mr. marczak: it was a mind meld. [laughter] mr. nichols: it was, that's perfect. you think about going back to 2020 and the pandemic and where our region was in terms of lack of access to education online, collapse of commerce, dramatic spike in poverty, lack of access to health care, among other things. beyond that, we have big challenges with things like delivery of public services, addressing issues of crime and insecurity in the region. so you started talking about the summit of the americas in los angeles, 2022. i would go back one event earlier, which was the oas general assembly the year before where we started to really incorporate a digital agenda into our goals for the western hemisphere. and then we built, we had five pillars there and we built on that in the summit of the americas in los angeles. i would just note that we are building on it further with apac in san francisco and in lima. asia-pacific economic corporation, you don't immediately think about latin america, but we have a number of countries in our region that are in a pac, and we are talki

mr. marczak: thank you, mr. secretary.deputy bacchus, when we think about smart cities, we think about modernizing government, data, visualization, transformation of public services. in thinking about that it means that large segments of the state are open to attack as well. how is the u.s. working with local regional governments on their critical tasks moving forward on cyber capacity? ms. bachus: thank you for the question and it's great to be here on this event of smart cities, incredibly important because of cyber issues but also technology issues, because who is running it will ultimately determine who has access to the information about your citizens and how it's being used. similarly we have had long-standing cooperation with ois on cyber security. i had the opportunity to participate in the last two security summits, one was in the dominican republic, one was in the bahamas and we talked about how it was that we could support the region in making sure that you reduce the attack surface and increase the resilience a