foia public liaison. marry -- marianne mannheim is a liaison at the department of state and we'll hear from her about how that part of the vision is working. but certainly the foia public liaisons are a big part of the way that ogis works, and as i said, avoiding disputes in the first place. so that leaves our third panelists that i have not introduced yet and i'm going to turn to first. that is kirsten mitchell who is an ogis facilitator. kirsten is one of those stalwart ogis staff members who works day in and day out to make our work as broad and accessible as possible dealing with requesters and with agencies every day. to resolve disputes and also to help -- particularly agency professionals figure out better ways to disclose smart. so i'm going to stop there. i know we're going to have some q&a at the end of this, but i'd like to turn it over to kirsten, then we'll ask marianne to speak and then gavin we'll turn to you as the third. >> good morning. so mariam talked about the culture change that we would like to see happen in the foia and i think as she said that is the future of foia. so i'm going to talk about what we mean by a cul

, i think we need to think long term about what we need as a government and as a country to make foia work. within this statute, ogis has been tasked with making policy recommendations to the president and to congress. i'm not going to put anybody on the spot here, but on the table and the foia foyer there is a copy of an article about the recommendations that ogis has prepared and the difficulty that they have faced in publishing them. so that's unfortunate. it's something that should change. and it's one of the things that i look forward to ogis doing increasingly in the future. the mediation -- mediation is the term that the statute uses in terms of the office's responsibility. i think arguably the more accurate term for what ogis currently does is facilitation. so i think that there is room for increase -- increasing move in the direction of mediation and a more active role for ogis. and in addition where mediation doesn't produce the result that ogis thinks it ought to, the statute tasks ogis with issuing advisory opinions which was -- which would essentially give it an opportunity to

so that the paradigm we're working with doesn't necessarily make sense. including for released foia records, but generally for the web. >> uh-huh. >> and the third is to note that there's -- there's a responsibility for folks outside government here as well. or at least that there may be an important role that traditionally it's our libraries and our archives that ensure that there is long-term access and permanent preservation. important government information. and i think that there is -- there's certainly some interesting things going on now in terms of libraries and archives and the way they are sharing that government information is available over the long term. and we're in the midst of a transition as to how that role is played in the digital age. and i think that this particular example is one where there's probably some room for new initiatives and improvements in the way that both government and the library and archives community is playing their role to ensure that there is transparency, not just in the short term but over the long haul. >> okay. marianne? >> yes. >> just

but you know, they have to work within the confines. but the head of the foia office, if that head of the office wants to do it, real huge professional cost to do it, say i'm not going to sign off on the letter and persist and ask questions, right, because not all -- a lot of requests are really pretty routine, you know. so the volume of -- you know, so you can sort of attack them as how do we handle this routine matter. then there are a smaller number that are really sort of the inner secrets of the agency from a policy perspective. it's possible. i have seen it done. i have also seen foia officers that lost their job in the -- their life is made so miserable that they take early retirement or they're shovelled off to some other position. well, what's the countermand? when we got the irs manuals, it was really interesting because they had guidance to how severe penalty you should do for misbehavior within the irs. and it was very clear that the dividing line between low serious/high serious was did the public find out about it. okay. i mean, explicit. i mean,

foia litigation cases to be adjudicated. we have a vaughn declaration in that spirit to read with respect to professor long. it begins, wherea susan b. long began working with the freedom of information act more than 40 years ago, when she was one of the first persons to realize the act's potential for shedding light on federal government operations. whereas, together with her husband philip long she used with uncommon success in its early decades, as an agents of change at the internal revenue service. whereas, she promoted government openness, also as a remarkably successful foia lit i ganlt leading to the creation of such lit i gags precedence as long versus irs, in which the government received only its second foia denial. after the vaughn v rosen case itself, by the way. whereas, more than 20 years ago she founded the transactional records clearing house known as track w david bernham, which has through both foia requests and litigation made comprehensively available to the public detailed information on federal enforcement staffing and spending. this is the last. whereas, in so doing, she has uniquely influenced the development of the foia during

but, in fact, a lot of the work the aclu has done has resonated in other ways and had consequences in other ways. especially the foialitigation. they are i want to pause and say that to my embarrassment, the aclu and other organizations have taken on a role that the press used to do. we used to a lot more foia litigation. we used to be richer and we would do these things sometimes to destroy but sometimes just as a matter of principle because we thought that government secrecy in some areas was simply offensive, and that's an area in which the press is receded the aclu, taken on a role, we should still be doing to see foia clinics popping up in places like yale law school which is also a measure of how much less of an economic engine the press is in trying to be sure some of these rights should belong to all of us. and then let me give you a straight thought on this question about drones and killing people and what the process means. ted's response perfectly right, so long as were thinking about warfare. antiwar paradigm before the soldier shoots he doesn't have to get a warrant. he doesn't have to go before a judge

worked hard on this amendment. this amendment clarifies in the cybersecurity sharing and protection act that foyia, the freedom of information -- foia, the freedom of information access act, is in fact clearly in effect for the vast majority of this information. we understand that companies, i'll just take an example, companies such as electric utility companies, may share their very vulnerabilities as part of a process to reduce or eliminate these vulnerabilities. we certainly understand that that's not foia-able. national security is not foia-able. but we make sure everything is at least possibly foia-able when appropriate and the only question is, does it stand for one of the exclusions? so by making it narrow, we tell the american people that the freedom of information act is in effect on cybersecurity and will not be unreasonably with held. i think this is critical at a time in which greater transparency is the promise and there is a great deal of concern about cybersecurity somehow being something that would take away america's freedoms. just the opposite is true. our freedom of the internet, our freedom to have an effective a