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


Human diversity and individual instruction. One of the most important facts about human nature is the great diversity among individuals. Of course there are certain broad characteristics, physical and mental, which are common to all human beings. But more than any other species, individual men are distinct and separate individuals. Not only is each fingerprint unique, each personality is unique as well. Each person is unique in his tastes, interests, abilities and chosen activities. Animal activities, routine and guided by instinct, tend to be uniform and alike. But human individuals, despite similarities in ends and values, despite mutual influences, tend to express the unique imprint of the individual's own personality. The development of individual variety tends to be both the cause and the effect of the progress of civilization. As civilization progresses there is more opportunity for the development of a person's reasoning and tastes in a growing variety of fields. And from such opportunities come the advancement of knowledge and progress which in turn add to the society's civilization. Furthermore it is the variety of individual interests and talents that permits the growth of specialization and division of labor on which civilized economies depend. As the Reverend George Harris expressed it, Savagery is uniformity. The principal distinctions are sex, age, size and strength. Savages think alike or not at all and converse therefore in mono syllables. There is scarcely any variety, only a horde of men, women and children. The next higher stage, which is called barbarism, is marked by increased variety of functions. There is some division of labor, some interchange of thought, better leadership, more intellectual and aesthetic cultivation. The highest stage, which is called civilization, shows the greatest degree of specialization. Distinct functions become more numerous. Mechanical, commercial, educational, scientific, political and artistic occupations multiply. The rudimentary societies are characterized by the likeness of equality. The developed societies are marked by the unlikeness of inequality or variety. As we go down, monotony. As we go up, variety.  As we go up, persons are more unlike. It certainly seems as though the approach to equality is declined towards the conditions of savagery, and as though variety is in advance towards higher civilization. Certainly then if progress is to be made by added satisfactions, there must be even more variety of functions, new and finer differentiations of training and pursuits. Every step of progress means the addition of a human factor that is in some way unlike all existing factors. The progress of civilization then must be an increasing diversification of the individuals that compose society. There must be articulation of each new invention and art, of fresh knowledge, and of broader application of moral principles. With the development of civilization and individual diversity, there is less and less area of identical uniformity, and therefore less equality. Only robots on the assembly line or blades of grass can be considered as completely equal, as being identical with respect to all of their attributes. The fewer attributes that two organisms have in common, the less they are equal, and the more they are unequal. Civilized human beings therefore are unequal in most of their personalities. This factor of inequality in tastes and inability and character is not necessarily an invidious distinction. It simply reflects the scope of human diversity. It is evident that the common enthusiasm for equality is in the fundamental sense anti-human. It tends to repress the flowering of individual personality and diversity and civilization itself. It is a drive towards savage uniformity. Since abilities and interests are naturally diverse, a drive toward making people equal in all or most respects is necessarily a levelling downward. It is a drive against development of talent, genius, variety and reasoning power. Since it negates the very principles of human life and human growth, the creed of equality and uniformity is a creed of death and destruction. There is a sense, however, in which equality among men is sensible and beneficial. Each individual should have the freest possible scope for the development of his faculties and his personality. In order to have this scope, he must have freedom from violence against himself. Violence can only repress and destroy human growth and endeavour, and neither can reason and creativity function under an atmosphere of coercion. If each person has equal defence against violence, this equality before the law will permit him to maximise his potentialities. Since each person is a unique individual, it is clear that the best type of formal instruction is that type which is suited to his own particular individuality. Each child has different intelligence, aptitudes and interests. Therefore, the best choice of pace, timing, variety and manner of the courses of instruction will differ widely from one child to another. One child is best suited in interests and ability for an intensive course in arithmetic three times a week, followed six months later by a similar course in reading. Another may require a brief period of several courses. A third may need a lengthy period of instruction in reading, etc. Given the formal systematic courses of instruction, there is an infinite variety of pace and combination which may be most suitable for any particular child. It is obvious therefore that the best type of instruction is individual instruction. A course where one teacher instructs one pupil is clearly by far the best type of course. It is only under such conditions that human potentialities can develop to their greatest degree. It is clear that the formal school, characterised by classes in which one teacher instructs many children, is an immensely inferior system. Since each child differs from the other in interests and ability, and the teacher can only teach one thing at a time, it is evident that every school class must cast all the instruction into one uniform mould. Regardless how the teacher instructs, at what pace, timing or variety, he is doing violence to each and every one of the children. Any schooling involves misfitting each child into a Procrustian bed of unsuitable uniformity.


The engineering program at CCU is intended to integrate faith, applied science, applied mathematics to solve problems, to optimize systems. We hope to take these concepts that we learn in things like calculus or linear algebra or physics and chemistry and we hope to apply those in a Christ-centered way that we can really make an impact for God's kingdom. This past summer I worked at Lockheed Martin as an intern on mechanisms and pyrotechnics for one of their space projects. That was really cool to experience firsthand to see how my classes will apply in the future to different industries like space. We do engineering but we do it with a Christian worldview. We do it with a biblical worldview. And that's one of the things that we're really going to strive to do here. We're going to strive to take what seem like applied math concepts in kind of just in a vacuum and we're going to say, no, these don't exist in a vacuum. Let's look at the way you analyze data, how that impacts people and how that impacts human values and how that potentially impacts the products that you make in terms of things like justice and in terms of things like equity, in terms of things like privacy and how do we do that but from a biblical foundation and we intentionally tie in the Bible. I think Colorado Christian University is really helping me to advance my learning and prepare me for what it looks like to be a steward and use my skills to advance God's kingdom in a cool way by using math and science.


going on everyone. Sam here with late in sports cards ripping 22 tops chrome four of the one hot a racing hobby six box break number 18 random team style here's a look again at your random results as always you can find these on the website under the results tab as well as the link that's in chat and good luck here everybody let's do it classic Sean face and Xiao Guan Yu congrats alpha Romeo go into George C holy cow 18 out of 25 true orange on that as well congrats I saw on there the rookie big-time Zao Valtteri Botas Xiao Guan Yu and Magnuson pink to 75 for haas at us now and Williams future stars over there's flipping out that's Lewis Hamilton purple to 199 this Max Verstappen distributors and like secondary market lot on the secondary market because the TV speed demons George Russell orange green troll car or not orange purple green troll card George Russell and we are sold out thank you Lee took the last spot of the night sold out on XR thank you so much Lee thank you everybody for getting that sold out do appreciate it very excited to rip that Alexander Albon gold Yuki Sunoda 44 of 50 wow going to Alpha Tari Naki Svarin a holy cow man big time Yuki that's awesome wow Guan Yu orange and Yuki gold in the same box big time right there big time Sebastian Vettel is big time Carlos Sainz boy kept correcting me on the release day of this or maybe not release day it was like the second day it was out or whatever it's about Terry Botas kept correcting my pronunciation in the name so I just started just saying everything like completely wrong to get a mad like you'd be like he was like no like it's Esteban O'Conn like there's no because I say O'Conn like more emphasis on the oh and he was like no it's Esteban O'Conn like O'Conn Max Verstappen and then I pulled one the next back I'm like I'm like Esteban O'Conn like he was just like dude so funny big time Verstappen Lando Norris nice one there for the checkered flag for McLaren ain't no Stappen Max Verstappen it's a purple Fernando Alonso 399 for Alpine ain't no Stappen ain't no Stappen that's great that's fantastic one oh boy oh wow yeah I know Vaughn Vaughn's the one who gets very mad but then he gives me a lot of ideas here ghastly Yuki Sonoda like you completely ruined Pierre Strong Jr. he's getting a producer tag every time we pull one now that's Clemente Novalock mp oh there's pure ghastly in this oh wow Charles Leclerc true fair enough they are too good not to share very good point very good point Grand Prix winners Max Verstappen the 299 I hate him Yuki Sonoda walking steamer it's like Chinese torture a more a core deal future stars right event answer foot it's just like slowly dripping the water on your face oh man have to think of it honestly really would have to be a deep dive yeah honestly Lewis Hamilton checkered flag Kevin Magnuson haas you're gonna use all deans winning by yourself you can see no to speed demons you know pure ghastly you want to come out here to 290 399 on the purple god that face just makes it all worth it all the stupidity all the dumbest I've made myself look it makes it all worth it at the end of the day Danny Ricardo says be home like I just walk around like we're saying yes get your face pounded for 12 rounds yesterday I took a just a beating earlier I came back Logan Sargent future stars we do these faces Frederick Vassour for Alfa Romeo it's checkered gold to 50 Vaughn it's pure disgust it is it is pure disgust orange red Max Verstappen troll card speed demons Lewis Hamilton I watched one of the breaks last night one of the XR breaks when we just went loopy and you like put your head down on the mat because you were so just defeated it was just so it was so funny because you hear us it was like it was when I pulled the Justin Jefferson extra extra we're like we're like mid conversation about nonsense about you like always been like just disgusting blah blah blah and then I have extra extra just like I just here you go oh my god Sergio Perez Carlos signs Ferrari Alexander album to 299 the trash can that's what your camera be called yeah I like that when stroll the trash can honestly change your diaper what do you three pure ghastly did you see our new shirts we got today Vaughn look at this custom shirts what are you three go dolphins on the front custom shirts baby that's how you know this stuff is real get the merch Lincoln bio yeah Lincoln bio coming home some merch Xiao Guan Yu to 399 right about Terry Botos exactly in the smoke what are you three is right in there let's go there's Roy Nassani to 399 Botos is an SP number 60 I don't believe so no it's not for us all I am down with that and it's often dream to give me some show to Adidas let's go I'm down and honor speed demons that's right up my alley that's old school have a Magnus in my theme music is jam on it I do yeah George Russell Felipe Drugovic on the green auto going to MP Motorsport is MP a not P nice one there buddy 84 out of 99 SP's don't say refractor near the number I'm gonna take that take a look at that next refractor I pull Franz Toss troll card purple green and their album don't say the number it's gold Lewis Hamilton 31 out of 50 I think we pulled this exact same card last break nice one there kid named not SP up Brad oh gosh now we're really losing it here now we're gonna get now it's loopy hours now it's loopy hours the party has just begun that's about Ocon breaking your ghastly Yuki Sunoda in the building oh boy oh boy let's go Brad rocking my new Los Poyos Hermano shirt what happened that's just a meme me and Brad it's like a breaking bad me and Brad it's I'm back and forth okay so it doesn't say refractor right number gotcha toss a player that's about Ocon first tapping grand pre-winners that's someone if you talk about someone who needs help Marino Sato you look at that guy that guy is just so far gone there's just there's no he's throwing paper towels at me there's a window separating us getting the old shoulder ready yeah it was pretty good today Brad pull the wander one-of-one laundry tag RPA that was a big one a bunch of other really good stuff to some cool one-of-one school autos a lot of cuts in there which is good Max Verstappen Samuels in second flag green Sebastian Vettel for Aston Martin to 99 yeah stargill cut goose cut I pulled a Joe Morgan cut was pretty cool Dom DiMaggio was kind of wild Yuki Sunoda to 299 purple Charles Claire to 299 or 399 for the Ferrari Fadati Sergio Perez pure ghastly speed demons al pure ghastly you want to come out here Landu Norris and Enzo Fittipaldi going to Charao's racing system an OP Congrats buddy Sebastian Vettel I think so yeah John Daravolo Daravolo troll card Sergio Perez pink Lewis Hamilton Grand Prix winners one of 75 Paul I do the same honestly Paul I'm kind of with you we're seeing every time I hear Cloud City John's a baby John needs a diaper change Oh Who's on ooh Box Topper Gold Wow Zann uh Zann Vork Good luck we'll random that to everybody that's sick See if um if not get uh do you know did you top load for any of those we did bubble wrap and then put like the fragile sticker on it just wrap it in bubble wrap that's one of the trash cans out there total wolf refractor Lewis Hamilton yeah that's cool those gold box stoppers are so sick Landu Norris Daniel Ricardo they're like they're not like just paper either they're like thicker stock as well if you like the chrome on the front so awesome Fernando Alonzo Max Verstappen to 199 yeah perfect true gold award winners 34 out of 50 Red Bull Racing Honda yeah that's perfect Frank Sinatra from Eminence football that was sick I remember hearing about that Charles Leclerc on the uh checker flag Madden was sick that was really cool Forest were you there for that one which one the Madden I don't think so Pierre Gasly I don't think so Kevin Magnuson purple to 399 Fernando Alonzo a Caleb Otto in Eminence that'd be cool that's the big hit you're going after right there Daniel Ricardo ooh chocolatey clear that sounds good clear which one oh chocolatey clear Charles Leclerc yeah red troll card Sergio Perez red green Max Verstappen Max Verstappen Max Verstappen you hear that in your nightmares oh I do I'm PTSD oh my god I'm such a stabbing like J. L. Schenke Lando Norris cool one Grand Prix winners so you remember much it's got to be high dollar and over signature oh yeah that's what I don't see delaying them right he'll be in transcended every now and then Liam Lawson George Russell let's get ready for XR we cancelled that one that one's gone that one's done tail Porsche to 99 ART Grand Prix Kevin Magnuson Max Verstappen if I choose any celeb auto to pull who do you want that's a good question Lane Fernando Alonzo cold wave 9 of 50 for Alpine congrats Alpine it is a great question Sergio Perez Formula 1 racing team Mercedes to 399 I think Jimi Hendrix would be really sick dope Kurt Cobain I think would be a good one I would say anybody who like passed away really young Jim Morrison Jim Morrison would be really cool yeah Voltaire Botos like a sick duo of Lane and Chris Cornell Bob Marley would be sick yep yeah that would be that's up there yeah man Charles Leclerc a team Tota Wolf to 299 a team we're losing them dude troll card Max Verstappen Yuki Tsunoda come on Vs Verstappen for actor on the back there please let's finish it up no but we did get an auto last pack fashion battle of Felipe Drogovic going to MP Motorsports congrats not P not numbered we'll do it for the break guys do this quick random for the box topper we already have it in our what's it called protective covering thank you let me get the names over alright good luck here guys we're just going to roll the dice whatever name is on top after 7 times we'll get the card 1 2 3 4 5 6 and 7 going to George C George C MLK would be cool Taylor Porsche Sebastian Vettel Lewis Hamilton Kevin Magnuson Frederick Bessour Lewis Hamilton Red Bull Fernando Alonzo Felipe Drogovic Green to 99 as well as a Zhao Guan Yu true orange to 25 and gold Yuisu Noda 44 out of 50 on the auto that will do it for the break thank you guys again next up we've got


So we should have, at the internet time, should have an EWTO, that it's a treaty agreed by business people, supported by government, and that will probably do better. And I think the past 20 years, because the WTO, the globalization was for big companies, for big countries, next to 20 years, the internet, with the help of the internet, we should use the internet to help the small business, help the developing nations. This is what I call the EWTO.


I'm coming up first Tom is gonna comp it a little bit and we're gonna talk about state channels and give some updates on What state channels that org is and the latest kind of collaborations that we've been doing and then talk about our roadmap kind of going forward So I get us mentioned What's going on with state channels? Where are we going? What to get excited about? So state channels that org you may have seen this website at some point It was on Twitter some talk about it What we're mostly doing here is we're trying to standardize the way that state channels work in this industry Myself and Tom and a bunch of others will show in a second I've all been working on this first like a couple years now and there's been a lot of progress across the tech stack and It's come to the be the point where we can begin standardizing a lot of the lower level Primitives and working our way up towards something that we got a mass adoption By dApps trying to get benefit from this technology in the in the coming year So about I don't know four or five months ago We all went to New York together for an event called East New York and during New York blockchain week And you can see here We have people from the Ethereum Foundation from prune from seller from magma connects and a bunch of companies Altogether we had a bit of like a state channel summit We got literally got into a room and we said okay look what are we doing? Why aren't we collaborating more? Why are we kind of all rehashing the same word together? And we had a lot of like really great results One thing that is important to note is that standardization sometimes can be kind of critiqued Whether you're looking at it from a VC perspective where you might want to see where you know one killer app Dominate the industry first until you see some standards adopt get adopted or get proposed But one thing that we've noticed that's been critical to Ethereum success is Defining standards and defining interfaces early on has led to some of the biggest actual booms in the entire industry You know most notably ERC 20 right after that was you know begun to get standardized when we saw this ridiculous boom You know which for the most parts financed like a lot of our actual operations here in the industry We've seen ERC 721 lead to like standard marketplaces for collectibles We've seen 712 lead to standard wallet Signing interfaces and there's many many more examples of once we get together Figure out how to do this thing right the rest of the community which is largely builders actually begin building on top So this is extremely critical So these are some of the companies that are involved We all have a really cool history if I had more time I'd tell you the whole story of how we've all been working together over the last little while, but we have L4 Perun prototype all connects seller magma fun fair Pisa all these companies and and there's some even on other Blockings have been collaborating another time It's been working on this problem together for the past couple of years And it's only been recently that we've been able to all kind of come together and Standardize at the lower level so so that's quite that's quite good And I want to just cut show the case for standardization What most people don't realize about state channels is that it's not just you know You write this thing once and all of a sudden, you know magically all Applications go wicked fast. It's actually quite a put a huge tech stack That is under the hood of the word state channels and I'll kind of show some of them You know one is the most obvious one is how do you actually progress state between two parties precisely? What are those objects precisely? What are you signing? The other one is like how do you fund these channels? How they how do they actually get funded in such a way that anything you do is meaningful on the chain that itself is yielded many papers of different protocols demanding many different standards difference across chains Networks themselves are built on top of this The actual Implementation of those engines which themselves are large software libraries that we've seen again through multiple different companies implementing these things Many archive repositories and GitHub trying to get this stuff working The wire protocol itself How do you communicate to other nodes if you're familiar with lightning and inter ledger and stellar and all these other network Attempted channel constructions these things are dramatically different across all of them And that's what's led to years and years of lack of interoperability for the most part And anyone here that's worked on things like inter ledger for example know that once you start getting Multiple protocols across different chains together. It's it's disastrous if because there's no good standards Integrations of the wallet level it is as well like a massive problem Once you actually have a good protocol that works when you go to a wallet It can take months and months and up to years to actually get that thing integrated well into wallets And again, we've seen that with lightning where it's been it's been taking quite a long time to get even lightning enabled wallets And then finally the UI itself when we talk about end users What did what does it mean to have a channel? Is it a card? Is it some other object in your in your channel? Is it the wallet itself? We've had so many discussions about this and The benefits for each of these things should be extremely obvious at each level What for example at the wallet UI level when we have a consistent UI? We have one set of UI components that every wall can standardize around and that users can have a familiar experience with when it comes to integrating itself We can have one API that a wallet just needs to import the API for and have a standard interface to how they open and close channels At the prior protocol level. I kind of gave the example communicating nodes between different blockchains is incredibly important Implementation of protocol engines we get this thing done, right? We can reuse the code in multiple different contexts When it comes to funding we can also have reusable collateral Pulled collateral is kind of a hubs so that if you ever wanted to you know reuse a hub and the lighting network in the state You know state channels now we're going to theory them or in any of the existing state channel networks that we have in the theorem You would definitely want to have pulled collateral And then obviously at the lowest possible level if we're going to have shared contract code if we're going to do any kind of Formal verification if we're going to do anything at all about Assuring this thing actually secure it like we say it is then we need to have at least one standardized protocol So it should be obvious that these are ridiculous the good benefits that Are worth pursuing So that's roughly the case for state channels that are in the case for standardization What I want to introduce now is just some updates on what we've been building in a project called state channels Which I'll get into is the collaboration between a couple other products in the space already so One is we've already taken the whole stack that I just described in the single implementation And we've got it on production today, so it's been a tremendous amount of effort between Our teams connect Specifically that have been building on top of it to get a full generalized a channels network on Production today, and this is like actually a ridiculously good accomplishment. I'm talking mostly in this talk about Standardization but the fact that we've been able to have all the stuff working at the point that now we have an example With which we can begin to standardize is an enormous success So like kudos to connects on on getting this working and the great part is we now have a feedback loop with with wallets with infrastructure Projects with applications that are actively using this that can give us feedback on what things they would like whenever we're discussing Which standards to adopt so that's been a great success a Second thing I want to mention is what I kind of said we're taking immediately a step of merging a project called counterfactual, which is initially the collaboration between two other those companies Prototypal and L4 and magmo and producing a single project Which is what I just described state channels and this is a phenomenal example of how once we begin to agree on standards We can dramatically amplify our efforts and you can see this on our github where we have now several people Extremely good engineers from multiple different backgrounds multiple different companies collaborating daily on in building this infrastructure Which you know obviously is going to lead to a lot more output a lot quicker and a lot less redundancy which For me and a lot of people in the show that have been working on state channels or other layer due constructions The ability to say that we're all working together Directly is an incredible success. So that's one good result from the state channel to the organization So I kind of just mentioned a lot of that stuff in practice if you want to follow that specific project We're continuing to work on it. It's called state channels We're gonna have a smooth upgrade path for anyone that's already working on it You can see the code today if you go to at state channels on github You can follow us on Twitter and where we're actively doing updates on that there Yeah, like you mentioned, this is how you can keep in touch with that project So, yeah, that's mostly the case one the make we've taken strides through all of the recent efforts this year of standardization immediately gotten something in production that works based on our initial and agreed upon standards and we're now merging projects in that set of projects to get a Single implementation that's going to be production ready for everybody else to take part in Over the next little while so yeah, that's that's state channels And now I'm gonna pass it on to Tom who's gonna talk a bit more about not just what we're done so far But what we're gonna be doing next Yeah, thanks Liam So I'm Tom close I am the founder of magma and as Liam mentioned we are one of the projects that have come together Into the state channels to org project And I just wanted to take this opportunity to thank Liam in his first role in that and really like getting the teams to work Together and creating this project That's gonna drive forward state channels in Ethereum and ultimately get state channels into the hands of developers so What I'm going to be talking about here is what we've been working on in the last couple of months and What our roadmap looks like for the months coming up? So what are we actually working on in this new state channels to org project? So this is the image you've already seen from Liam Explaining the different levels of the stack and I'm just gonna pick on a few projects that we're working on at the moment and Explain which and they're all from different parts of the stack and I'm gonna explain what work we're doing and each of those projects The first project is a project that we're just calling Protocols and contracts and that's to do with the underlying protocols the challenge and response mechanism And the contracts that support that I'm also going to be talking a little bit about our work on the client and the hub So this is the stuff that you need if you're actually going to run a state channel So this is going to be running on your browser. It's going to be running on a server somewhere It's going to be running the wire protocol It's going to be storing your states and all sorts of things like that and then finally I'm going to talk about a few things from right at the top of the stack and in particular I'm going to Focus on some of the ideas we've been discussing around browser and wallet user experience use of state channels Introduces all these additional Challenges in terms of how you explain what you're doing to a user and how you interact with the user So to start off with I'm gonna I'm gonna start talking about these protocols and contracts project So this is where The majority of our work has been so far So protocols the underlying protocol and the contracts form the foundation upon which the rest of the stack Sits and changes in this layer have to ripple up all the way through this attack So at the beginning of this con of this collaboration We've been focused on trying to get consensus at the base layer having a firm foundation that we can then build on top of So we came to this project with like we each had our slightly different protocols and over the past couple months we've been working to merge them together and Work towards a point where we can actually freeze these contracts in this protocol So there have been a couple of different Areas that we've been working on here the first one that I'm going to talk about is protocol hardening so this goes to I guess the very essence of what you're getting from the state channel and The the guarantee that you want to give people is that a participant in a state channel should be able to progress that channel or Terminate it and withdraw their funds within a fixed time regardless of the behavior of other participants So even if you're in a even if you're the only honest participant in a channel You should still have safety you should still be able to withdraw your funds in your if you need to and not have them indefinitely locked in the channel So We've been looking into this When we came into this we were pretty sure that our protocol was already Already pretty good and didn't have many holes We've been thinking about it for a long time and then we started using this new tool So we've been using this tool called TLA plus which was and a I guess it's a protocol specification language and protocol verifier and checker that was invented by Leslie lamport so it's for checking the behavior distributed systems and We built a model of our protocol in this specification Run it through the checker and it just threw up a ton of problems that we hadn't thought about So this was really interesting and in a minute. I'm going to point you to somewhere you can find out more about it The I guess the to give you an idea of the sort of problems that it threw up It was things like If you are able to front run transactions So it's pretty easy to dine a state channel framework so that if I can get a transaction into the chain Then I can definitely progress this the state channel What we started thinking about is what happens if you can get a transaction into the chain But if your opponent can get another transaction before yours What happens then and we found out in certain circumstances your attacker could like lock the channel forever Which is pretty bad So this is really interesting I think we're now in a place where we've closed up a lot of those holes if you want to find out more about this You should go to this research forum, which we have open source today So if you go to research dot state channels to org you can see about a lot of the conversations that are going on Some of the things that been thrown at it highlighted by the TLA plus stuff and other conversations about the protocol level This specification and later we will also have this basically going to be our place where we discuss all the changes to this protocol Right the next thing that we've been working on is gas optimized contracts So you're probably aware the whole point of state channels is to help chain scaling and throughput and Your ability as a scaling solution is very much limited if it costs a lot to open and close a state channel So for us coming into this project This was a very important thing We want it to be really cheap to open and close a state channel in the happy case And also as cheap as possible to launch a challenge and respond to a challenge if there's bad behavior So we have these two metrics the first one which I've just described is the happy path And that's how much it costs to deposit into the state channel to close the state channel collaboratively And then withdraw your funds and when we started out, this was pretty expensive. So this is 600 gas Which is I guess like 30 transactions, maybe a few slightly fewer than that But like that's pretty significant like you need to be doing quite a lot of activity in your state channel to make it worth it It's this expensive and we've now managed to get that down to a hundred and sixty five If you're using ETH 185 with ERC 20 So this is these are changes that happened in the last couple of months Most of these changes are due to like basically reducing the amount of stuff you store on chain And we think we can do even better than that There this is before we've started like batching transactions and stuff. So we think we can bring this down even further And the second part of that is the challenge part So how much does it cost to launch a challenge if you're opponent blocks and then how much does it cost to respond to that challenge? And this was originally a whopping 11,000 gas 1100 gas Can't even read numbers anymore and we've now managed to get that down to 200k gas So we're beginning to get into the range where these things make sense and it makes sense to use this as a scaling solution Finally, and the final part of this that we're working on is the protocol and contract documentation So if you want to find out more about these protocols today You have to go and read a couple of different research papers and most of those papers are out of date because of these changes That we've made in the last couple months So what we've been trying to produce is an authoritative and always up-to-date specification of the protocol and contracts So this living documentation that's always guaranteed to have the most accurate up-to-date information And we've made some progress on that still work in progress. We hope to be able to release this in the next couple of months But this will exist in the future and this is an important part of what we're working on In order to help the community like understand and use this framework So our goal here This is going to be the focus mostly for our next three months So we want by the end of 2019 to be able to freeze and release the v1 protocol And that's going to include a fully robust protocol the optimized and verified smart contracts and full documentation Okay, so I'm now going to talk a little bit about the client in the hub. So this is work that we're doing in parallel But like So this is like teeing it up for the next thing that we're going to work on when we've managed to freeze the protocol So the goal here is to provide a reference client and hub that implement the protocol And this will be something that wallet users can take wallet creators can take and put into their wallets It's going to have libraries that if you want to build everything from scratch You can and it's basically going to have the design patterns of actually how to interact with this protocol and There are lots of things this needs to do so we're merging these two code bases one from counterfactual one from magma and Both of these code bases did a subset of these things And we're trying to merge them together to get one that does everything that it needs to and so that includes robustly storing your states because your states like money in a state channel if you lose them You lose can lose money Validate transitions detect and respond to on-chain challenges launch your own challenges if you need to and Support virtual channels through the hub So this is another another part of the work that we're working on and we'll also be working pretty hard to try and merge those to code bases together over the next three months and Finally, I want to talk very briefly about some browser wallet UX design things we're thinking about and These are things that I think the whole community will have to get involved in but we've spent we're trying to build a Example application and thinking I've been thinking a lot about What the actual user and experience with a state channel could look like? So questions that we're thinking about here is how should a user interact with a state channel?  And then they're going to be able to do on-chain things, but their friends are kind of locked and they have to do something to get out Another question is can we avoid approving every single signature? So anyone who's used the DAP today will be used to getting a metamask pop-up Now the whole point of state channels is to allow Multiple transactions a second and you don't want to be doing multiple metamask pop-ups a second So can we avoid that? Can we allow the wallet? Can we allow our client to sign some things for you and in that case how much does the user have to trust the app? You know if the client is just going to sign things the app sends to it. How can we keep the client the user safe? Which is this next question to what extent can your channel wallet protect you? and then finally What policies should a channel wallet be able to enforce and very quickly? We're thinking we're beginning to think that the state channels the thing that makes sense is to have a policy-based Permission system, so you like approve a budget for an app rather than you're approving each channel or each Each interaction so you could imagine maybe something will look like this in the future your channel wallet pops up They ask you to approve a budget It will ask you to prove a spend budget of two E for a given site You approve that and then your channel wallet helps it takes care of anything else It opens it closes virtual channels that opens channels when it needs to it closes them The only constraint is it doesn't go above that to each limit so yeah, if these things are interesting to you or if you've got a use case and I want to have input into how we're thinking about this stuff Please come and talk to us or go to the state channels research forum These are the sort of conversations we want to have with everybody in the community So yeah, that's it from me and from Liam who has now disappeared, but stay tuned So this is ongoing work Follow state channels on Twitter and thanks for listening


Hi, in this video we're going to talk about that how to use switch statement in TypeScript. With switch statement we can evaluate an expression and then match that expression's value to a case clause and finally execute statement associated with that case. Let's make a simple example with using switch statement. For example, let's say that we want to find discount of a product. So we need to make few variables. Let's make a variable product. This variable is going to be a string and let's make a variable discount. This variable is going to be a number and let's say that we want to get our product from prompt. So we're going to say product equals to and from prompt we're gonna get our product name. Let's say to our user, let's show to him text enter product name, then our user is going to enter text of the name of our product and we will store that information inside variable product and then we want to use switch statement and inside our switch statement we want to evaluate our expression. In our case expression is going to be very simple, we just want to see which product is entered from the user and we're going to return to our user an alert box which is gonna give to him information about discount. For example, if our user enter as a product name book, then we're going to say that discount for example is going to be, let's say 50% discount and we want to break from our case, further later we're going to explain what this break statement means, then on the other case our user could enter product name for example t-shirt and in that case we want to give an alert that now discount for t-shirts is 35% and we will put another break after alert and of course if user enters some other product that is not a book or a t-shirt, we want to give to him information that by default discount is going to be for example 10% okay, let's make it, let's zoom it out a little bit to be more visible. So here we have two variables, product which is string and discount which is number, we're going to get information about our product from the input and then inside our switch statement we want to test the value of our variable. We want to match the value of this product with these cases and if one of them is matched, then we're going to execute code inside that case block, for example if our user enters a book as a product then this code is going to be executed and suppose that we do not have this break statement that will means that after executing this code our program is going to continue to execute code of other case blocks which we don't want to do in this case, we want to just alert information about our discount and then to go out from this switch and if you want to go to the other cases then you don't need to use this break statement in that case after this alert all other code from these other cases and is going to be executed. So you can often see that almost in every case block you can see another one break at its end then for example if user enters as a product name t-shirt then we're going to execute this code and if user enters a name of the product which is not a book or t-shirt that means that it can be anything our default discount for this product is going to be 10% so default section is going to catch all other values which we can't evaluate with these cases that's all in this lesson thanks for watching see you in the next lesson please don't forget to subscribe to my channel