Consistent with National Security concerns. During the process of preparing this report, we sought and obtained declassification of facts about the still highly classified program in order to allow us to put in context how the program operates. And clarify some public misconceptions. As a result, over 100 new facts were declassified by the government to provide needed context for the programs operation. I want to extend the boards appreciation to the personnel at the office of director of national intelligence, the department of justice, nsa, fbi, and cia who worked constructively with the board in this process. Its the most comprehensive public description of how the section 702 program operates and we believe this description will advance the publics understanding of the program. Turning back to the report, it was adopted unanimously. The board also unanimously offers ten recommendations to strengthen privacy safeguards, and to address these concerns. They are in a number of categories. First is the targeting process. The board calls for the government to clearly articulate the foreign intelligence basis for its targeting decisions. Second regards the role of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and the board calls for the government to submit a sample of tasking sheets and query terms so the court can consider them in improving the continued operation of the program. In the parts of the Prime Minister known as upstream or about, the board calls for a periodic assessment to make sure that the best technology is being used to filter out purely Domestic Communications and urges the develop of technology that would permit policy decisions to be made concerning whether socalled about collections should be limited. In the area of accountability and transparency, the board calls for declassification consistent with National Security of fbi, cia, and nsa minimization procedures and have the government provide more insight into the extent to which it acquires and utilizes communications of u. S. Persons. With regard to efficacy, the board asks the government to develop a comprehensive methodology for assessing the efficacy of counterterrorism programs. And lastly with regard to u. S. Person queries, that is queries using u. S. Person selectors of Data Collected through the 702 program, in the case of u. S. Person queries cutted by the fbi, the board agree that the fbi should update its minimization procedures to make it clear that in criminal matters its agents routinely query the database for section 702 information. The board agreed limits should be placed on the fbis ability to use and disclose 702 data. Three additional statements are included in the boards report representing different Board Members approaches to limiting the fbis use and dissemination of 702 information. One position is there should be enhanced internal review of that process. Another that this question while not pressing now should be addressed before it becomes urgent and a third that yet such query should be subject to court approval. The board takes the position that the nsa and cia should be permitted to query section 702 data for foreign intelligence purposes using u. S. Person identifiers only based on a statement of facts that the query is reasonably likely to return foreign intelligence information as defined in the foreign Intelligence Surveillance act. Judge wald and i would have gone further and we have separately proposed two additional recommendations that were not adopted by a majority of the board. The first is designed to ensure that communications by americans are properly purged if they do not have foreign intelligence value or constitute evidence of a crime. The second is that foreign intelligence queries using americans identifiers should only be made with court approval. Board members brand and cook take the position that oversight of such queries is already rigorous and judicial review is not necessary or appropriate. Again, all the boards recommendations are based on policy grounds and in our view none of them require legislation to be implemented. As part of the study, we conducted two public hearings and one public workshop and the board also solicited Public Comments through www. Regulation. Gov. Dozens of comments were received and we have reviewed all the comments. We appreciate the public input. At every step of the way the board has received full cooperation of the Intelligence Community. While the boards report was subject to class faction review none of the changes that resulted from that process affected our analysis or recommendations. The entire report that the board is going to vote on today is unclassified. There is no classified appendix. Pursuant to the boards statutory duty to advise the president and elements of the executive branch and congress, the board briefed staff from the house and Senate Intelligence and judiciary committees on june 2nd regarding the boards tentative conclusions and senior white house staff on june 17th. As i have indicated previously but also want to reiterate, in the course of conducting this study and also our study of the 215 program, we found nothing but hard working men and women in the Intelligence Community who are dedicated to protecting this country and weve seen no evidence of misconduct. The 215 and 702 reports fit into the boards broader mandate to balance National Security with privacy and Civil Liberties in overseeing existing programs and providing advice on new programs. Its not our institutional job to always oppose or critique counterterrorism programs but to objectively analyze them. Well soon be holding a Public Meeting to discuss where the board goes from here in the near term and get input on the public on the boards longterm agenda. The board has sufficient staff to work on more than one project at a time and were looking forward to both expanding our oversight function but also our advice function as well. I want to thank board staff who were invaluable in preparing this report and worked tirelessly to study the programs, analyze them, and to make sure that the classification process went smoothly. Ill now give individual Board Members an opportunity to address themselves starting with miss cook. Thank you, david. I wanted to also start with thanks to the incredible work of the staff. For all intents and purposes, we have been building this airplane as we have been flying it, and it takes extraordinary skill and dedication to do that, so thank you. I would also commend the chairman and in particular our executive director for, again, at the risk of flying this metaphor too far, their remarkable work piloting the plane. I wanted to take this opportunity to briefly discuss some of the recommendations we have made. We concluded that the section 702 program is legal, valuable, and subject to intense oversight. Our recommendation should not be viewed as an indication of concern about the current operation of the program. Instead, they are targeted and focused recommendations for relatively slight changes at the margins of the program. First and foremost, our recommendations as to queries using u. S. Persons identifiers and about collection are not driven by a concern that u. S. Persons rights are being violated. Instead, the recommendations are designed to prevent the section 702 program from transforming over time from a foreign Intelligence Program to a means of effectively surveilling u. S. Persons. We have seen no evidence of a backdoor, so our recommendations are designed to make sure one is not built. Second, the current requirements for the foreign intelligence purpose of the targeting rationale are the natural byproduct of the statutory structure as well as the historical underpinnings of the section 702 program. Section 702 was designed to move away from requiring the extensive justification necessary for a traditional fisa and for good reason. We are not recommending a return to a full traditional fisa packet, just a statement of facts, which will have the effect of increasing the rigor of the analysts approach and the oversight process. I also wanted to emphasize the boards conclusion as to the value of the program for the governments counterterrorism efforts, to say nothing of its larger foreign intelligence benefits. This program has assisted the governments efforts to learn more systematically about the membership, leadership structure, priorities, tactics, and plans of International Terrorist organizations. It has enabled the discovery of previously unknown terrorist operatives, provided the locations and movements of known suspects, and allowed the discovery and disruption of plots directed against the United States and foreign countries. A program can have substantial value separate and apart from plots thwarted and the section 702 program is an example of that. Finally, i believe the greatest value of the boards report may very well be in dispelling the misunderstandings and misconceptions about the section 702 program rather than the recommendations themselves. Restoring public trust and confidence can be a matter of education and transparency and does not always require a change in the governments operations. I hope we will now focus on building out our advisory capacity. The last year has been largely devoted to oversight, but our mandate is twofold. As we continue to build the permanent, meaningful federal agency envisioned by the 9 11 commission and congress, we have the opportunity to really think about how best to protect privacy and Civil Liberties in light of the need for counterterrorism programs, and i look forward to that process. Judge wald . Thank you. I, too, thank everybody who was engaged in getting this fairly mammoth and complex report out in record time. I want to take just a few minutes to put in context why the chair and i wrote an additional statement dealing with u. S. Person queries. As diligent readers of the report will recognize, this is a very complex program, and its main thrust is to be able to collect the communications of foreign nonu. S. Persons who are based abroad. In that process, however, the communications of u. S. Persons may and are collected where they are communicating with the foreign target. In many cases the u. S. Person may well not know, probably in most cases, may well not know that they are communicating with a foreign target. Since we are a privacy oversight board, our focus was on the privacy of the u. S. Persons who communicate with targets, in many cases not knowing that they are targets. Now, if those communications themselves on their face contain foreign intelligence, it seemed to us quite reasonable as well as to the other members of the board that the government be able to use have access to that foreign intelligence. However, the fact is that in the vast scope of the numbers of communications of u. S. Persons that are collected without their knowing it in this process, there will be much private and confidential information which under normal rules would be protected as privacy and with an aura of Fourth Amendment, whereas these are policy recommendations. The fact is that everybody in this, and this is in the main body of the report, recognize that americans have a Fourth Amendment some Fourth Amendment interest, protected interest in their private communications. So to get to cut to the chase, the two recommendations that we felt were needed additionally were, one, right now these when u. S. Persons Communications Come in, they may contain a lot could contain a lot of private, confidential information which is not at all relevant to foreign intelligence. At the current practice, those are not purged in any regularized fashion. The minimization requirements which we propose be made more restrictive say that the analysts upon review, but theres no duty to review ever, should be purged, taken out, but only if clearly they cannot be of any foreign intelligence value, and the standard, and this is in the regular report, the standard thats used is what we call kind of mosaic standard. The analyst has to decide, but even if right now there appears to be no foreign intelligence value, is it conceivable that in some distant future or some other analyst or somehow it might become relevant . We dont think that should be the standard. We believe that there should be a duty to at the point any query is made of u. S. Interests, u. S. Persons interests, that there should be a purging process going on which takes out the information which is not of foreign intelligence value, and we think as set out in our statement, that thats what the original definitions in the fisa regulation thats still applied to 702 and the thoughts of the original drafters meant to happen. So aside from the purging process, very quickly, the other recommendations we had were for some kind of judicial oversight and in this case it has to be fisa. We think that the fisa court should have to approve a query as being of potential foreign intelligence value. The same thing would be true in the case of the fbi when they send these things through to see if theres any evidence when theyre making an assessment or investigation of a regular crime. There ought to be some judicial approval of the fact that its reasonably likely to come up with foreign intelligence value. Perhaps its my own experience as a judge, but i do feel that some kind of outside, noninvolved approval ought to be necessary before the private information of the u. S. Persons, which is not of intelligence value, should be made accessible in these queries. Miss brand. Thank you, mr. Chairman. I echo your thanks to our staff who tirelessly worked to write this report and shepherd it through the preclearance review process. Turning to the substance of the report, i think its significant that the board with our varied background and perspectives unanimously concluded that this program at its core is statutorily authorized, constitutional, and highly effective. I believe that our targeted recommendations for changes to the program will further protect Civil Liberties and privacy without impacting the effectiveness of the program. I dont plan this morning to address the separate statement of chairman medine and judge wald. I would encourage you to read the separate statement miss cook and i published, but i want to make two brief points this morning to dispel some of the Common Misconceptions that have surrounded this program in the recent months. First, as our record made clear and the chairman has already said, this is not a Bulk Collection Program or a dragnet. I dont think we can stress that often enough because it has been such a common misconception. Under section 702 the government may only target individual, nonu. S. Persons located outside the United States whom the government believes will have foreign intelligence information. So impact that, the government may never target americans for surveillance under section 702 no matter where theyre located in the world. The government may never target anyone located inside the United States. The government must select specific targets for surveillance and collect only the communications of those targets and even when selecting a particular foreigner abroad, the government must believe he or she is likely to possess foreign intelligence information. Second, id like to dispel any notion that this program is likely to give the government a complete or even a significant picture of an americans private life. Our report discusses incidental collection under section 702 and chairman medine already referenced this. This is the fact that if a targeted foreigner abroad communicates with a u. S. Person, that communication will be collected. Thats an aspect of the program that was understood by congress when it enacted section 702 and its unavoidable under the program. Concerns have been raised about the extent of incidental collection. We spent a lot of time as a board looking at that. But the fact is that the government doesnt know exactly how many u. S. Person communications are collected under section 702. So to address that weve made recommendations that the government take measures to assess the extent of incidental collection, try to determine the number of u. S. Person communications collected. We look forward to seeing the results of that inquiry and deciding whether any additional recommendations to the program should be made on that basis. But its already clear based on what we do know that the chance that any given american will have any of his or her communications collected under section 702 much less a significant number of them is remote. If the individual is in communication with a particular foreigner abroad who has been targeted for surveillance under section 702, then, yes, his communications with that individual will be collected, but none of his other communications. And if an individual is regularly in contact with a number of targeted foreigners abroad, such that is significant number of his communications were being incidentally collected, then that connection could be very important for the government to know. Examples such as the case discussed in our report. Demonstrate the value of discovering domestic connections to fisa investigations where they exist. So i hope these facts and the rest of the boards report will dispel some of the misconexceptions about the program, and i look forward to working with the government to implement the recommendations that weve made. Mr. Dempsey. Thank you, mr. Chairman. We. I think, mr. Chairman, obviously, echoing and supporting the comments of all the board member, both about the work of our staff in getting this report to conclusion, i would say as a person who sort of values his weekend, there were far too many weekend emails associated with this report, but thats what it takes to do Something Like this. I appreciate the time that people put in on this. I think one, there are a couple over arching points that are important to recognize here. One is the chairman said everything we want it to say is