pence.

president and ceo of the lbj foundation on behalf of the center for national security for international security and law, the public-interest declassification center, intelligence studies project i want to welcome you to an evening with the director of national intelligence. as you know, tonight one of a series of public programs that we host at the lbj presidential library for friends of the lbj library. please join us march 2nd free and evening with cnn's john and chris author of the best-selling a fight of his life inside joe biden's white house. and we have more programs to announce to our friends soon. please join lbj presidential library director for his free ongoing virtual series the

american presidency is, decisions for war and peace. that session will take place on february 7th with the executive director on his critically acclaimed new book the peacemaker, ronald reagan, the cold war and the world on the brink. you can find more information on the series at lbj library.org. now i will turn the podium over to the acting chair of the public-interest classification board that introduced director haynes. [applause] as the acting chair of the public-interest declassification board i'm excited for the opportunity to discuss the critical need for modernization of the federal assistance for

classification and declassification of records and i want to thank everyone for having us here tonight. we appreciate being involved in the conference. this evening we welcome the director of national intelligence for a conversation with adam klein the director of the robert s strauss center for international security and law. i'm honored to be able to introduce who i've known for over ten years. he's had a remarkable and varied career which isn't surprising to anyone who's worked with her. her level of energy and work are legendary. sworn in as the director of national intelligence on januart female director of national intelligence. during the obama administration she served as assistant and principal deputy national security advisor from 2015 to 2017 when she led to the council's deputy committee. from 2013 to 2015 she served as the deputy director of the central intelligence agency and before that she served as the

deputy counsel to the security council's legal advisor which is when i first met her. over the last few decades with all three branches of government in and outside of the intelligence community she's also worked in academia and as a research scholar at columbia university and senior fellow at the laboratory. an amazing background was done amazing things with and independent bookstore. she's one of the most inspirational people that i think you will be able to meet. the director of the strauss center and program on technology security and global affairs prior to joining who served as the chairman of the united states civil liberties oversight

board, the independent bipartisan federal agency responsible for overseeing counterterrorism programs at the nso, fbi, cia, department of homeland security and other federal agencies. so i want to talk a little bit about why we are here today. the concern that too much information is unnecessarily classified and that over classification and inability to share information can undermine the critical democratic objectives. i end of the other members share these concerns and we welcome her efforts to reform the classification system. we look forward to hearing her remarks into the conversation this evening. please join me in welcoming haynes and mr. klein. [applause]

it's an honor to be here with all of you today with senator cornyn who is a long-term member of the senate select intelligence committee and important wisdom has enabled the communities mission over the years. but thanks as well to the clements center for national security, the strauss center for international security and law, the intelligence studies, the lbj presidential library, the school of public affairs and the public-interest declassification board for cohosting this important conversation on classified information and our democracy. that was quite a mouthful but it's a testament to the breadth and interest and equity is relevant to this issue and the challenge of bringing them to gather. on behalf of the entire intelligence community, i want to tell you how grateful we are to draw on the expertise at the university of texas on all manners of issues including the one we are gathered with this evening and to the members of

the public-interest classification board, thank you so much for your efforts to address the classification and a declassification challenge. all of us who work in national security know how challenging this is but also how important it is and we are grateful that you are trying to find ways to improve the situation. given how many cautions have opined on the problem and how many reports in and out of government to talk about it over the decades, how many have tried and failed to change things added the fact you are here is a testament to the capacity to fight to cynicism on the issue which i greatly respect and admire given how important this issue is. you have some great panels and discussions lined up and of those who are speaking are far more impressive experts and thinkers and i am frankly but i will do what i can to contribute to the conversation and institutionally, i want you to

know that we and the intelligence committee are ready to roll our sleeves up and make a difference on this issue. i thought i would say a little about why i thought this is so important to the country and then talk about some of the practical challenges we faced as we attempt to address the classification reform and a talk about some of the things we are doing to try to improve the situation. many have noted that the amount of classified information whether properly or not has increased significantly over the last 50 years and a deficiency and the current system have led to over classification as well as under classification but i found more under than and this is an urgent challenge to solve because first over classification undermines critical democratic objectives such as increasing transparency to promote and informed citizenry and greater accountability and second, over

classification undermines the basic trust the public has in its government and third it negatively impacts national security because it increases the challenges associated with sharing information that should not be classified or at least not classified at the level of the information is classified at. i will focus on the third point even though i believe the first two are as important if not more so. uniquely qualified as the consequence of the position to make the case for how over classification can negatively impact national security particularly given the current threat landscape. as the ukraine word demonstrates the importance of sharing intelligence on the cane national security threats with allied partners and the public could not be more important and having a system that can facilitate such sharing as much as possible through properly classifying such information initially and ultimately having the resources to review and downgrade or declassify what can

be released is critical. this is particularly true today as essentially every significant national security and foreign policy challenge we face requires us to work with partners and allies. but even within our institutions the challenge of over classification and compartment which is a derivative of the broader problem creates challenges for our work. we've seen this in areas such as base where the military leaders publicly discuss the fact that compartments have made it especially challenging to work across agencies and the departments to develop comprehensive strategies that take into account everyone's equities, interests and minimize the over classification or comp argumentation is crucial to maximizing the capacity to help policymakers and operators make better decisions. and in course we are increasingly in need of sharing the downgraded information with the private sector and other entities on the front lines of cyber attacks or other threats for which the intelligence

community is morning may make the difference between success and failure including the critical infrastructure. exacerbated by the growing amount of classified material it is proliferated across a wide range of agencies which simply is a reflection of the degree to which the impact and importance of national security issues that come from abroad are of importance to everyone in the country. and all of this is to say that not only is this an important issue for our democracy, it's also critical to the national security. it undermines the capacity to effectively support senior policy decision-making to rapidly share and expose information to allies, partners and the public and basic trust the systems having the government which makes it harder for us to do our work. having said all that, however, i want to acknowledge the challenge is more complex than i think most people realize at the

outset. there are some real pragmatic challenges we face as we try to create a system that is more effective. first i want to say what is likely obvious but worse perhaps reiterating that we must keep certain information secret or we will not be able to do our job in the intelligence community. but it does have to meet in national security standard and to be clear, just because information is inconvenient or embarrassing isn't it the basis for classification but there are national security reasons for keeping certain things secret that shouldn't get in the way of promoting the educated public debate or doing our job. for example, while it may be important to disclose the fact of u.s. military action and the nature of the threat posed which may have served as a basis for such action, if we don't protect a certain information regarding for example the tactics we use or details regarding the weapons employed or sources who contributed to the work, we may

lose the insight that helps us avoid the next threat or put the lives of those who risk their security to support hours in great danger or give the adversary and advantage that puts the forces at risk. keeping such information secret even when properly classified has nevertheless become much more challenging in light of technological advancements that have increased the risk of massive and damaging leaks. technology has revolutionized the way information is created, stored, communicated and accessed making it far easier to leak the information and disseminated in some cases resulting in direct and immediate harm. ironically however the effort taken to manage the increasing challenges associated often make it among other things harder to devise a system that facilitates the declassification when appropriate. the sheer amount of information all of us deal with every day whether working in a classified or unclassified environment adds

to the challenge. for example in the already resource constrained environment, we have a relatively small number of people, money and subject matter expertise dedicated solely for the declassification radio. and that relatively small group faces the daunting task of processing request from an utterly massive repository records. as the pi dd essentially noted in one of its reports over ten years ago in one intelligence agency alone the growth of classified records was approximately one every 18 months which we noted was about 49 million cubic feet of paper. how many people would it take to review that much information. over the years numerous investigations and reviews have been done and also cultural issues that make this much more

difficult. this points to the fact there is virtually no incentives in the bureaucracy to declassify or to refrain from classifying a document. it is surprisingly challenging for national security professionals reducing the amount of classified material takes additional time, which is at a premium and most of these jobs. to give an example of which there are many it takes extra time when writing an e-mail or memos to mark the classification in each paragraph or sentence in order to ensure that any unclassified information is marked as such. furthermore as the national security professionals, you are trained to mitigate risks to national security which makes it likely that you will be naturally biased classifying information that you believe could cause any damage to u.s. national security. additionally the process for d classifying information before it would automatically be

declassified and numerous reports of classification have demonstrated the employees remain uneducated about the requirements and standards to be applied when the classified documents which can also lead to over classification so we recognize we have at least two major objectives. first we need to continue working on the development of the system that promotes the appropriate classification of information when identifying to begin with and it minimizes what is classified as an international matter. we need to facilitate the downgrading and classification of information to promote sharing when possible for enhanced accountability and trust. leaving aside the debate about whether the standards we use are the right ones for classification and when the information that is properly

classified should be declassified because of the public interest that would outweigh the security concerns. there would be a significant impact and i think that we end of the intelligence community can and should make progress on particularly with the help and guidance of congress and with others so let me talk about a few things we are trying to do to make a dent in the objective. we are working on implementing various recommendations from the reports of them on the subject working to resource the implementation of the recommendations and highlighting the challenge with appearances like this one to make clear this is a priority for the intelligence community. we are working on removing barriers to access and reducing backlogs by assuming the congress supports the efforts investing in the technology to support the most effective and

efficient management of records, increasing staffing of information management experts and developing and implementing institutionalized records and training. third we are increasing investments to scale technology that can only allow us to enable significantly more declassification in a shorter period of time with greater consistency. specifically we are using the further developing tools that aid with searches and documents and to streamline a standardized review and release practices and these tools have increased the consistency, speed, accuracy and declassification reviews while also reducing the amount of time needed by eliminating multiple manual processes. we are also experimenting with artificial intelligence machine learning tools that might be used as discussed in the prior report to automatically identify records for declassification and perhaps most importantly finding ways to promote the adoption of

such tools across the intelligence community where we found them to be useful in certain pockets of innovation. but i want to be clear that the problem we have will not be solved with technology. human beings in the form of classification and records, professionals as well as the subject matter expert to state they consult with are critical to making progress into the expertise this requires is not widely available. so we need to both recruit, retrain, retain the professionals needed for this effort for even as we look to expand the capacity to deploy the technologies against challenge, we continue to require human beings to manage, monitor and validate the work that is being done. fourth, we are working to ensure that the it infrastructure are processed for managing classified information and the various policies and legal frameworks that exist including unclassified but controlled information take into account the broad objectives that all of you are focused on.

fifth, we are looking to promote the prioritization of disclosing information on high public interest, which is often measured through criteria such as a number of requests we receive on the topic, historical significance of documents, the potential yield of the released documents. we are also looking for ways to make the public the legal framework within which we operate in the intelligence community. i think this is critical to promoting credibility and the public's trust in the work because we can explain how and why we take certain actions even if we may not be able to disclose information about the specific actions themselves. for example, we proactively released to the attorney general guidelines that we operate under that allow us to reference and relied on them publicly discussing the work and we put out significant amounts of information regarding the implementation of the intelligence surveillance act. we are working on other frameworks that may help people to better understand how we work and the constraints we apply to for example the collection and

dissemination of intelligence and we are increasingly reviewing intelligence products for public release on issues of public interest so that more people can understand better what we do and what we are twin policymakers on the key national security issues. an example of this if you have any interest you should take a look at the website where you will see a number of analytic assessments from the national intelligence council in addition to the regular public releases, annual threat assessment, the trends report and other reports like that. so although there is no recommendation to address all of the practical and structural challenges that are presented i'm committed to working on this issue to improve the situation and i'm grateful to those that have been willing to spend their time on the challenges particularly the senators that have been stalwart supporters of the system and have raised attention on this issue. and without question this will have to be a keen effort and

without your collective assistance it isn't going to be successful in reforming our classification system to better meet the needs of the intelligence community and the american people. thank you very much for listening to me. [applause] i'm director of the center here at ut austin. thank you again for being here and especially on this topic. first of all the illustration of why we need the director of national intelligence, nonpartisan agency but it's it's above all of them and can drive these kind of initiatives. second is such a contrast with the authoritarian adversary with the intelligence services existing primarily and here we have the leader of our intelligence community pushing for greater transparency and

cooperation with the independent board doing the same but thank you for being here. we appreciate it. [applause] you eluded in your remarks the need to declassify information to share it with the public and you lead one of the most remarkable instances of that recently before the invasion of ukraine and we saw them releasing information and i think it was effective at stripping away from their invasion. we were always one step ahead. can you walk us through some of those and take out one piece of intelligence in particular how did you persuade the agencies to release that information and how did you evaluate the security equities and sources and methods and how did you ultimately come to the decision to release the information? >> thank you for the work you've

done on these issues and i think it's been an extraordinary goal. on this issue, we were producing obviously in the intelligence community, intelligence for the senior leaders on what we saw in terms of the intentions in relation to ukraine and what happened is after they sort of received the analysis and were working through it, the president directed his team to go out to talk to partners and allies about what we might do together in response and whether we might shape that event is essentially by creating deter sand writing other policies at that time. secretary of state and others went out and started talking to partners and allies and they came back and said they are skeptical and don't think russia is going to engage in this way and they don't think that this

is being contemplated. the president turned to us and the intelligence community anna said you've got to get out there and sure start sharing this so that we can start having a conversation about it and so we did director burns, others and myself started to push out about one of the things we did in trying to promote this is recognizing that it's great for me to take a trip or for the director to do this and others in the intelligence. what was really useful is getting the subject matter experts. a lot of that can still remain

classified providing the downgrading we call it but also being asked by the policy community to expose some of what we were seeing. we work together across the community and rarely now does any product of the analysis frankly go to the senior leaders without including a variety of different points of intelligence across the community. how could we expose what we were seeing which we might have learned from classified sources using open source and there's a

remarkable amount of other things like that that we could effectively point to and what we recognize is that in doing that and that open source intelligence into developing those projects in that way they are productive and you begin to develop essentially a process for doing this. as it creates its own momentum in a way. >> staying here for a moment because it is a seismic event of this moment, we have seen ukraine be very effective at targeting things like russian commanders, logistic facilities, using the position strike weapon the united states has provided. media reports suggested the u.s. is providing intelligence support and for those of us that studied it professionally, it certainly looks like the u.s. which has the best capabilities in the world in many areas is providing support. what if anything can you say about the super in the intelligence realm?

>> we are generally trying to help them defend themselves against russian aggression and i think one of the things that is likely to be among the lessons that are being learned coming out of this conflict is the degree to which that kind of intelligence sharing can be useful in a conflict. it's obviously always been useful but the degree to which it's had an impact hasn't been recognized necessarily and building that a system i think has been a key element. >> why do you think it's more effective now than in the past, is it the weaponry or the different capabilities that might not have existed? >> i think it is at least in part the capacity to provide that kind of intelligence and to share it in real time and

develop those mechanisms with a partner like ukraine. i think also ukraine deserves an enormous amount of credit for which they've been able to utilize everything handed to them in a pretty extraordinary way to prosecute the conflict. >> you recently said it is expended at a rate they cannot. what factors do you look at when forming these assessments about the future course of the war, is that logistics and supply, economic factors, internal regime dynamics in russia or something else entirely? >> it's all of the above. it's one of these things people have focused in and greatly so on a challenge on both sides of the conflict into something that we are consistently trying to monitor and understand what the

implications are but the supply lines, morale have a sort of how the leadership is doing and a variety of factors are critical and one thing we are seeing in the conflict is in addition to the grinding conflict we are seeing right now where the movements are not, sort of hundreds of meters it is extraordinarily challenging as the front lines have for the most part remained relatively static even as we see the russians engage in the regions and making incremental progress in that area what we are also seeing is this extraordinary outrageous attack against critical infrastructure, civilian infrastructure and it is intended to undermine the will of ukraine to fight and

have an impact on their economy and capacity to deliver supplies to the frontline. i think the place they are having the most impact because we do not see any reduction in the result of ukrainians to fight this war and we see them continuing to be capable from the military perspective in this way what we do see is the impact it's having on the economy and the ukraine economy has already been devastated during this conflict and we are seeing the reductions of 30%. it's brutal and if they take down the grid and have the impact they are looking at it will be really, really challenging. >> shifting gears to the other principal authoritarian adversary, china of course the threat of the chinese invasion are blockaded with taiwan and it's obviously very acute that would have huge economic security consequences. you said earlier this year china is working hard to build the

capability to take the taiwan militarily. you described a threat. how close is china being able to do that and do you think they will try? >> this is one of those things where they are building up the military capacity in order to have the option in effect to take taiwan for force and potentially over our intervention western intervention. our assessment continues to be essentially that they would prefer to do so for peaceful means rather than using force and that would be the approach to this but one of the challenges is that if they become convinced the peaceful means are insufficient in other words they won't be able to do it through those means this is partially why they are building a military option and the challenge among other things is trying to help policymakers and others understand where the

implications of this are. this has anna and norma's implication and potentially tragic outcome. but it's also any disruption around taiwan from the shipping destruction or other things can have significant impacts on the financial global economy and this is something that they make most majority of leading-edge semi conductors for the world these exist in almost every category of electronic devices that we have. it will take years for the west to build up the capacity to do that should something happen to that of supply there's a variety of things with understanding and

how we think about what's happening in that space. >> we will have to make an exceptional decision about whether we are going to fight to defend taiwan and the policy of strategic ambiguity. the job is to provide warning about if that is happening if it's definite enough to enable the president to have the decisions made. will the intelligence community be able to provide a timely warning and what types of capabilities are being brought to make sure that we are watching china very closely? >> that one i really can't answer. [laughter] but we will do our best. [applause] >> let's switch gears here to something that might be of interest to the younger audience

members. if you try to access tick-tock on the campus you no longer can. the state issued an order prohibiting it on states networks and we are a state institution here at the university and this is in response to the massive amount of data the app collects on your activities, movements, personal attributes, interests and so forth and there's potential it can be changed or programmed the public opinion. what is the potential intelligence risk to the intelligence professional. as a general matter, one of the challenges and i mentioned that we have been putting out some of our national intelligence assessments for example releasing what we can, one of the ones we put out is related

to the effort to accumulate the data and what they can do with the data and how that can be used. this is something we concern ourselves with. if you look at the data that you described if they are headquartered or otherwise have a presence in china the laws require them to provide them with access under certain circumstances to the data and that is something they can then draw on in the context of their own and what we see increasingly is a variety of authoritarian government using digital data to engage in a form of digital

repression and that is to their efforts to influence. that's something we just have to be conscious of as we are trying to think through these issues. >> on the subject of technology with the war in ukraine if you go onto twitter and another social network you can see videos coming off the battlefield and you can see immature analysis of these things, open source intelligence and there's a growing group of people that do this professionally. it's one of the highest quality examples. how does the intelligence community regarding the rise of editors in the open source base? is it benefit, potentially a source of bad information that can influence the public or something else altogether? >> that's really interesting.

i think the former director of the cia when i was deputy he came back and did a talk for employees. one of the things he said and this was years ago relevant to the question, he said i thought it was going to be terrible not having the president's daily brief and access to all of the intelligence that you get in the intelligence community. then i started reading the paper. it's actually not bad. the reality is there's a lot of open-source information. there's some remarkable analysts around the world that are producing information and thinking of these issues and we don't consider them as

competitors in any way. obviously we try to tap into the best of what's out there and learn from them and i think that's an area where we don't always do it as well as we showed it. it's something where i think we need to increasingly get those outside perspectives. they are quite helpful and mostly what i think is opportunities in the context of open source intelligence for us. i think we are bringing that in as much as possible and then vetting at the way we do everything. we have the tradecraft we try to make sure that when we are looking at resources we understand the context so we can tell whether it's the source that is trying to spin us or what the biases might be as we then produce an analysis and similarly want to look at an open source and do the same and hopefully we can add a data

value. we have several audience members who ask questions and submit questions to politics and intelligence. ideally, these are things that are kept separate increasingly we see them becoming subjects of partisan debate. it used to be one of the most bipartisan areas in congress and you regularly have bipartisan support for the intelligence bills and then it shifted over time. does that concern you, and what do you think we can do to restore the degree of consensus around national security generally and intelligence specifically? >> absolutely does concern me. i think that the perception of the intelligence community is being publicized and makes it harder for us to do our job.

people want to take attention to the one and makes us less effective from the national security perspective and the way moving forward, even before moving forward one thing that is true today that gives me great hope and i'm grateful for is the senate select intelligence committee, the house intelligence committee is quite functional in other words particularly we had the chair and ranking member do workforce interviews with me. i talked to the centers on both sides of the aisle on a regular

basis and we try to do briefings on a bipartisan basis, so we send everything to both sides. we try to do things in a way that promotes confidence in the system and allows for that and then we have a lot of ways in which we try to manage this issue and among the things that are structurally built in we don't have very many political appointees. in my own institution it's me, my principal deputy, the general counsel, the inspector general. that is basically what it is in the various elements across the community. and that is part of just trying to ensure that people understand the degree that this is career service and what we are doing is

for the nation and not for politics and a piece of it from my perspective is what i was talking about in my remarks, which i think is trying to expose as much as we can about what we do and we don't do and being as transparent so that we can engender trust and i think with the american people about how we do our business because there's a lot of misconceptions about the intelligence community that we are trying to. >> is there one thing you can't say more about that would demystify things and reduce some of the attention whether it's domestic terrorism in the communities or some other topic that you think has inspired skepticism that you are working to enable more declassification on? >> there's a number of places that we are looking to try to create that help people understand how we are working on these issues.

there are reasonable questions and concerns about how do we handle commercially available information. >> certain agencies and access to geolocation where you can put in a phone number and see where that device has been? >> any kind of data that might be purchased. on the one side of the adversary can purchase the same information and so we are trying to understand what is out there and how to manage it. we obviously want as we ingested to apply all the safeguards that we apply with respect to u.s. person information and personal and private information and other things and have frameworks for dealing with that but one of

the concerns that gets raised you might have to get it court ordered to get certain information. if you can purchase it and you don't get it court ordered, isn't that undermining the system? is that argument incentivized, so we need to think through some of these is she was to make sure people understand here's how we are thinking about it and there's a trust piece to it but there's also just supporting democratic government it's fair for people to have questions and want to be able to debate the guidelines and structures with which we operate. what is the legal basis for the work and while the congress has to step in the shoes of the american public for our oversight and for a great deal of what we do because of so much of it is classified, we do want to give as much of the outline

of what we are doing so there's areas and opportunity for that kind of public discussion. >> for those of us whom the post 9/11 era was formative it's remarkable we've gotten this far but it's also telling about the shifts in the geopolitical environment and so several audience members want to know about the shift in terrorism as being the defining theme of u.s. security policies. how is the ic adopting and how do you do that accordingly in today's world? >> that's a great question. so if you things that may or may not be interesting.

however you want to characterize it in this context and in great power competition is another piece of this including russia and others and so that is at the front of the line and at the same time, we have terrorism continues to be a threat and something we have to continue to focus on and. to apply them to other transnational threats such as organized crime and cybercrime and frankly narcotics when you look at the united states as a consequence of that and it is

just extraordinary from outside of the country to the united states and otherwise contributing to the mapping. >> and of course to do all these things you need tools and ways to get out this information and one of the most important tools, something called section 702 allows you to use digital infrastructure in the united states to collect intelligence on people who are overseas were not americans is about to expire at the end of this year and this is used to cover roughly 200,000 foreign intelligence targets a year and this is a number that is published annually by the declassification reports. do you think it will be reauthorized and what are you planning to make sure it is and

can you explain why it is important? >> it is absolutely critical. when it comes to cyber attacks and ran somewhere we've been able to identify such attacks where they are able to act on them we do a great deal of work and counterintelligence in this space to identify other

countries. we do a range of things. nothing is untouched by this authority so it's fundamental to our work. we do a lot of effort to try to ensure that people understand what the authority is, what we do with it. we have reports that we do about compliance with the privacy and civil liberty constraints that are on it and the way in which we approach this into the training we provide. all kinds of things that hopefully give people a sense of the seriousness with which we take the responsibility of having this authority and this is something that i think honestly we wouldn't be able to do our job without and you will hear from the community leaders over the course of the year if it isn't acted on by congress in

terms of my projection for whether we will be able to reauthorize it, i don't know. it is i think it will be extremely challenging. this is our sense and something where we are looking and have already been trying to have conversations with members of congress and others about what this means and what are the kind of things that would be required for us to try to get there. >> we had a question that i think is on everybody's mind. is there any good news in the world, and of course -- >> nobody comes to me for that. [laughter] you published a global trends report but since this is the intelligence community i want to give you an opportunity to give us the sobering news so is there any good news in the world and also is there one thing that keeps you up at night that you think the public doesn't have its eye on adequately?

>> the boss asked if i could bring we do the daily brief fridays could i bring one piece of good news and we've struggled i cannot tell you it's not an easy prospect for us. [laughter] i will tell you i'm sure there is good news in the world. i do not often focus on it and i do find incredibly inspiring the degree to which frankly our intelligence community expertise that they bring to bear on some of the challenges that we are facing, and i think a lot of the work that we do that is in we call it opportunity analysis.

it's not easy for us to do but what we are doing is trying to find places where essentially there might be an opportunity for the united states to pursue a policy that could promote our interest and ally's interests in different areas. two things like for example as we watched europe try to manage the conflict on the sanctions and their efforts to cut off oil and so on and to sort of free themselves that leverage that russia has they've been moving more towards clean energy options and other things. so we look for ways in which you can think about how different events around the world might create opportunities for us in different spaces that may be useful so that is more in terms of what people may not be focused on it keeps me up at night i will tell you the thing

that really does that is at the top of my list is whether or not we are going to be prepared for the future in order to manage the incredibly complicated fast-moving constantly evolving threat landscape. when i brought together those intelligence heads of the community to talk about priorities, whether all of their priorities for the future were in the context of things like that and we all put together here's what we've been thinking about instead of the key issues for us over the coming year. what you will find is the vast majority we know we have to focus on russia and we have all these critical threats around the world, but what we are focused on is are we recruiting and retaining a talented diverse workforce? we have the right expertise that we need in the intelligence committee and are we getting an

integrated into all the different work that it needs to be integrated in and are we investing in the science and technology that will give a competitive advantage for the future, are we building the partnerships that we need to make us stronger, are we paying attention to the resilience of the critical infrastructure and our work? all of those are what's going to make us agile and flexible to address the challenges of the future, but the people are at the absolute top of that list and it is fundamental that we get the most talented folks that this society has to offer and bring them in so that they can help us understand what's happening and to be prepared for that future. >> here at the university we will be here to support you. thank you for taking the time to join us and we wish you good luck. [applause]