mr. evanina. mr. evanina: i concur with your concern for cybersecurity and the need for us to be prepared to, at least meet where we are in the global economy. i'm not particularly familiar with requirements to contain -- contained within this new policy, so i can't speak to that. but in the purview of national security, the cyberthreat is real. i think we have to take that into consideration for anything we do moving forward, whether here, domestically in the united states or any of our businesses and government operations overseas. mr. lynch: mr. scott, ms. cobert, do you want to take a bite at that? mr. scott: one thing is that cybersecurity knows no bounds. concerns about cybersecurity are, you know, global. physical location is one element but probably in the case of cybersecurity, not the most important in terms of concerns, it's more about the secure by design sort of notion, you know what have you put in place and how well is it implemented. so those would be more my primary concerns, in some c

mr. evanina. mr. evanina: i concur with your concern for cybersecurity and the need for us to be prepared to, at least meet where we are in the global economy. i'm not particularly familiar with requirements to contain -- contained within this new policy, so i can't speak to that. but in the purview of national security, the cyberthreat is real. i think we have to take that into consideration for anything we do moving forward, whether here, domestically in the united states or any of our businesses and government operations verseas. mr. lynch: mr. scott, ms. cobert, do you want to take a bite at that? mr. scott: one thing is that cybersecurity knows no bounds. concerns about cybersecurity are, you know, global. physical location is one element but probably in the case of ybersecurity, not the most important in terms of concerns, it's more about the secure by design sort of notion, you know what have you put in place and how well is it implemented. so those would be more my primary concerns, in some cas

mr. evanina: sorry. congressman, i think when we set forth this policy we looked at it and tried to provide the most flexibility for investigative agencies and service providers to see what is the most practicable and reasonable for their individual agency. some of the bigger agencies may provide data service provided to aggregate this data for multiple people to go out and do the search. we are clearly acknowledging that the effort will be exhaustive initially to identify people's social media footprint. mr. connolly: ok. what are the red lights, though, flag for us, got to follow up on this? my facebook posting, we're talking about the block party for july, in my cul-de-sac, talking about maybe a family reunion and interspersed with all of that, you know, the resident needs to die. how do we flag the serious from the trivial and how do we make sure that if it's all trivial that's the end of it? it's deleted, it's not retained, because there may be other names in that facebook, there may be pictures of

mr. evanina. first of all, thank you for your service and i support incorporating social media into federal background investigations. i have a broader concern, which is whether race or ethnicity play a role in security clearance denial or granting. and let me give you some context for this. recently, four american citizens were arrested and indicted for espionage. and then all charges were dropped. these were in different cases. and it turned out that the government just got it wrong. and the one fact that was the same among all these cases is the defendants looked like me. they happened to be asian americans. cases of sherry chen and shu yu li. their lives were turned upside down because of what our government did. "the new york times" has asked our government to apologize. i wrote a letter signed by over 40 members of congress asking the department of justice to investigate. since i wrote that letter, our office has been contacted by federal employees who happen to be asian american, alleging t

mr. evanina i know you worry about this stuff all the time and is well ms. obert you are dealing with mr. scott as well. what about that dimension of this? i know you were prepared this morning to address this question and i appreciate it if you want to take a pass but i'm just worried about that, about stuff enough to protect the data when it's in the united states and now we are being asked to force power companies dealing with international trade to deposit their data into these foreign countries that don't have the security potentially that we have. mr. evanina to. >> sir i concur with your concern for cybersecurity and the need for us to prepare to at least meet where we are in the whole economy. i'm not particularly familiar with requirements within the policies i can't speak to that but in the purview of national security a cyber threat is real and i think we have to take that into consideration for the thing we do moving forward whether domestically in the united states or any of our business is in government operations overseas. >> ms. cobert or mr.

mr. evanina reference. the individuals from those contractors who work on investigations also have to go, undergo thorough training against the standards and we work to ensure that's a perfect training. >> the incorporation of social media data is not as simple as it may sound to many people so i'd like to delve deeper and how we get a query for publicly available information to the point in which we have jayapal and verified information for use in the adjudication process. again to begin with contractors must contact social media checks on clearance applicants based on guidance from you about the information relevant to clearance of investigations, correct? >> we are going to start with the social media efforts with the pilot i mentioned. that will help us understand what kind of guidance we should be putting in place when individuals are conducting social media searches to verify that information to ensure we are focused on the pieces that are relevant to a security clearance not the other issues that are