which transparency in the informed Republic are cornerstones of accountability and the democratic ideals of the United States. It's a unique position that we find ourselves in. However, inherent with this position is a duty and responsibility to protect and withhold valid, classified and sensitive information, which if released could cause real danger and damage not only to US initiatives, but to personnel. So I want to leave you all with that sentiment. I'm proud to be here and with our colleagues that just for those here, we all work extensively together. It's not we probably a week that we don't only mail each other to include Bill about all cross-ranging initiatives and things we're working on and as well as individual MDR cases in the case of Stephanie, Don, me and Kerry pretty much every week. Thank you and my remarks are concluded. Well, thank you. Well, thank you panelists for speaking. Out clap. Now, so to maximize time, to maximize time and participation from you all, we're going to forego talking among ourselves in the panel, but I will introduce William Burr for commentary. So Dr. Burr is an archive senior analyst. He's been a senior analyst at the National Security Archives since 1990. He directs the Archives nuclear security documentation project that has led the collection and editorial work to create the award-winning online site, the Nuclear Vault. He received his PhD in US history from Northern Illinois University. He has served as the Archives overall freedom of information coordinator before launching consecutively the Archives research projects on Berlin crisis and nuclear weapons documentation. His articles have appeared in diplomatic history, Cold War, International History, Project Bulletin, International Security, International History Review, and the bulletin of the atomic scientists among other publications. 2015, he published his latest book with Jeffrey P. Kimball, Nixon's Nuclear Specter, the secret alert of 1969, Madman Diplomacy in the Vietnam. He's welcome. And he's a frequent ice cap appellant and all around observant person. Please welcome Bill Burr. I have a lot of time for discussions, so I'll cut short my presentation somewhat because it should be some time for people to ask questions. So thanks for the invitation to be on this excellent panel. I have some comments about how the MDR system developed over the years and why it is not living up to its full potential in certain respects. I mean that is mainly because at present there is no effective final appeal. For years, MDR has been a productive method for getting national security information declassified but has become somewhat less so in some areas for reasons unrelated to its merits because MDR is a good system. I'll create during the Nixon administration, you know, we know it's obligatory for some presidential records and for donated records like Robert McNamara's up in College Park. But it also can be used for requesting just about any identifiable agency record that fits the MDR parameters from CIA for the fans, not just the archives, but the agencies as such. Now thanks to the ingenuity of the late Steve Garfinkel, the Clinton executive order established ice cap as a vehicle for considering appeals denied by the agencies or by Atnara. Of course by contrast, as Mr. Bradley mentioned, FOIA provides no final appeal, just a possibility of litigation. Of course, a possibility of litigation makes FOIA a powerful tool for open government and accountability, but it's not practical in most cases. So we have MDR, but we have a final appeal. And that's given MDR an edge as an alternative to FOIA for making requests for national security information, especially on more difficult topics, intelligence or nuclear, whatever. So when it began its work in the late 1990s, ice cap lived up to its potential by making innovative decisions on a variety of challenging and sensitive intelligence, nuclear, and other issues. I want to give examples because they're all on the website. Now because ice cap has operated on a majority rule basis, the members could and did override agencies that were doggedly classifying information that was arguably no longer sensitive. Of course, ice cap has its limits. We can't get it, we can't review legislatively exempted information like CIA information or formerly restricted data and so forth. So there's limits, but it's done much good. But it sometimes happens in life. It became a victim of its success. During the decades of the 2010s, the decades of the 2010s, we know it became overwhelmed with appeals and we've heard 1200 outstanding cases. They're still on the books. So this backlog is an important shortcoming of the MDR system because it means that the final appeal doesn't really work in any reasonable amount of time. Of course the pandemic shutdown compounded the backlog that was necessary and unavoidable, but it went hand in hand with what looks like, at least from my perspective, sort of a near collapse of the declassification system 2019, 2020, 2021. So with all that behind it, I don't see how ice cap can tackle the backlog with the resources it has at hand. So this is nothing new to any of you. So it's a powerful fact. So there's a, ice cap has a bare bone staff and it faces a significant technology deficit that we've heard. There's no means to send unclassified documents by email. There's problems holding unclassified conferences at NARA. NARA lacks the technology. So if ice cap does do its job properly, it's got to have more funding. It's going to have more staff. And of course, where that's going to come from, who knows? But it's a fact that it can't do its job properly. It catch up with the backlog and then you kind of, you know, 10% of the cases like God's saying, well, that'd be nice to get a 10% every year of the backlog. That would make a difference. But who knows? So expanding staffs would be helpful. Improving the rules would be helpful. For example, giving the MDC more authority in the classification decisions and appeals at NARA would be very useful. I would support that, I think. And especially with all the presidential records coming in thousands and millions of pages of presidential records. I mean, NARA and MDC could chip away a little bit at that huge pile of presidential records. But unless there's an effort at systematic review to review those records from Truman to Eisenhower and forward year by year to review that mass of records, you know, the MDR process is not going to help get access to those records. So there needs to be a major funding for systematic review. And there used to be systematic review back in the nineties and two tenths, but it's at an end. So that's going to be considered. Because without systematic review, those records are going to be unavailable for the most part for our lifetimes and longer. Now, if there are better executive orders under review, as we've heard, I think there are better rules that could help with eliminating backlogs and eliminating overclassification. And I have suggestions, but I'm not going to go into those because if you look at the website of the National History Coalition or the Twitter feed of the National Security Archive, you will see recommendations that were recently made by diplomatic historians and National Security Archive and the History Coalition for improving the executive order. So I won't go over them point by point. It involves like tightening up the use of the stressor exemptions, tightening up the rules for 15-year-old documents. It's under the rules. The agencies can ask for exemptions, but that could be tightened up quite a bit to make it more difficult for agencies to classify records after 15 years old. There are other reforms I have in mind, you know, drop dead dates. If there were drop dead dates for new classified documents, the backlogs in the future would not appear, but there are no drop dead dates, a pressure, as far as I can tell. So I can conclude by stating my main point. As long as there's no effect of final appeal for agencies and IELTS, using MDR will not be an entirely reliable method for seeking desatification of national security information. So if I step to be expanded and revised, there will make a big difference, but time will tell about the possibilities. We thank you for your patience. Now we have more time for the discussion. So we will alternate our questions from you all here and our remote audience will submit questions via the chat function of WebEx. We do have a microphone, so if you would like to speak, I'll put the microphone in the center. And if you speak into the microphone, the remote participants can hear you. You don't have to be on camera though. Any questions from you all? Michael Revnitsky, I'm from the researcher community and I appreciate the work that ISU does. And ISCAP, in fact, I tell a lot of my colleagues who are also researchers that NARA is our friend and hopefully ISCAP and ISU is our friend as well. But one thing that has been troubling is that there are hundreds of cases listed on the docket on ISCAP's docket that, for which the records have been not yet provided by the agencies. And I don't know if that's because ISCAP is not ready to get the documents yet or because the agencies have been intransigent or because they can't find them or some other reason. And it would be helpful for transparency to learn more about that delay in the agencies providing records so that ISCAP can begin the evaluation and review process. Thank you. Well, thank you. That's a relatively straightforward question to answer. So you'll notice on the status log that we have on our website that the records requested from the agency, the ISCAP has not received responses from hundreds of appeals because it's not productive for the ISCAP stat to do so. So for those many, many appeals for those DOD command reports that are being processed in the combatant commands or in the components, there's no value in the ISCAP receiving those records yet. So that's the vast majority of the records requested. There are other considerations something strange happened. Agencies are having a hard time finding the request. It could be in the neither confirmed nor denied, it was Glomar responses. And the agency can't really provide records. The best they can do is provide us a justification. And periodically, we do go back to agencies to gather that. So if you see that status for your request, it doesn't mean that the agency is stonewalled or is thumbing their nose at the ISCAP. It means either it's not productive to send that to the ISCAP staff yet or there's something peculiar happen. And we do our best to sort out those peculiar issues. Questions from the remote world? JD, please hand your very direct question. Why is ISCAP so slow in processing MDR appeals? Oh, Kerry, would you like to answer that? Oh my God, I love that. Thank you so much because I think I'm probably half the problem. So the ISCAP process in just in a sort of short snapshot is that we receive the records. And if there are agency reductions, first of all, that's a great step, right? Because then we have something to actually look at and start to adjudicate. In some cases, if an agency has failed to respond, we get the blank documents or if something was denied in full, we get the clean copy of the documents and we set forward. And some of these documents are really short and never easy because I feel like if they're shorter, oftentimes they're far more complicated or they're pretty long and lengthy. Either way, we sit down and I speak only for me, not for my ISCAP colleagues, but I know they also go through the same process. And we read every single word of these documents and we spend an awful lot of time looking at what has been previously declassified on this situation, right? And so, Bill had mentioned Hearts and Minds. I can tell you I spent an awful lot of time looking through the National Security Archive website and other publicly declassified repositories of records to see what specifically had been declassified on the entire 300 plus pages worth of tax that had been included in this. And then taking that knowledge and reviewing what is still considered to be a sensitive either source or method or forward relationship or what have you, right? And making recommendations and that is extraordinarily time consuming. It does not happen quickly. It also, we then go to the meetings every month and sit around a round table and deliberate how to best protect that must, which must be protected and to release everything that we possibly can. And a lot of it is a back and forth and a negotiation in which we start off with just for fun, a redacted paragraph, and then we try to slice that down as much as possible to redact only a few words or a sentence or so. And then what typically happens there is the agency, which either denied the information the first time or which is the equity holding agency will take that information back. They send it to their SMEs or their subject matter experts who determine whether or not our redactions are adequate or appropriate in the context of what they determine to be sensitive. And again, it's a back and forth, right? Like they provide their recommendations to us. We then sit around and determine whether or not that that fits what we believe is the appropriate action on this document. And then once all of that concludes and all agencies are in alignment, then we can make that final vote. And even when it gets really close to the end zone, there have been several instances, I know where we've gotten something where it's like, oh, we think where this is pretty much ready for an ice cap vote. And then looking at it, it's like, well, but since we've already released all this over here and I just saw this posted over here. So what do you think if we can, can we just get this other redaction down? And then the whole process starts again. So it is, I think declassification in general, having worked in the belly of this beast for the better part of my career, it should be time consuming because you want to make sure that it is not a knee jerk note, right? Or a knee jerk, okay, we're going to take the whole paragraph rather than try to figure out what we can release here. And that requires time, it requires engagement, it requires making sure that everybody who is involved in the information is okay with it. And some of that requires justification, some of that requires negotiation, some of that just requires bullheaded, like, nope, we're still not okay with it, right? And then once we've concluded all of our deliberations, then we pass that forward. And it goes to a vote. And our members, so we work at the liaison level. And then it goes to the member vote, which again, just sort of adds to the time. But I guess as we look through each one of these, each record, we really do put an awful lot of thought and a lot of time and a lot of investment in research to make sure that the final product that goes forward is as transparent as it is possible to be. Thank you. Any more questions from the live audience? I'm afraid I have one more question. Michael Ravnitsky. So could you give me any insight or could you give us any insight into the National Security Council IPC group that's evaluating the executive order and maybe not with specifics about what they're talking about, but just the process and the to gauge the length of time it might take to come out with something and would there be a draft issued before the final is put out so that there can be some opportunity for some input? I understand it's not subject to the normal public comment and so on. Thank you. Yeah, that's a tough one. So the process is a National Security Council White House process for policy development. And that process is protected by executive privilege and let alone the classification issue. So it's very little I can say about that. It's happening. It's ongoing. It takes a long time and it's complicated. And it's unlikely that the public will see very much until the whole until the executive order is published. But again, I'm speaking as somebody who sees it from the from the very far outperfury. Questions from the online community? Somebody had a question for Stephanie. I believe we had a little bit of an IT issue were cut out when you're speaking and they were wondering if you could you made a comment about the Reagan and Ford exemptions while talking about the 1978 ruling and they were wondering if you could just repeat that. Repeat that again. The Reagan. Yeah, Reagan for Reagan forward forward. I think is what yeah. So what I was talking about specifically is the 1978 Presidential Records Act. Prior to that act, presidential papers were considered personal property. And so the presidents could do what they will with the with that material and Roosevelt, President FDR Roosevelt decided to donate his papers to the National Archives setting up the presidential library system. Hoover thought that was a great idea. He decided and then subsequent presidents had donated. Obviously, there was issues with President Nixon. And so as a result of that, we have the Presidential Records Act. And what why it is important in talking about MDR is for those presidential papers that are not covered by the Presidential Records Act, they are donated historical materials. So the Freedom of Information Act does not apply. And so the only way the public can request access to those closed classified papers are through the mandatory declassification review process versus the Reagan administration forward. Because once the PRA Presidential Records Act was passed, President Carter was in office at the time and he was grandfathered in so the PRA does not cover his materials, but he did donate his papers to the government. And so for Reagan forward, people can file FOIA request as well as MDR request. And the other big thing is the mandatory notification period in the PRA. So at any point that the National Archives wants to release presidential records, Reagan forward, we have to notify the incumbent and the former president. And they have a 60 working day period in which they can request access to the records to review them for a potential assertion of executive privilege. And they do have an opportunity to ask for a one time 30 working day extension on that review period. Questions from the audience, please. Hi, I'm Josh Gerstein with Politico. I have a question, Mr. Carpenter. You said you welcome the process kind of being pushed back towards the agencies. It seems that the ISCAP is proactive in releasing a log of all of its pending cases. Are the agencies equally proactive in releasing logs of their pending MDR cases? I've found just personally to have had some difficulty where agencies don't even use tracking numbers for their MDR cases. So I don't imagine it would be terribly easy for them to tally them up. But wouldn't it be useful to have that level of transparency? The agencies here all release their pending MDR logs as well, just like the ISCAP does. Yeah, that's an interesting question. So that would be something that could come up during the ISU MDR oversight initiative that we talked about. So a best practice across the government could be for agencies to be more transparent about the requests that are coming in. So there's no reason for them not to be. FOIA logs, for example, those are often made available to the public. There's really nothing stopping MDR requests from being made available, so the public can see where the requests are in relation to others. That's a good idea. Questions from the world? Do you see ISCAP using AI technologies such as a closed area chapped GPT agent to accelerate the process? Interesting. AI for ISCAP? No, that would be a that would be a no, but where artificial intelligence could be put in place is for that first level. From systems of records, systems of electronic records through an automated review process to identify through intelligent machine learning, sensitive stuff, screening being used as a weeding process. That certainly makes a lot of sense, but the ISCAP process probably not. Questions from our group, please. Hello. Hello. Yeah. All right. My question is, given what's happened with the Trump records, the Pence stuff, have there been discussions even high up about reevaluating or updating the Presidential Records Act, given all that's happened? Yes, there have been discussions, not that I'm privy to, but definitely there are congressmen, senators on the Hill who have actually proposed legislation or drafting legislation. And so there is that thought that, yes, the Presidential Records Act could do with a revision. The last update to the Presidential Records Act was 2014, and part of that was just codifying the notification process that I just mentioned. But in terms of internal discussions, none that I know of, but on the Hill, there have been people who have been quite white, transparent with their desire to update that. I think we have time for at least one more from the outside world. Does ISCAP have ideas on how it will grapple with classified projects that involve corporations, such as still classified aircraft programs that will eventually get publicly released? Does the ISCAP have a private process for that? Yeah, classified aircraft programs. So, of course, aircraft have long lives. B-52, for example, has been flying for six to 70-plus years. There's iterations of the B-52 that contain classified. They're exempt from auto-degust in 50 years. There's a whole issue of contract studies, like grand corporation. So they're not accessible to the employer, the MDR, unless the agencies actually have them. That's right. Because they're probably getting all this public money. They do classified studies, so there's no accountability. Dr. Burr's question had to do with collections out there. Even the federally funded research and development centers, there are classified collections of those places, not subject to automatic declassification. The only way to get material out is through the mandatory declassification review process, which as we know is overburdened. So, yeah, it's complicated. Yeah, so for classified corporate records done under a government contract, those records are subject to the National Industrial Security Program, which essentially requires agencies to provide declassification guidance. There's no real system for that. It would have to be done on an individual basis, that's it's done now, and it's not efficient. The results in agencies required to keep material, in corporations required to keep material classified or destroy it. And as Mr. Dr. Burr mentioned, often those studies might not be available elsewhere, any in any form. We are past our 230 time. Any of our panelists have any last words? I was just going to say thank you for the questions. Thank you for your continued interest and just kind of a parting idea from me, not necessarily representing the National Declassification Center. If we don't rigorously review historical archival materials with an aim of releasing all that we can and protecting just what we must, we in many ways undermine those secrets that need to stay secret. If everything is secret, well, it's really anything secret. So I encourage my agency colleagues, especially when looking through that historical lens to and Kerry mentioned this with, you know, the ice caps, very careful deliberations to think what can we release and what must we still protect? I think, you know, smart people might have different views on that, but using that magnifying glass every time we're doing an MDR review on historical records is valuable. But thank you guys for coming. I appreciate seeing so many folks here. Well, thank you, Don. And that concludes our day. So thank you very much and thank you all.