the committee will come to order today we will hear testimony on the presidential records in the new millennium updating the presidential records act and other federal recordkeeping statutes to improve electronic records preservation we exist to secure two fundamental principles first americans have a right to know that the money washington takes from them is well spent and second americans deserve an efficient effective government that works for them our duty on the oversight and government reform committee is to protect these rights our solemn responsibility is to hold government accountable to taxpayers because taxpayers have a right to know what they get from their government we will work the american people trust in the presidential records act they trust in this over thirty year old piece of legislation to preserve for all time the records of each administration crafted in the aftermath of watergate scandal the act marked a major step forward in openness and transparency for the white house by mandating the careful preservation of public accessibility of official records the american people would have an accurate historical record of decision making the purpose of this act is clear but history moves on technology moves on and today we deal without a doubt with an administration who has to by policy attempt to implement modernization of an act that never envisioned facebook and t not a new problem but it is a growing problem the clinton administration first had the digital age but ultimately seeing that email versus paper mail is substantially the same and when printed is identical made it relatively easy to comply with during the bush administration unfortunately the move from lotus notes to microsoft exchange made us acutely aware that the quantity of digital information if not lost but simply misstored could end up costing us tens of millions to recover in fact the digital age is more complex and if not handled correctly is both more subject to loss of critical records and cost to preserve and recover them we on the committee have broad oversight and we try to do each part of government as best we can but we do have limited special responsibilities the presidential records act falls to this committee we take seriously that the decades that have gone by have caused an act fully understood to be very difficult to implement we look forward to our witnesses helping us as we begin to craft the types of legislative reforms that will codify good policy that has been developed by multiple administrations and go beyond that to make it clear to the american people that all transactions appropriate and equivalent to the original ones captured will be captured in the digital age i now recognize the ranking member for his opening statement  corps our law enforcement officials and our nation's leaders from both political parties this was a sustained unrelenting effort over a decade and it shows that when america confronts its most daunting challenges we can come together with a striking and inspiring unity of purpose the presidential records act and the federal records act are landmark open government laws that are based on a fundamental principle that federal agencies must retain records of their official business these include records that have historical value as well as records that are important for administrative informational and evidentiary reasons the electronic age has brought new opportunities for making government work more effectively and efficiently on behalf of american taxpayers it has also brought new challenges for ensuring that the federal records are maintained properly have experienced problems preserving electronic records particularly emails during the clinton administration the email system experienced technical problems that resulted in lost emails during the bush administration the white house conceded that it lost hundreds of days of official emails and top officials routinely use their republican national committee email accounts for official business to address these problems the current system now automatically preserves all emails from white house email accounts in addition white house computers block access to private email accounts like gmail and hotmail  white house employees receive emails relating to official business from their personal accounts they are directed to preserve those emails either by forwarding them to their official accounts or by printing them as cutting edge technologies continue to develop they will create additional opportunities and challenges government officials can now communicate with each other and with the american public in new and creative ways through facebook new policies relating to social media to begin with it has limited access to these platforms to a small fraction of white house employees it has also worked with the national archives to develop protocols to save official postings and samples of public comments in a manner that is consistent with its protocols for written correspondence as you know mister chairman i always believe more can be done so the question for today's hearing is whether we openness in government act a package of five bills that overwhelmingly passed the house last congress with broad bipartisan support including your own mister chairman and every democratic member of this committee joined me as  house and agency emails are preserved electronically right now the law requires only that these records be saved there is no requirement that they be saved electronically this legislation had such bipartisan support last congress that it advisory panels provide more access to presidential records secure electronic messages generated by administration officials ensure donations to the presidential libraries open of the public record and give the government accountability office more t with probably the most critical information for today so i am pleased to have you here pursuant to the rules of the committee could you all rise to take the oath and raise your right arms do you s ferriero as you know you have been here before we do the green the yellow the red the important thing is that all of your statements are on the record and although you may go on script  to the extent that you can add to what is already going in the record not simply repeat it we would appreciate it with that you are recognized for five minutes thank you mister ferriero thank you and good morning chairman issa and ranking member cummings thank you for calling the hearing and for your continued attention to the management and preservation of government records as you mentioned general counsel gary stern accompanies me this morning and will be available to answer questions from the committee i am pleased to appear before you today to discuss the work that nara does to implement the government however does not apply to the president the vice president and those members of their staffs that advise and assist them nor does it govern recordkeeping by congress and the supreme court the presidential records act of one thousand nine hundred and seventy eight established public ownership of all presidential and vice presidential records but it vested all records management and authority entirely and exclusively with the incumbent president and vice president the legislative history of the pra states that the president is encouraged to implement sound records management practices because the pra presumes that all presidential records must be permanently preserved and transferred to the national archives at the end of the president's administration the act allows for comparatively straightforward records management policy that is the white house saves all presidential records with the exception of some publicly received bulk mail correspondence where a sampling is saved and all presidential records are transferred to nara when the president leaves office in one thousand nine hundred and ninety four the clinton administration established the policy of preserving all white house email records with an electronic recordkeeping system the george w bush administration continued this policy while both administrations experienced some problems as you mentioned preserving their emails which required restoration projects the overall concept of capturing and preserving electronic presidential records in their entirety became the accepted practice nara staff has successfully transferred the electronic presidential records of these two administ with all other records into the national archives throughout the course of an administration both i and my staff provide guidance and advice on matters affecting white house records management when invited to do so in this administration nara staff meet regularly with staff in the white house office of administration and other executive office of the president components on electronic records issues and provide guidance as requested for example we have provided advice the preservation of presidential record material generated by the white house and posted on social media websites and we have provided sampling methodology for archiving those types of records nara has testified several times before this committee on the continuing challenges that federal agencies across the government have in managing and preserving electronic records under fra the fra requires each agency to follow nara's guidance and implement a records management program we have developed an extensive set of regulations and guidance on how agencies need to manage their records at the beginning of this administration president obama issued a presidential memorandum on transparency and open government nara has subsequently emphasized that the backbone of a transparent and open government is good records management to put it simply the government cannot be open or accountable if it does not preserve and cannot find its records in february two thousand and eleven we issued our second annual records management self assessment report with respect to how agencies manage electronic records the report noted that records management programs at many agencies are at risk in september two thousand and ten nara also produced a report on federal web two use and record value that noted the web landscape is evolving so rapidly that if we  t to address these issues we risk losing the truly valuable materials created by the federal government in that report we made several recommendations which are included in my written testimony one of the fundamental challenges that agencies have in managing electronic records under the fra and what distinguishes them from records governed by the pra is the need to separate permanent records from temporary records electronic records management systems generally require significant user input to file individual records resulting in few agencies managing and preserving their email records electronically rather most agencies simply rely on print to paper as their official records management policy for email and many other electronically created records while the fra still provides a viable statutory framework for managing federal records we believe that there could we ways to modernize the fra to improve the management of electronic records before closing i do want to raise one critical but often overlooked point ultimately responsibility for records management will always rest to some degree with individual federal employees no matter what systems are in place that was true in an era of exclusively paper records and  remains true in an increasingly digital age as the archivist of the united states i have made the management preservation and future access to electronic records my highest priorities indeed as part of the transformation process that i have initiated within  have set up our own records management laboratory to develop and test best practices i am committed to working with congress the white house and federal agencies to do all that we can to improve electronic records management and preservation mister chairman this conclud act and other records laws i am pleased to appear before you to discuss information technology systems in place for the executive office of the president and their impact on electronic records management i have served as the chief information officer of the office of administration since aging it infrastructure over eighty two percent of our assets were end of life and no longer supported by their manufacturer enterprise software was severely out of date and had not been updated in years the eop had a single data center and no viable plan for a secondary disaster recovery these flaws led to multiple email and network outages in the first forty days of the administration we have devoted significant time and resources to modernizing the eop it systems in order to enhance stability ensure security and provide robust electronic records management among other initiatives we have replaced network switches overhauled our internet connection patched network gear migrated to exchange two thousand and seven moved to blackberry enterprise records management while adapting to emerging technologies although past white houses have struggled with email preservation starting from the first day of this administration email has been preserved through an automated archiving system that was procured by text and pin to pin messages on eop blackberry devices although we have explored an enterprise solution for archiving records created on social networks due to a lack of a suitable enterprise solution eop components currently use a combination of automated and manual methods to archive these records finally we have installed a new content management system on the white house website that archives every change to the site these initiatives have improved electronic records management on the eop it systems additionally we have made it easier for staff to work on those systems we have deployed secure mobile workstations enabling staff to work on eop systems while traveling or at home staff also have secure web based access to eop desktop and applications enabling them to work in a records managed environment from any computer we also restrict eop network access to websites that could pose risks to records management or security this includes sites like gmail yahoo mail facebook along with instant messaging sites like aol instant messenger from the eop network a limited number of staff have access to approved social networking sites for official business but cannot access web mail sites like gmail or instant messaging these proactive it measures are reinforced by eop policies employees are instructed to conduct all work on eop systems including electronic communications except in emergency circumstances when they cannot access the eop systems and must accomplish time sensitive work staff receive guidance that the pra applies to work related electronic communications on personal accounts and are instructed to take appropriate steps to preserve any records on their personal accounts such as forwarding those communications copying their eop account on outgoing emails through these proactive measures we hope to improve the eop electronic records management and address the challenges presented by emerging technologies i hope this background information and  people carry a product which circumvents your entire system by going to the at and t network on a daily basis in the white house isn't that true nothing stops someone from using this or other wi fi connected not to any wi fi in the capability you don't block any verizon sprint at and t or t mobile the fact is that people every day bring their private property into the white house and can gmail hotmail and the like from within the white house correct individuals are not restricted on what they bring into the white house on personal devices on the person chairman issa so someone if they chose to could be emailing back and forth to the dnc from the white house and you would not have the ability to person so let's stick to straightforward i am not after the president i am not after the administration i am after the changes in technology and whether or not we are equipped to deal with them today there are hundreds of products in the old executive reality of the last decade of changes and hopefully our work here is not about the current occupant of the white house but about an act that has survived multiple presidents with ever changing challenges m ferriero if someone were to produce a book five years from now and they had their gmail records their microsoft word documents all of which were produced on private computers using the cloud while they were sitting inside the white house or working as covered persons for the office of the president would you believe you're entitled to that source material under the presidential records act after don't they basically talk about meetings experiences and so on and ultimately aren't they most often from information that is either written typed or in some other way captured  during the time they are either employees of the white house or physically in the white house that is just the reality of what we see post president mister ferriero exactly in fact some of the heaviest users of our presidential libraries collections are former members of the administration chairman issa they have to supplement what they took with them how do you propose in a digital age that we deal with those correspondence that occur ultimately the president is both the head of the armed forces the head of the administration and the head of his party how do we appropriately capture that which we should capture not capture that which we shouldn't by statute rather than policy mister ferriero well as i said the way the law written the control unlike the federal records act the control of that content rests with the president and the vice president so the position that we have is guidance is to provide guidance and stern meets with his colleagues from the white house on a regular basis to provide that kind of guidance and to understand how technology is being used in the white house chairman issa are all of you comfortable that  encompassing they include language about included but not limited to all formats and all so any official communications involving their work are presumptively presidential records regardless of what system the on it is also our clear understanding from this administration and prior administrations that the policy is you must use the government systems chairman issa policy but not the statute and as we already heard they do use non government systems otherwise there wouldn't be a policy that when you send and receive on your gmail you forward it into the official system by definition you can't have it both ways you can't say the policy is that you only use official and then the policy is on those many many many many  in which you don't use the official please forward for the record clearly the policy is not getting the job done completely mister stern and i guess the question is does that occur often or our understanding is it can occur in emergency disaster or a terrorist attack communicating on official email may be impossible would you had currently the white house blocks access to personal email on white house computers employees are prohibited from even connecting personal electronic devices to the eop network is that correct  ferriero the evolving guidance that we are working on in this particular administration is a good indication of how the system should work in a healthy environment as i said the that should be the guidance you use your personal connections when you don't have access otherwise mister cummings okay mister ferriero and you ensure that that record then gets transferred to your official email  so there are extreme and ridiculous proposals designed to make a point at its most basic level compliance with recordkeeping laws comes down to employees making decisions is that right mister ferriero that is the human element i was ferriero because it points us in the right direction in terms of how we deal with our electronic records and it also raises the consciousness of congress about the importance of records chairman we started in on this discussion just now on the thirty year problem in document presentation and i think maybe we should explore that further mister stern certainly feel free to jump in does the nara favor presidential recordkeeping is it common that on the second term they are more aggressively getting these archived is it your presumption that we should start earlier in a president's term mister stern the advantage of in any presidential term even and from our perspective we are planning a transition the first day the president is in office in terms of working and coordinating to ensure that all records particularly electronic records would be in the right shape and format so they can be transferred to us when the president  will in terms of the issues of pre accessioning we would just get copies for storage in its original format the agencies would still have legal custody and be responsible for access use all of those issues until there talking about today involves the preserving of federal records but preserving federal records is really in my opinion not enough i would say that it is equally as important to make these records available to the press and available to the general public now the american people have a right to know what their government is doing what meetings are taking place what they are working on and one of the ways that they are able to figure this out is by having the press really report on the records on what the government is doing i would like to point out that the  a administration has taken many very important steps to open up government and to allow the public to see what is taking place it is probably the most transparent government in the history of our country and i would like to give one specific example and ask for your comment on this in december of two thousand and nine the white house began making all visitor access logs available on the white house website so the public knows who is wooing whom who is going to the meetings what are they working on who has access so i would like to ask mister ferriero or mister stern to comment on how important a step was this for the white house to make the visitor logs available to the general public to the press to write about it this is the first time in history this has been opened up to the american people how important a step is this mister ferriero i will start i think it is incredibly important but it also needs to be coupled with other heads of agencies releasing their calendars and their schedules also and we haven't made as much progress there misess maloney mister stern do you have a comment entry records in the roosevelt white house so it is certainly our mission as the national archives to open records as quickly as we can when they come to us and we always encourage the rest of the government to be has probably been more effective than any other in the history of our country and has made use of the social media such as facebook twitter youtube blogging and these applications bring great innovation and allow people to have access to what our government is doing and what the activities are but they also bring very special challenges for the archiving of this information raised a series of questions with them to analyze the content of their postings on social media to make decisions about whether they are records or not if they are records then they need to be captured just as u guidance of the federal records act and we have provided guidance on the capture of that content also misess maloney would you say the benefits of using social media and these various tools to communicate with the general public outweigh the challenges ferriero yes definitely this administration is committed to involving the american public in the workings of government in a way that it has never been involved before and this is the way it is happening  close since both of you have mentioned the importance of having the agencies involved and that the performance of the agencies in managing electronic records are equally as important and i would just like to point out that we have a bill before congress the message preservation act that calls upon the agencies to electronically save this information and to save their emails electronically and i urge my colleagues on both sides of the aisle here i certainly appreciate your leadership and your time and certainly i appreciated it with chairman clay last congress having oversight in our subcommittee of nara and appreciate the hard work that you do also appreciate the fact that you have a north carolina connection i wanted to ask you about the print to paper policy could you discuss the drawbacks to this  that rather than keeping a digital record which seems more efficient easier to search easier to maintain i would guess it would be easier to maintain  compared to this idea that you simply print something off and put in a file mister ferriero i already have ten billion pieces of paper i don't need any more paper it embarrassing that in the year two thousand and eleven our guidance is print and save we should be capturing this electronically i have forty four facilities around the country the storage costs for presidential records act acknowledge electronic communication as record that will help mister mchenry what part of the federal records act would have to be updated in order to insist that we have electronic records a lot of difficulties come in as archivist and i have asked you this at every hearing that you have been before the committee so you probably know where i am going with this but in terms of  i want us to be we have in the past eight months gone through a major reorganization transformation of the agency created basically a new organization driving out repetitive kinds of operations and streamlining and making it more efficient but most importantly putting our user community in the center of what we are doing and engaging the staff in this process and the engagement of the staff through social media internally has really had an impact on how people feel about being part of one large agency i visited now thirty two of our forty four facilities so i have had an opportunity to meet firsthand with the staff to talk to them first question what is it like to work here tell me the stories with and without supervisors so i have gotten a really good picture of what works and what doesn't work and we are serious about turning that archivist ferriero it is very good to see you again i would like to take a moment to say that you are doing an outstanding job leading the national archives your you serve this is especially true regarding open government and electronic records management i would like to ask you about regulations as you know the house last year passed the electronic message preservation act or empa under this legislation you would be required to issue regulations to agencies and the white house on the preservation of along with the existing statutes provide you with the tools that you need in order to help agencies comply with federal recordkeeping statutes and can you elaborate on how exactly these improvements question but during the previous administration this committee discovered something very disturbing this was after we learned that the previous white house was unable to properly manage the emails in their system and many were lost on top of that dozens of senior white house officials conducted official business using their republican national committee email accounts instead of their official government accounts countless records perhaps millions that should have been preserved under federal statute were lost mister colangelo do we have to worry about those same problems in this white house mister colangelo congressman what we have done since two thousand and nine is worked with the technology that the bush administration procured which is a commercial off the shelf product a proven technology to records so the eop email systems are being archived additionally to that we have also stabilized our systems and enhanced mobility so that we offer users many choices to access responsibility is that by design or is that something that was it just so happened that way mister stern yes the national archives used to be part of gsa and  hasn't played any functional role in dealing with management and preservation of records so i think it is not unreasonable to consider whether they need to have a role in the statute and as the arc t testified earlier this morning we don't think gsa will likely have any resistance either ms buerkle i apologize i have been advised that this has already been covered before i got here so i apologize for that  let's go to the whole email question and the preservation of those do you have mister ferriero any recommendations regarding potential additional rules for ensuring that the transfer of the presidential administrat on the other side on the federal records scenario ms buerkle i believe that this issue is raised because in the instance where obviously with president clinton and president bush those were two terms but in the event of what could be captured what couldn't be captured obviously the ranking member and i have an agreement that in times of an emergency in which the system is down you come as you are bring what you have and do what you must but assuming that there are covered persons and we would have to define covered persons not to be just anybody but covered persons that have personal emails and personal facebooks do you believe the statute should give an absolute right for those covered persons documents if you will to be reviewed by a third party to ensure that there is compliance with the law i am not talking about if you will preempting people's personal rights but if you are a covered person and you have access and you may or may not have used it is that discretion something you would like see reviewable at least by the office of the presidency itself mister ferriero certainly by the office the presidency yes and i could after more thought extend that my concern as i have said has to do with any time there is the human element involved when someone has to make a decision since you capture one hundred percent of all communication on the exchange system at the white house and since that includes private conversations that do occur i mean people do email home et i am phoning home i won't be home at any reasonable time tonight they just killed bin laden if that happens you capture it it is there thirty years from now people will be able to see what somebody said that evening to their family on why they weren't going to be home until after midnight shouldn't we in reverse also have that ability to collect data from covered persons the other direction in some organized way in your opinion mister colangelo from a technology cutting edge technologies to create records and decentralized environment in which they reside what mechanisms are currently in place to encourage collaboration between records management and it professionals as needed worked together talked met together so the situation is that we have the it folks off developing systems all of which have records implications not talking to their records managers so we convened the first ever joint meeting of the two to start this relationship of records managers being at the table with their cios as new systems are being developed the situation is even more complicated for me because in the wonderful world of the federal job family there is no such thing as a records manager so we are working now with opm to create a family of jobs around information management that will address the problem so the result is in many agencies and subagencies the assignment for records management falls to the most junior person in the agency not a full time job high turnover not very well trained and we get what we get from that situation mister connolly a recent report by the american council for technology industry on government best practices for social media recordkeeping identified the need to develop communications between social media team and records management as best practice number one the report also said until best practices and tools emerge to assist in the records management of social media records agencies were tending toward retaining all social media content so that those portions of the records are protected given the overwhelming volume of data this could encompass i would be interested in your thoughts about what is the best practice going  managers and web managers so we have recently brought together the federal web managers and the records managers to talk about this very issue of what needs to be captured and how it needs to be captured i referred earlier to  i think there was some indication that these best practices would be put on the website any idea of time line for that  communication also takes the stress off of our system so it reduces the work system as only for work systems and it keeps the clear separation between personal and government issue equipment mister connolly so people are allowed to use their work computers a tremendous amount of information even though you work with the libraries where many of the assets reside ultimately a freedom of information act request on any president covered under your records your many archives follow up the desire to foia thirty year old material generally from the government is pretty minimal right in other words agencies control for thirty years their documents you control them when they are too old for anyone to ask the original model of the archives was you wanted the records to get to an age where they are no longer needed by the agency and where the restrictions pretty much are lifted so in the old model after thirty years when they transferred records to us we could presume that the records were virtually open in their entirety unless there was classified information or personal privacy information so the ideal is when they come to us we can just make them open you wouldn't need to make a decide not to run for a second term which i understand he has already made that decision you are only two years away from receiving four years of information so you have this variable that goes from four years to eight years presumably it will be eight years for this administration like it was for the previous two but when i look at the department of homeland security you have decades before under completely different cabinet officers those records are going to be available in a sense in your opinion and mister ferriero i think i will bring this one to you in a sense doesn't an administration's sunset and an even hand of a nonpartisan entity become the more logical custodian at the end of an administ ration of for example department of homeland security from the bush administration right now secretary napolitano hires four hundred people to decide whether or not bush era records are publicly available or not does that seem like an of modernization that we should hold hearings on and decide whether or not to take the entire presidency as a period of time in order to refresh broadly and that is why i asked about your own  history because you are making foia decisions on president w bush today while in fact you are not making decisions on any of his people and his administration instead the succeeding administration of the opposite party is making those years sooner than you will the cabinet officers records mister stern so the notion that if we were to get more records earlier and have to process them i think it would have to be accompanied by rather massive addition of staff and resources to deal with the processing element of it and part of the old model is they are the agencies records the agencies can decide on the restrictions and on access and they have greater resources than we would have if we take in massive amounts of  belong to the administration that it should be handed off in its greatest portion to individuals who report to someone who wants public information public private information private and who is a political that general belief doesn't change the fact that the department of defense what is going on today must be determined by the department of defense and its current cabinet officer but the sooner that transfer were to occur the more likely the public would have a fair right to know not in any way determine either by the vindictiveness of the next administration or the graciousness of covering up by the next administration both which quite frankly the record shows there has been a certain amount of that that has gone on under both parties i recognize the ranking member for his second round mister cummings i was just listening to the  from the clinton white house sixty five thousand email messages that elena kagan had some role in and very often those messages were a combination of personal and do the job we needed it to do and i am wondering where are we now with that and how do you make sure i was just telling the chairman a few minutes ago that he and i came along a while back and we can still remember when people were using carbon paper and typewriters and now all technology changes seems like every five or six days if not every day so how do you keep up with that how do you make sure you stay on the cutting edge and at the same time make sure that it is a balanced approach so you are not just getting equipment that  we did in the beginning of the administration was really invest in stabilizing our core we averaged somewhere in the seventy percent uptime in the first forty days of the administration now we are over ninety nine percent operational uptime we had to replace a lot of key we are constantly upgrading new systems as i mentioned in my testimony where we are looking at upgrading our archival system before it becomes out of date so let's beat that before it gets to that end of life state and now we constantly look at new technology before integrating it into the eop enterprise to ensure that it does follow the compliance and records management and helps meet the business need so it is constantly meeting that business need and also ferriero the challenge you face would appear to be that each administration delivers you records in a certain way the clinton administration as i understand it delivered you lotus notes as a system famously from this committee's standpoint the next president tried to take lotus notes and transfer it to microsoft office suite including exchange and then discovered among other things that they are image backups and were not capturing so we have seen these transitions what is it we can do for you broadly as the archivist either through mandating that the systems that are delivered to you be in an open format fourteen bond paper with ten courier but those days are gone and if i had dos three point three wordperfect followed by we won't even go through supercalc and all the other programs that are long forgotten they would deliver me an amazing nightmare you have that don't you mister ferriero i do have that nightmare and it makes paper look very good today the electronic records archive that we are creating in fact  is designed to accommodate those changes in technology as well as changes in attachment it has neutralized formats basically to make it possible for us to migrate the digits through time so that they are available in perpetuity on the other hand being much more involved at the creation point as i talked about earlier is important to us so that we can establish standards  around email creation and electronic record creation and capture chairman issa so in closing if in our modernization legislation we mandated that all agencies give you sufficient comfort with their preservation on an annual basis so that either the material could be transferred or changes could be made so that the next year you are not getting two years of information that is going to be very expensive to change that would be helpful secondly if in fact we design for transfer at the front end then you could save and the american people could save a huge amount of money isn't that correct  well that will be among other things in our legislation i will close m colangelo you talked about the good and the bad of the bush administration is there a way that we could ensure that the funding and the capability of each  more best practices as a matter of course or is it simply that president bush did a great job of capturing email archives and creating the naz and the volt and so on while toward the end refreshing servers was not a priority and you inherited them over three years old those kinds of good and bad should we have a role or are you satisfied that each administration does the best they can and hands off mister colangelo from a technology standpoint i think it is important to invest in in frastructure so that there is a continual flat line there versus the up and down chairman issa okay i might note by the way that the white house has almost always been at least one generation of the exchange system ahead of the house congressman so from a technology standpoint we have an enterprise wide gateway that blocks all staff from accessing these and then when a component staff member makes a request for this it is reviewed by their counsel and then if is appropriate for the business use they are allowed access through a certain policy and they have access to an approved number of sites we have looked for an enterprise wide preservation system technology hasn't matured enough currently but we are continuing to look and hoping that it will come around what happens now is records are preserved by a component by component basis and i know today actually the white house released a blog post on whitehouse  v describing their process for capturing records on some of these sites so for example on twitter they use an rss real simple syndication that emails back into the email archive system and facebook  colangelo for every individual that is provided access into the social networking sites they are provided additional guidance and training from legal counsel on their presidential record act obligation anything so a personal message for instance on another email don't forget to grab milk on the way home would be captured through the traditional email system but a message that is going through facebook through the email system on that for those computers would not be captured in any way as i mentioned we don't have an enterprise preservation system currently available mister lankford okay is that an issue for us that there is basically email that is going through our system that basically they are just told not to do anything on that that should be related to official business that would just be personal on that or what are the parameters that are given to them to say you have access to facebook but please don't in these areas mister colangelo i know that the guidance is pretty detailed i don't have that access so i haven't gone through the one of those things that is hanging out i understand the technology change and how things are shifting there is nothing off the shelf on that but it may be something that we need to address in the coming days obviously this president as is par for our culture as a whole is very interested in being able to use social media sites and i think it very appropriate the inappropriate side is we have a large volume of a lot of interaction with constituents and with people and with the white house that is not being tracked and is not being monitored mister colangelo we continue to look into this technology we interest and with your history of tracking what twenty one thousand young people every year going through your camps i suspect that you know more about how to keep track of the hardest things to keep track of in the world  that i want to thank all of our witnesses you have been very generous with your time i appreciate your input it will help us as we go forward clearly some of you will be back again as we try to implement good policy after so many years of a law