Transcripts For CSPAN Key Capitol Hill Hearings 20160814

If someone does go into the content Management System and grab a document, which they have access to, which is fine, and they turn around and email it to a friend or in turn they get hacked at their computer and they lose that document, the gone. Byebye. But if the encrypted and you can still have an encrypted document sitting in the content Management System, thats fine, that can operate. The just an encrypted blog. Looks like a p. D. F. Take it out, send it to fridays friends. They go to open it, they have to try to decrypt that document at the application and so theyre going to have to try to authenticate it. Thats about keeping secrets. Keeping your documents and your data secret. Integrity, i love that one. No one ever talks about. It Digital Signatures are one of the greatest things ever. We use them every day, we dont eel even realize it. We use them when we go to eab site that has website that has h. T. Http. How do you know youre going to your banks website . Do you trust that little u. R. L. You typed in . No, you see the lock. The backed by a certificate. You check on the integrity and the authenticity of where that came from. Its a visual signature. How do you know to run some code on your computer . Ey digitally find it you get a little warning. This code is coming from an unknown source. Ok, so what do you get from a Digital Signature . Integrity and authenticity. Who the from, whos the originator, has it been altered in transit. You can do this on documents as well. If i get a p. D. F. , its almost the same concept of going to an http website. I can see who the document came from, who signed it and if anything has been altered on the way. If someone changes one pixel on that p. D. F. , it will break that Digital Signature and have a big red x on it. Whos using this today . Hats a good place for it . The transcript, thats a nice thing to be able to say, hm, my electronic transcript, i didnt like this, going change it, excellent, send it off to my employer or my potential employer. So schools like stanford are starting to digitally sign their transcripts before they release them. Thats pretty good. I can see the transcript now as an employer came from stanford university. And if someone laid to tride to alter that little tech, it would give me a red x but i get a nice blue ribbon that says, this thing has not been altered since its been signed. The Government Publishing Office, they changed their name, they used to be the , vernment Printing Office because they printed everything on paper, theyve moved to electronic delivery, the Government Publishing Office now. Great, good marketing. But they sign their documents. The budget, for instance, thats the electronic signature log, stats are up there, because its cool. Imagine getting a budget which change with changed values on it. My friend from cloudflair, who is busy on his phone, but he set me up for this, thank you. Oh, youre recording. Oh, youre tweeting me. Wow. [laughter] ive never been tweeted. Cool. Thats Digital Signatures. Again, more about integrity. Also get authenticity of documents. Confidentiality, were talking about data Sentry Security solutions. Weve had the fallback with additional layers of security, layers of security, we can put security mitigations on the data itself, we can encrypt it with d. R. M. , we can monitor it and analyze it with our analytics engines. And then we can also protect things like integrity of our data. Ive blaggettered on enough blaggettered on enough. Im going to blathered on enough. Im going to throw up security u. R. L. s you might be interested in. Am i allowed to take questions . Really . Absolutely, yeah. Mr. Gottwals are there any questions . Chickens. Come on. Nothing. All right. All right. Thank you. [applause] a shy group. Mr. Gottwals yes. Now the my pleasure to introduce our esteemed panel. Frank, why dont you just have everyone tart so come up with you for the panel. I think we have two panels right there. While theyre doing that, i am going to introduce them. On our panel we have marion, the principle director and c. I. O. For cybersecurity at the department of defense and cheryl, chief Information Security . Officers a ath the Central Intelligence agency. Moderating todays event is frank konkol. I also want at that to take this opportunity to thank you all for attending today. Thanking our speakers and also akobee for their gracious support of todays adobe for their greashes support of todays events gracious pport of todays events like todays. Frank that sounds better. All right. So i will introduce our panelists quickly. Although connie just did. You guys can talk about yourselves just a little bit before we get started. Tell us about your jobs. Cheryl, well start with you. Cheryl im the chief Information Security officer at c. I. A. All of our systems get looked at centrally. Before that i actually spent quite a bit of time in the iccio over at the d. N. I. Mary andrew and i worked together rather close i had maryanne and i worked together rather closely throughout that time. Weve known each other for 15 years. T Small Community. Its a Small Community although i think were trying to grow it. Frank im the third wheel. Worst tindr date ever. Third wheel. Mary anne, tell us about yourself. Mary anne im in a joint duty assignment in the pentagon. Im an n. S. A. Employee, ive been there for 30someplus years. Interesting, i had a group of makes me realize how long ive been there, a group of young coops come in the other day, come into the pentagon from n. A. S. , and they asked me if id come talk to them. One of the last questions they asked me was, how long have you been at n. A. S. . Im like, longer than any of you have been alive. Marianne really looking across the whole department of defense, which is a huge landscape, at all the fiber security activities that were undertaking and how do we make progress in this area. Frank i think trevor did a pretty good job earlier kind of discussing what happened last year. Wasnt the best summer for federal government in cybersecurity. I think he covered the civilian side quite well. I think this panel well get into, have the d. O. D. And i. C. Have been affected. When we were on a call, we always do little calls to make sure i dont ask anything too outlandish, especially to our i. C. Folks. We talked about what you guys got done wrapping up doing, which was the leg work of sending out the letters to people who had been affected. So, i guess with that in mind, kind of, whats been the impact broadly since then . Cheryl it was a monumental activity. Marianne not just the letters. The letters were a monumental activity. One of the things we learned from it, especially at the Senior Leadership level, and from everybodys level, is that there are systems and data that we didnt pay enough attention to that we probably wouldnt have considered missioncritical data, that impacted us so broadly. As an o. P. M. Breach. Huge impact. We finished mailing, were going to have a party, 21. 4 million letters of. Of those, two million of those got a return to sender. So then we had to go find correct addresses. But that doesnt seem like until you go through Something Like this, you do not understand the undertaking of all the facets of everything that was involved in that type of a breach. I met with more privacy lawyers than i knew existed. Actually going through things for the first time. We had a lot of help from the white house because they certainly wanted the situation handled in a certain way. A lot of political help and just kind of a Lesson Learned for all of us. I dont know if you guys know, but as a result of that whole thing, congress decided that the department of defense would run the i. T. For the clearance process system in the future. Were in the process now working very closely with o. P. M. And making sure the Current System is secure enough , at the same time were working very closely with them to make sure we develop a new system. Frank i didnt realize the i. C. Had been impact ad lib differently by the o. P. M. Breach than your standard d. O. D. Person with a clearance. How was it for you guys . Cheryl thats both true and not true. For our agency, we were probably not impacted quite as heavily as most of the rest of the government with cleaners or whose information is regularly processed through o. P. M. Sherrill we do our own cleenches but we also hire from outside clearance but we also hire from outside. We do have people who have involved and got letters because their previous employment might have been in d. O. D. Remember, a good chunk of the i. C. Is actually d. O. D. And goes through that same clearance process. Frank you wouldnt have gotten letter. Marianne i did not get a letter. Sherrill i did. As well as my husband and children. We had a lot of people who did get letters and who were upset. We still worry about it. We have to worry about it. But as marianne said, one of the best things that came out of this theres always a Silver Lining in every one of these bad things that happens. Terrible to say. But none of us were as aware of what data was being processed in o. P. M. And what data was potentially accessible via internet connecttivity until this happened. And the much more extensive than any of us thought. So the good news is, a lot of attention and focus was paid on this. And we think we are on a path to improve the protections around that level of information in the future. Marianne also, what other missions do we have that retain privacy data, medical systems, all those kinds of things, and what are they doing with it and how are they protecting, it protecting it, right . Where else do we have this kind of data, who has it, how are they holding it, what are they doing with it. Frank that concludes the negative nancy portion of our panel where we talk about the bad stuff. [laughter] now lets get a little bit more forward thinking. I want to start with you, marianne, on the d. O. D. Cybersecurity that came out last april. You have a lot of roles in that. Theres a lot we can dive into with it. But just lets go broadly to begin with. On what d. O. D. s doing. And then well get to some of your specific duties with that. Because you have a lot of roles you have to do. Marianne the second d. O. D. Cyberstrategy, its very encompassing. Im focused on the cybersecuritya aspects of it. After he released the cyberstrategy, the Department Released the cyberimplementation plan, which goes through all the fat fastets. It would facets. It would have fine ops and fiber ops and fiber defense. We have the cybersecurity implementation plan. About a year ago, a year and a half ago, we made a very concerted effort that we were going to focus on the basics. Theres a million things things you can do in cybersecurity, and we decided we were going to do basically a back to Basics Campaign because we looked at the intrusions, any successful intrusions wed had in the last year or year and a half and probably 98 of them were due to something simple and trivial that somebody knew they should have done but that wasnt implemented. So we went back to coming up with kind of a top 10 list. And we pushed that out and so we have been marching down that path. I can talk, i mean, do you want to ask me questions or keep talking about it . Frank you can keep talking. Sy have a few questions i have a few questions. The one aspect, when trevor was talking about accountability and following up on this stuff. I wanted the scorecard part in particular. Thats new and important. Marianne all of these top 10 things, there have been formal military orders have gone out to do this stuff. So the not like anybody should have been surprised by it. People werent doing. It because they have so many thing to do. Obviously it didnt get prioritized high, along with all the other mission things they had to do. So what we decided to do was do a scorecard. That has been a tremendous amount of activity and effort on our part, but has been pretty incredible because nobody, i dont care how many stars you have on your shoulder, nobody likes a bad grade. Nobody. We started doing c. I. O. Meetings. We have them every single friday. Every single one of the service, all their data rolls out. They have 10 scorecards for each service and they have to sit in front of the d ombing dcio and tell him why they have dodcio and tell him why they have the numbers they have. Every user logs in with a p. K. I. Why dont do you that . What percentage is the air force . What percentage is the navy . Everybody should be 100 . One of the other big pushes we have is windows is a huge operating environment that we use in the department. Getting off of all that legacy stuff, especially for end user machines and moving to windows 10. We have something that tracks that. External facing web servers have to be behind the d. M. Z. All those thing. Briefing that to the c. I. O. Once a week gives people a gets people mr. Ayotte tension gets peoples attention. The secretary of defense gets to see it. He gets a briefing on it once a month. Then they have a chat about it. Frank are those chats usually positive or not so positive . Marianne for the secretary, i think he thinks theyre very positive, right . Frank i bet he does. Marianne what ive seen is initially when we first started this, at the very senior level, they really thought it was kind of the commander at the owner of the network level. So to worry about this stuff. They really didnt have visibility or have any idea how good or how bad they were. Very quickly we got into the thing where they need to care about this. When secretary of defense is care being it, your congressman is caring about it, we need to care about it. Weve seen tremendous improvements. The accountability and that culture, weve been waiting for this our whole career. Accountability and people caring at the very senior level about cybersecurity. Frank you have seen the d. O. D. C. I. O. Speep speak before . Arianne i see it every day. Frank i feel like hes a pretty intense dude. Hes right up in your face. Marianne very, very smart person. Frank lets switch gears. How about from your c. I. A. Perspective. Whats changed since o. P. M. And then i want to get into how thats feakted how the agency deals in cyber. First of all, i guess there were two questions there. Sherrill o. P. M. Didnt really cause major disruption, change, at our agency. Ill just start with that. We spent the last year trying to get the definitive list of what might have been compromised from o. P. M. That belonged to us. But as far as did what happened at o. P. M. , absolutely changed the focus or direction of how we protect our agencys information or systems, absolutely not. Weve been on that path for a long time. Frank ahead of the game. Sherrill i dont know if id say ahead of the game. Ware of the issues and i shouldnt say the bad word, the not in my talking points, but we had aim. Weve been focused on Insider Threat and protecting the data for pretty much as long as ive been doing cybersecurity and thats been quite a while. Frank going through a strategy, five, six years ago now, you guys had a big move to cloud, which was, you know, got a lot of headlines and attention over the years, whats changed within because of that . Has been there been a huche learning between mutual learning between the cloud provider and you guys . Has it changed the way you do business internally at all . Sherrill eye sight and cloud have been significant changes for the entire i. C. And our agency in particular. We are the ones with the contract with amazon, so we are responsible for the security of what is provided to the entire i. C. As far as hosting infrastructure. Hen amazon came in, we started off with what we thought was still a very short timeline for approving its operation. When i say short, if you go back historically, big acquisitions like that and big Services Like that, you could see years being spent on analysis of the system. In our case, when amazon really got everything in place and where they thought it was ready for us to make sure it was secure enough, we ended up with two months. In that two short months, we had the assessors across the i. C. Working with us and working closely with amazon. We may be one of the first that they actually opened up the hood and let us see some of under ner workings specific disclosure agreements. I cant give you anydy at that detail what have we might have found. It was a really good learning experience. We got to understand all of what amazon does to protect your information commercially, and our information internally. We also found a few things and gave them feedback on changes we would like them to make for us and the good news is they took a lot of that to heart, so they implemented a lot of the changes they made for the Intelligence Community commercially and you all are benefiting by that as well. When youre using a. W. S. Hosting. Its a great learning experience. The other thing thats changed significantly as a result of eye sight and the cloud is the focus on, hey, you know what, i can spin up the cloud instance on the internet, i get this all the time. In two hours and im up and running and all my datas out there. I still cant meet that twohour time frame to give you an approval to put a system out there. But were under extreme pressure to enable mission to spin things up much more quickly, put things out there more quickly, and so you talked a little earlier about that need to share, need to protect, we are focused on both. Were focused on trying to move at the speed of mission, and yet ensure that that mission informations at ad quatly protected. Informations adequately protected. Its been a great experience. One more thing about amazon that we hadnt realized. People love that compute. You think about it more for analysis and for getting results quickly. From a cyberperspective, its great. Because think about it. In the past, when we would tell people to audit, youd see systems shutting down because they would fill up with audit information and cyberpeople would get yelled at because that system doesnt work because we put too much security on it. Or we tell you to encrypt the data. Well, the time for encryption and decreppings decrippings often makes the users too upset to use it because it takes too long. Now go into elastic compute. When the system starts to fill up, you just spin up another v. P. C. Theres no longer any of that impact from the systems filling up and being unable to do the work because we filled it up with security information or were tellinging you to encrypt and youre telling us this is adding overhead, it doesnt anymore. Cloud has been a god send. But for the folks trying to implement systems quickly, and for us to secure their work loads better, were very happy with it. Our agency and many of the other i. C. Components are busily working to move their work loads into the cloud and off of legacy. So into the new. Frank is there a lot of collaboration between all you fellas . Sherrill there is. Every time we provide a new i. C. Wide service, we have the 17 components that have the opportunity to look at it. They often have the opportunity to participate in the testing. They certainly are given the body of evidence and the ability to adopt what the existing findings in infrastructure provide. Then when they go to secure it, theyre only needing to focus on the delta of what are they implementing on top of whats already approved. As an i. C. , absolutely. Weve been working together very closely on this. As well as the cloud. I shouldnt have left it out, but the cloud that n. A. S. Stood up that provides that same type of service. Frank going back on the d. O. D. Front, you guys are sort of under way with your own modernization effort, if will you. The joint information environment. I think youre in the jrss phase right now. But maybe you can talk about what ramifications that should have on cyber for d. O. D. Wide . Marianne sure. On just operations also. But, so the people people that dont know the d. O. D. , and ive had people actually say this to me, which makes me smile they think were this wonderfully environment with we do have a very good command structure. We always know who is in charge above us. Maybe whos below us. It is really a very loosely kind of federated infrastructure. Of everything. When i think it was probably general alexander kind of came in and said, i cant seay cross my, you know, my networks that im supposed to cybercommand, right, we were looking at doing some type of a comment information environment. Common infrastructure. Thats what j. I. E. Is. The jrss, which is joint Regional Security stacks, is a common set of Security Capabilities at midpoint locations around through the infrastructure. So the army, the air force, navy, gives us the ability to have consistently implemented security and then also give us the ability to share among all of them. So it goes a very long way to helping us have a much more home genius environment, that we understand, we know what people have, we know what people are running. We can actually share the pertinent information we need to share across these security mechanisms. Frank its also probably important for cyberdefense too which is part of the plan as well. Maybe you can talk about whats changed from a threat vector perspective, this might apply for you as well, sherrill, what weve seen in the past couple of years with zero exploits, those types of things. How is the threat changed how has the threat changed . Marianne we are constantly looking at the threat. What the threat is, what are protections we have across the infrastructure, are they the right protections, where dough with need focus where do we need to focus . I do see that changing. Sigh it changing because initially we all do perimeter protection. That was the name of the game. If youre protected like in the department of defense, we have Internet Access points. Those were our big deals. We put lots of heavy duty protection on Internet Access points because things were coming and going. Today, as were moving to a very mobile environment, things dont come through those necessarily. Were finding that our end points are the places where we really want to focus our environment. Because thats where our biggest threat is. 7 million end user devices in the d. O. Dfment much thats a lot. Thats a lot of things. We dont have that many people. So you may say, how can you possibly have that many, right . But i have three computers on my desk, i have thata laptop i use when im hope. I have my blackberry that i carry around with me. All of those things are an entrance into the department. We need a way to protect all of those. I think the threat, we constantly look at it and say, ok, were spending all this money on this perimeter device, or this set of perimeter devices, how far does that get us, what are we seeing with all these threts coming in, whats the best way to attack them and where do we attack them. Were starting to go move toward end point security. All of our issue papers, which are things we do in the department, to get money for new initiatives, were focusing on cybersecurity on the end point. Frank trevor made a comment about Insider Threats being perhaps the most difficult to guard against. Is that the case for you guys as well . Marianne theyre all none of them are necessarily easy. Insider threats are kind of difficult because the person has a valid identity in your infrastructure. Frank weve seen how much damage one individual can do in some of these cases in the last few years. Marianne absolutely. There are some really cool things. Theres a lot of cool stuff out there now. Were looking at, what are the things we can implement better . Looking an anomaly detection. This is what this person typically does every day, comes and does this. All of a sudden he does something out of that. Either hes on late at night or hes accessing systeming that he hasnt accessed. Then you have to question it. Frank right. Talking about that, the end of the cat cards. He was talking about saying in two years he wants to have them done and something in place that will be able to look at behavioral patterns and things like that. Marianne yeah. Were looking into that. He did say end of cat card. I think he did it, the cat card is used for many, many things. What he meant to say was end of cat card. As an authentication mechanism onto the infrastructure. Frank he yelled it out. He pretty much said it. Marianne i know. The cat card, its your i. D. To get into the pentagon. Its a physical i. D. Military people have all their military, medical data on it. That stuff were not looking at replacing. Using it as an authentication mechanism, what are Better Things we can do . Frank true multifactors. On to mobile. You can talk a little bit about how thats changing for you guys. You guys are still kind of in the stone age with using mobile technology, i think, right . Sherrill were in the stone age. Frank not to be a jerk. Sherrill in fact, i commented when i came in here today, it was kind of cool. My cell phone was in my purse. I have to remember to take it out of my purse. Frank i would hate your job. Sherrill when i get to work. We dont allow any personal devices in or out. Because they are attack factors. We very seldom allow without a waiver mobile devices that are provided by the government in and out. New fu get a blackberry, we dont use those anymore, by the way, you get a smartphone from the government, which weve blocked down, youre supposed to use it away from work. Not inside. So you have your phones on your esk and i still carry a pager. Frank how very 1990 of you. [laughter] good lord. Sherrill we do have a strategy to move ahead. And we partner closely with n. A. S. In particular on what are the best ways to secure mobile devices. And one of the things we want to focus on the most, which we talked about this, how spoiled you are, how you feel like, you know, how can you do your work if you cant carry your computer or your tablet around with you as you go to meetings or have the ability to take notes, well, i still know how to write with a pen and paper. Because i have to. But we are focused closely and weve worked closely with n. A. S. On this. How do we provide secure mobile computing to our work force at least in our facilities. And how do we secure wire nls our facilities . We are focused on wireless in our securities facilities . We are focused on that. We know we have to do. It you cant go into best buy anymore and buy that big desk top compute that are you stick the computer that you stick the power under your desk and the big monitor at the top. I have to admit, i do like my big monitors that are on my desk. I have two. And i can do tons of work and spread it all across the two ig monitors. How do you dock those so youre not limited to the tablet. But i also dont want to carry around a 20pound brick. Maybe it will make me stronger, but thats kind of a pain. Frank im guessing theres not a lot of pokemon go players in the c. I. A. H. Q. , is there . Sherrill those who do make very, very obvious. Thats all i can say. Im going to Say Something. Its not in my script. There is another, not mine, another Government Agency i know of that spent a lot of time going around their compound eliminating the pokemon go points. Frank thats awesome. Im so glaud said that. Now i feel like this tindr panel date opened up a little bit. Got you out of your shell. [laughter] how much time do we have here for questions . I want to make sure the audience 20 minute. Ok. I have a couple more. You talked about, you guys kind of talked about this, crossagency, crossgovernment collaboration in cyber and industry as well. Lets talk about that. Where are those point its where youre wanting the points where youre wanting the interaction . Marianne in the department of defense, anybody thats listened to the secretary of defense frank hes begun going out west a lot. Marianne hes huge on industry relationships, partnerships, collaboration. He has brought industry people in. To very key positions in the government. To try to bring a morin owevative a more innovative flavor to the department of defense. He set up something called digital services. Defense digital services. Which is actually looking at some of the key things that we do and how they can bring industry bureaucraticitieses or products in products practices or products in. There was a hack of the pentagon. I will tell you, i went through a whole cultural revolution myself when i first heard that, to the point that we got to implementing it. It was pretty interesting, ctually. Frank a bunch of kids, right . Marianne we hope. It was very focused. Its not just like wild and wonderful kind of a thing. Anybody coming and hacking anything you want. We picked specifics. Web front end. D. M. A. We picked a very specific web front end and then we had people actually watching to make sure that the hackers didnt go beyond where they were allowed to go beyond. But it was, you know, they have very stringent rules. Its run very med to thisically. If they identify something, they have to give the government 30 days to fix it before they can release it and say theyve done it. Its very specific. I think it was extremely sm successful and were looking at other places to do the same thing. I just think you have to be careful and make sure that you actually contain it. You just cant we dont want people to say, ok, were wide open, everybody hack. Its very specific. Very prescriptive. You make sure youre protecting yourself. Frank the guy who heads that is an interesting character. We did a panel with him and he came in in a hoodie. Totally chill dude. I liked him a lot. I think he said, get shit done. Thats the kind of guy he is. Its interesting. I thought that was kind of cool. Bringing that fresh perspectives. Marianne spent a tremendous amount of time and has had all of us spend a tremendous amount of time with industry. We do Silicon Valley trips, we do trips up to new york, east coast. I dont mean a couple of us. He takes a whole entourage. He takes all his c. I. O. s with him. It can be 40, 50 people. Frank party bus style . Marianne big buses. We just meander through Silicon Valley and meet with venture capitalist groups and really good thought leaders. Weve met with its amazing. Who they go to, you know. To bring thought and innovation into their teams. Just really kind of pushing the bubble and trying to grow us to think differently. And then really establish those relationships an bring kind of cool stuff in. Youve heard the whole fail fast. Process kind of theyre trying to bring into us. To look at things, to try it out, to pilot it. And then to pick something. Fairly quickly. You talked a little bit about mr. Howardson. Hes very much trying to push us to be innovative and do new things and bring new ideas. He looks at what industry does and says, why cant do i in thank . Then he comes and tells us to do it. Things go up and you have 50 million reasons why its hard to do but then you start figuring them out and knocking them out one at a time and you get them implemented. It is exciting to work in an environment thats so people think of the pentagon. I did coming down. I thought, policy organization, takes years to get policy out. It is nothing like that. The crazy wild. Frank sounds like a pretty cool party bus. Maybe the smartest party bus id ever attend, i think, probably. I can say that 100 certainty actually. [laughter] i lost my train of thought there. I was going to go back to you. Because the same thing on the i. C. Side. Are you guys having party buses . Were you a little more low key about how wed go for that innovation on the tech side . Sherrill i dont know if id call us a party bus. We do partner very carlos closely with industry very closely with industry. We have labs where we actually bring industry in to help us resolve and determine whats out there that they have, that we need. Test it out quickly. Bring it in for quick review. And the cloud helps us a lot with that. It doesnt work on the cloud, dont bring it. If it does, we want to have the opportunity to spin up an instance, try it out quickly, see how well it works to solve a problem. Share that and then we can use it even further. Weve been working closely with the manufacture am with the amazon marketplace. Ill say first, you know, no, we dont have a complete clone of whats out there commercially, up in the i. C. But weve been able to look at the commercial products that we think people want and various agencies will say, look, i really want to try using that. Vet the company to make sure that, yes, we were going to have a contract with that company, we can do it. Bring it up, let people try it out. At that point, which ever agency determines they want to use it and implement it, they will have to do that security assessment of the tool. But then the cool thing is, they can share that assessment out with the rest of us. So we dont have to reinvent the wheel every time we want to implement the new product. Lots of partnership with industry. Lots of requirements out with groups like groups to help us identify whats coming. D. O. D. And i. C. Uses it pretty extensively. To help us solve those really difficult problems that we dont see a lot of market share right now to help us with. Frank what struck me when i first heard about that is that innovation pipeline. Where youd have a lot of companies that maybe wouldnt normally do business had government that would have an opportunity to do that. Once they go through the vet prague sess and stuff like that, it seem vetting process and stuff like that, it eems like it made sense. Marianne its not a party bus. A lot of serious stuff. T. S. A. Big bus. It is a big bus. The other thing i wanted to mention as far as our Industry Collaboration is that were looking at how we can do a better job with, like, certification. Bringing things in and bringing this technology in more quickly. Weve been talking to a lot of our Industry Partners about how they do things and what they do and were kind of at a point where were looking at almost a maturity kind of i dont want to say a ma turelt model, but maturity model. But some companies are very mature and they do very robust things internally before they release a product. If we look at cloud, those are one of the fist things were looking at, cloud, we look at what that the do. Theres an auditing. Then comes into our environment and then we go through our standard testing and the taking about like 18 months before we actually implement something. The way too long. Were kind of doing the same thing three times. Were looking at how we can its not necessarily like certified, the process, but understand their process and then say, ok. Its good. We dont have to test it three more times. The other thing were looking at is, just talking to the industry, is every single sector has different requirements. And has different they call it something different. A lot of the same stuff but they have to package it ditchly. Were looking at how we can differently. Were look at how we can Energy Sector has certified this and we understand what theyve done and we dont have to redo them. We just accept their certification. Frank that makes pretty good sense too. I want to open it to some audience questions. Is there a microphone . Any questions . Questioner mike nelson at cloudflair. The c. I. A. Question i asked trevor earlier. C. I. A. Means confidentiality integrity availability. Have any of you had problems with attacks closing down your websites . Is there a growing problem or something you have under control . Because we always hear about hacks that get the data. We dont hear about the hacks that actually close down websites without actually ausing intrusions. Sherrill we experienced attempts to dddos the c. I. A. Public website a few years ago. In fact, it went from maybe once a month and then we were seeing it like every other day. And then it was almost every day. Not to name any particular vendser or product, but we with through the issue our service provider, our Network Service provider, so first off, we monitor for it a whole lot more closely. We have a mechanism to move our website into oura more protected enclave every time we start to see this coming. Then weve also taken some of the best practices of having the website forward housed throughout the internet so the actual home website, you dont even touch it. Ill tell you, since weve made those changes, i cant think of a time when we actually were experiencing a true ddos. Marianne i would echo that. Years ago when he these problems. Since we moved all of our internet facing websites behind our d. M. Z. s and were watching for that stuff all the time, bths its been a long time since the something we worried about. Frank any other questions . We have a gal back there. Questioner hi. A little bit off topic. Related. E. M. Electromagnetic pulse defense. Which can have a direct impact on our nations i. T. Infrastructure. Do eith ofer either of you play in the e. M. P. Defense world . Frank you didnt sign you were for this, did you . Shes like, im never doing one of these again. Ever. [laughter] sherrill you dont realize, i have to go through a publication review process to get permission for what im allowed to say publicly. E. M. P. Itself, not really. Other than we look at Contingency Planning and we try to make sure that all the eggs arent in one big data center. Something like that happens, we try very hard to make sure that unless youre going to do it worldwide, were not going to lose everything. Were likely going to lose something, just as everyone else is. Marianne id say we look at what we think the risk of that is and what the likelihood is and take appropriate action. Frank thats come to light a lot more in the last few years. Didnt the white house put out a basic strategy and the d. H. S. Has been examining those issues too. Not just e. M. P. Attacks but also large scale solar flairs, right . Like the one that happened in 1896 that could devastate power grids and stuff like that. I dont think theres any simple solution. Sherrill everybody has resiliency, redundancy. All those types of solutions. For the critical i think across the entire government, weve identified what we consider our critical infrastructure. Those are the things that were looking at and we make sure we can protect. Frank back there. Questioner first id like to say that i appreciate everything you do and im very impressed that the two of you have a position that have given couldnt nuent to the dont continuity to the development of security to the agency you represent. The question i have is about the first topic you presented on that letter that was sent to the 20 something million people. Im one of them that received the letter. I think more than one. I think it was mailed several times. Which i thought it was a little bit confusing because i didnt know, oh, is there this another breach. A little confusing. The question is, why those federal employees have been given protection for just two years, i think, or maybe three years, and how can that information really be protected 20 years interest now, whoever has it, you know, how we can figure out that they have time, the use of this, later . Maybe when marianne i think those are great questions. I dont think its three years anymore. Im not positive but i think its been extended to like 10 years. Theres conversations that happen all the time about should that be for life or whats the appropriate time limit. This is really kind of all in a whole new area, this whole privacy protection. And how long you should be protected for. It is kind of interesting because, of course, my information was taken and i went in and set up all the stuff with the credit Monitoring Agency and i feel like i cant even walk without getting a text on my phone that im walking. Theyre tracking so much stuff. Its kind of nice. You go, i went to my daughters going to college tomorrow. I was down there doing some prep stuff and we went into a walgreens, i used my credit card. Before i got to sign i goat goth a text that says, are you using your credit card in walgreens in florida, one or two, yes. Then the transaction went through. Its that realtime. I dont think we know what the whole fallout of this is going to be in the future. Frank lets get the last couple out. Which ever you want first. The fella in the blue and then questioner thanks. We talked a about the move to cloud and industrys doing a lot in the security as a service. Security as a cloud enabled service. I know theres some challenges with that, in the d. O. D. And the i. C. Is that something that you are using or see being able to use in the near future . Sherrill we do now. Weve invested quite a bit of time in identifying what are the best tools and solutions to secure data in the cloud. But the other nugget there is knowing your data. So not all datas equal. Would i apply the same Security Solutions to all data equally . Absolutely not. I wasnt kidding, every time we have a new capability, a system move into the cloud, were not really focused on the i. T. Were focused on the data. And who needs the data and how well we need to protect the data. So we spend a lot of time making sure that the right secure solutions are in place around that data so it doesnt o where it doesnt belong. So, yeah, i have a blue team of the testers, my blue team is think of them as white hat hackers. The good thing about the blue team is they work directly with the system administrators and the people who are developing the system. So theyre learning better techniques and what bad things can be done against their system. At the same time were testing them. And then the cool thing, from an Insider Threat perspective, is we also work with people that are monitoring the network , so when the blue teams testing, it f35 they do something, they if they do something, they immediately reach out to the folks doing the monitoring saying, did you see me . If they didnt see them, they tell them countyly what they did, including screen shots. So the next time somebody other than the blue team were to come in and try this, we will see it and we will track it. Its pretty cool stuff. Frank you guys are early adapter of cloud. In government. 2012 at least. Sherrill the now been in operation for about two years. With a new focus on how do we get even more Sensitive Data now properly protected that gets back to those questions about what are the techniques and tools and Security Solutions that were going to add as we try to put more Sensitive Data out there. Frank d. O. D. s been more cautious about cloud use. Marianne were definitely moving strong. We have our own cloud. I think were looking at all different variants for different applications. We are that big and we have a about a zillion applications. Were looking at different variants. In some cases well use a commercial, in some cases well have our own. But i think other things that sherrill said for us apply as well. All datas not equal. Those are all the things were working through. Rank last question up here. Questioner thank you. My questions directed primarily to you, marianne. The government has issued out the defense federal ac whichization clause. By december, 2017, industry is going to have to be compliant. Number one from your vantage point, what are you seeing in terms of industry challenges or comments with meeting that, and then, number two, based off of where d. O. D. Is sorry, where d. O. D. Is going, with their Cloud Services and so forth, do we really think that were going to be able to bridge the gap with these requirements based on the fact that a significant investment for industry for maybe marginal return on investment . Sherrill i probably disagree with you a little bit. Which is ok. Meteorologist im a huge proponent of the clause because i spent 30 years at n. S. A. And i saw how our adversaries get into our network and i saw tons of data being ex fill traited. Marianne which was d. O. D. Intellectual property. You can look at airplanes that were developed in other countries, you can go out on the web and search it and they look a lot like our airlines. Airplanes. I think the game has changed a little and the whole economic advantage activity, and i think we need to be really cautious. But knowing that thats kind of an achilles heel for us, our industry networks, you guys are probably very familiar with the defensive industrial base, were working with all of those partners very closely and the rest of industry. But i started this conversation with the back to basics talk nd thats the thing, back to basics and cybersecurity practices implementation. Yesterday or maybe the day before i talked to about the stats we got, six months out industry was required to report to us how they were doing against the defar. We had a lot of things that were great. The more traditional security, the physical security, and all that stuff, you know, really looking good. But the things that the two things they were struggling ith the most were in the multifactor syndication realm. We dont necessarily look at hat as industry having a problem. The companys having a problem. Were kind of looking at it as, what are the products theyre using and why arent the vendors of those products providing better capabilities for them . And so gary challenged to us figure out how we can help solve the problem for them. Were looking at some avenues. I dont see us relaxing that because thats really an achilles heel for us. Any major d. O. D. Weapons system thats being developed, theres multiple vendors behind it. They have our data. Theyre connecting into our system. You have to kind of connect all of it. Frank i think that wraps it up. I want to thank the panel and adobe for putting this on. Have a good rest of the day and if you ever need press on your bus on the west coast. I know a guy. Marianne im going to take it for that one im sure. [laughter] [applause] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] [captions Copyright National able satellite corp. 2016] libertarian president ial candidate gary johnson discusses his campaign. His views on donald trump and hillary clinton. The affect of third parties on u. S. Politics and the impact he could have on this years president ial campaign. Now a discussion on religious liberty and Public Schools and protecting students and educators religious freedom. The Family Research center in washington, d. C. , hosted this event. Its just over an hour. Hi. Wed like to welcome you, those of who you are here and those of who you are watching, to the Family Research councils lecture series. The topic today is very timely since many children are preparing to go back to school. I know its really early. But believe it or not, the kids in my community went to school last monday. So, ready or not, its back to school time. If we love our neighbor as we love ourselves, as jesus commanded us, were going to care about what happens to the students and the teachers and the administrators in that arena. Mr. Cureton especially when it comes to their godgiven First Amendment freedom to believe and to live according to those beliefs. As we all know, infringement on religious liberty in Public Schools is an escalating problem. Students are told they cant pray, they cant read their bible, they cant share their faith and talk about their faith in class. But it turns out that most educators who repress religious expression do so because theyre unaware of the United States department of educations clear guidelines which protect their students religious freedom. Thankfully there are thousands of dedicated educators in the Public Schools who are also committed christians. Plus most church going families send their children to Public Schools. That means literally mling millions of christians are already there. Imagine the impact that educators and students could have if churches across america equipped them with the federal guidelines on sunday so that they could take them to school with them on monday. Here to help us become more effective stewards of our influence in the Public Schools is my friend, eric buehrer. Eric is the president of gateways to better education, Whose Mission is to create a Better Future for children by keeping god in their schools. As a former Public School teacher, eric can represent to both sides of the religion in schools debate. For over 25 years, he has written and lectured extensively on the topic. Erics work has been featured by numerous ministries, including focus on the family, American Family association, Alliance Defending freedom and of course Family Research council. Sit gogateways. Org frc for more information. But eric is here today to present promoting religious liberty in your Public Schools. Which will be followed by some q a and well have a roaming microphone. But please stand so that our friends who are here with us from cspan can get you on camera. Would you please give a warm f. R. C. Welcome to eric buehrer. [applause] eric thank you for the invitation. Thank you for the hospitality. Promoting religious liberties in Public Schools. A of people in the Christian Community feel like Public Schools are a lost cause. We should promote homeschooling, private schools. What can we do to impact Public Schools and why should we care . I would like to address that with a few interesting facts. According to research, Polling Research found 84 of church attending families send their children to Public Schools. Even if84 i dont they have a Christian School on campus half of the students in that church attend a local Public School. That is where the future generation is being educated. 50 million children attend Public Schools. 6 million are in private. Those schools that are classified as conservative christian, well under one million students. The vast majority are coming from the Public Schools. Nearlyng to research, 50 of Public School educators are church attending christians who say their faith is important in their lives. That is a million and a half educators in our Public Schools. One of the operating principles is that are christians in every Public School classroom. Christian superintendents, school board members, administrators, educators, christian parents and teachers. Schools look at public as an us versus them mentality but the moment for me was realizing its not about us versus them. We are them. We are the superintendents. So often we dont know how to appropriately promote religious. Iberty in our school so we say nothing. What our organization is equipped those christians with what they can do with an existing law and with academic integrity. This generation of young people and cherisherstand religious liberty. Into amoving today climate where we look at religious freedom being freedom to worship. You can believe what it is what you want as long as it is in the home. If we want this generation to grow up to cherish religious liberty lets not just treated as a civics lesson. Lets let them live it out in their world, the Public School campus. Today whenonder that you go into a store during christmas season, people are hesitant to say Merry Christmas . Because thatder generation of employees grew up in a world where they were conditioned to believe saying Merry Christmas was inappropriate. They carry that into their adult life and that is what we have today. Hy dont we were burst that they can live it out in the world in which they occupy in their Public Schools. It is more than an intellectual exercise. They are living their religious freedom. We focus on two key things. Academic freedom and religious freedom. To teach about history, coulter and values and promoting and protecting students freedom of religious expression. Thisow educators how to do within existing laws and existing standards. Im not asking you to smuggle bibles into a closed country. This is not doing something sneaky. Do, we teach educators to they can defend any colleague, any parent, any school board because it is in when it is within existing laws. A lot of christian teachers meet with christian hearts, not their christian heads. They have a passion for their students but often that passion gets in the way of good academics. We help them understand how to do this academically within guidelines. ,he way we deliver this message through professional Development Seminars for educators. The church commuted the inviting us to go in. Pastors want to make sure the Public Schools understand how to be responsive to that large segment of their Public School population. They will host us and do workshops for parents and teachers. The University Program where we help educate upandcoming teachers and all the things they can do once they enter the profession. Told by teacher will be a veteran teacher you cant do that and they assume they must be right. They begin to live as if they have to be an atheist and a Public School. Classroomk into that i have to teach like i am an assay an atheist. We create educational materials. To equip the teacher and the parent with what can happen in Public Schools and how to do that appropriately. Can being principle found from our Founding Fathers from 1787. Ordinance was a document developed to govern territory northwest of the ohio river. The United States acquired it. Schools. Ey addressed here is what they said. Religion, morality and knowledge being necessary to Good Government and the happiness of mankind. Encouraged. L be. Here is a three legged stool we created this great government and to sustain it, you need to have three things, religion, morality and knowledge. Schools are so important. Today, we havene said religion, not too sure we can do that. Morality, we are not sure whos morality. We are left with only knowledge is necessary for Good Government and the happiness of mankind. How is that working out for us . Not too well. Instead of this three legged said just balance on this pogo stick of knowledge and we are shocked when they fall off. Why should we be surprised . The asian occasion world in the Education World it is surrendere surrounded by knowle. Then we will have a great society. Forgotten thend other aspects of the equation the founders said was so important. In everydayflected experiences. This idea that religion cannot be in a Public School. Isaiah was a first grader in california. Christmas season, he wanted to bring candy canes. Their andote on talked about the story of the candy cane in his believe in jesus. He brought them to class excited. The teacher took a look at it and said she went and checked with the school principal. The principles that you cannot distribute that. She said jesus is not allowed in our school. Note,lly ripped off the gave them back to isaiah and said now you can pass out the candy to your classmates. , the school did allow him to distribute those but they had to do it after school on public property on the last day students were exiting going home for winter break. About moore is taught. Jesus or religion, christianity is somehow offensive. Its not allowed. Its not appropriate to be expressed. He learned a poor civics lesson there. His faith can only be dealt with at home and at sunday school. He cant express it to his friends. Isaiah is not alone. Columbia university and their surveys, 57 of teens attend religious services and 44 do so weekly. That is amazing. Millions of young people and , oftenn attending church every week. Classrooms are filled with students who come from a religious background. The u. S. Department of health 73 ofan services found indicate12 to 17 religious beliefs are important part of their life. Do we acknowledge that . We talk about teaching the whole child but there is a whole there. It is not just their intellect. Its their emotional and social aspects. We dont talk about spiritual aspects. The fact of the matter is most students coming in 20 Public School environment have some religious orientation. Teachers can create an environment that allows them to be who they are. What we are going to talk about is how to create a welcoming environment in a Public School for religious expression in the classroom. For key things. These are very practical. I want you to come away from the presentation and do these things in your local schools. I dont want you to just say that was interesting. I didnt know they could do that. I want you to implement this in your local community. It will be a lifechanging. You need to step up and help clarify religious freedoms. Celebrate religious freedom day. The third thing is encourage prayer in school. Teacher led prayer was thrown out of school. You can encourage prayer. Fourth, help educators move from fear to freedom. Most of them operate in fear when it comes to this issue of fear. They dont wake up saying how can i repress the fate of a child but they are so afraid of doing something they will get criticized for they end of repressing the faith of children in their schools. Lets clarify students freedom. Years u. S. Department of education is issued guidelines explaining students religious liberties. Clintonder president Richard Riley issued guidelines on students religious liberties. They are beautiful guidelines. Its a matter of free speech and free association. You can speak to whomever you want to about whatever you want to, including your faith. In 1995 they developed these wonderful guidelines. They sent them to every superintendent in the country saying give this wide distribution in your community. They updated it in 1998 and since it out again with another letter. Please give this wide distribution. Then under the Bush Administration they sent it out again in 2003 to every superintendent in the country. Again saying give this wide distribution to every parent, student and staff member. Giving over the country workshops for teachers. I already ask how many have seen this from their superintendent . Not a hang goes up. Its been there for 21 years. It would answer all of these questions about what students can and cannot do. For lack of information many educators suppress students and their religious freedom. We have a link to it if you go to a landing page we set up for this lecture. To thel see the link u. S. Department of education guidelines. Is a poor name for the document. It deals with a lot more than prayer. It is all forms of expression. You can download that. Lets take a quick look at the seven key things in those guidelines. , they can readay their bibles and talk about their faith at school. We have 20 says minutes of free reading time, i want you to read silently. If a child wants to open up his bible and read his bible or their devotional and read that devotional, that is their prerogative. They can bring and read their bibles. If the teacher says i want you to open up your english textbook, they cant say i know my religious liberties. That is not the assignment. If it is available you can read whatever you want for the next , orinutes, or during lunch recess, or whatever they want to do they are free to do that. They can talk about their faith with their classmates during recess or lunch time, or free time in the classroom, the teacher is not the one to get in the way of that conversation. Theyre not to pull out the conversation as separate or different. Students can organize prayer groups and religious clubs and announce their meetings. It is the equal access act. They need to be treated equal as in the other noncurricular club. If you have no one is club, a hion club, chasse club allowclub, you have to ad for other clubs. Equal access to school newspapers, Bulletin Boards come into common announcements. Treatedd to be equally. They can express themselves in their homework. If it is appropriate to the assignment. We had a case from los angeles. They have a lot of fresh fires. This is a High School English class. The assignment was right a personal essay about how you felt when you watch the fire is on tv. One passionate student wrote about how it reminded her of the first of god being a consuming fire. She wrote about her burning passion for christ. The teacher refused to grade the paper or except the paper because she dared to mention god. Didnt say you should burn. Just my personal reaction for what i saw on tv. It took an intervention between the parent, the teacher, administrator and the student before the teacher said i have to change all of my assignments of this never happens again. A student doesnt take you up on what you said . This teacher was from this mindset that we need to keep schools sealed from anything religious. Tochers have the freedom meet with other teachers for prayer and bible study. If you can talk about what you did over the weekend, you can talk about your faith. Teachers cant be praying with students but adult to adult in their own time, they have the freedom to do that. The fifth thing is that students may be able to go off campus and have religious studies during school hours. Lawse 40 states have that allow to have religious release times set up. 40 states have the laws. The school has to decide whether they will do it or not. They actually leave campus , go back onl hours campus and not be counted absent. Faithts can express their at a school event. If you have a talent show and a student wants to sing a christian song, it is not the schools expression, it is the students expression. Disclaimer that it is not attributed to the school. A lot of educators do not understand they have that freedom. Delawarerly a case in where students wanted to do a skit for a talent show that portrayed how jesus was protecting a young lady from. Emptations of the world they were going to end with a bible verse shown on the projector. The administrator said cant allow that, that is religious. Teacher who had been to our teachers workshop a year before said i learned that students have the right to express themselves at an event like this and he contacted the family policy council. They reached out to the administration. Not in a threatening way. The administrator turned around and said ok, they can do it. Not only did they do this skit theywith deuteronomy not only were able to do this get, they got a standing ovation and one the talent show. We have that. You can watch the video. It is really inspiring. A teacher understood what student religious liberties were and they were able to express themselves in that talent show. Faithts can express their in a graduation ceremony. This is student expression. Student to chooses a express to speak because they are the valedictorian, the class reason,t, some neutral if a student decides to Say Something about their faith, im so glad jesus christ is part of my life, that is attributable to the student and the department of education says if a school want to be careful about this all they need to do is put a disclaimer that says student speech is it be dont is attributable to the student, not the school. The federal government looks at it as free speech. Clarifying these seven religious liberties in your schools can be a wonderful thing. A School District in North Carolina put together a wonderful video where students and teachers explained students religious liberties. Can download that video yourself and show it in your , announcements. We encourage goals to show this video as part of your school announcements. It clarifies what the department of education says. Lets take a look at that video now. Everyone knows about the three rs. Responsibility and respect as they relate to religious freedom in schools. We should respect the rights of every individual in our school system. Andhe rights of students other staff to have their own believes and assemble those believes. To be valued equally. Students have a right to pray at the flagpole and have their own religious books at school. All of us have the responsibility to make sure feelnts and teachers included. Out of respect dont try to tell us we have to be like you. We have our own faith. Or no faith. School is a place to celebrate our community. Coachesers and produc should practice the three rs. Ofwe can be knowledgeable the faiths of our students. Teachers have the right to teach about the religions of the world but not to disparage one religion versus another. Allowchers can create and religious art and music. You cannot lead students in prayer when acting in official capacity. When acting in an official capacity on behalf of the school or the school system, School Employees and volunteers are agents of the state we cannot promote nor inhibit student expression of faith. We cannot encourage or assuage toward a particular religion. It isnt hard. I have the right to follow my faith. Believe what i want to believe. I can pray or not pray on my own time. Keeping school for instruction. And not disruption. Your rights, your responsibilities, and respect from for others. I would love to see that video shown in every Public School in america as part of their morning announcements. That will be the first time a lot of teachers were aware of what should go on in their classrooms and what can go want in their classrooms. Clarifying religious freedoms is number one. Its not getting down to the local level. What we have done is put together a pamphlet like this. Its simply quotes the department of education. We decided if it is not going to happen from the superintendents, lets give it to the individual students and parents and teachers so they have it so they can take a look at what the department of education really says. It is not our opinion. It is from the department of education. We have collaborated with Alliance Defending freedom. , they havet a pack donated their time to our free to Speak Campaign offering to send a letter to the School Official of your choice. 25 students in your youth group and you want each one to take 10 and give them to their friends. All the congregation gets them as well. Packets ofts, 10 pamphlets. Give us the names. You can order these and if you names10 we will put the of the schools in there. They volunteered their time to write a personal letter to each School Official explaining from is Supreme Court angle here what the Supreme Court says about religious liberties. It doesnt say so and so asked you to send this level. It just comes out of the blue. You maytime of the year have questions about students and teachers religious liberties. Here is what they are. It is a wonderful personalized letter hand signed from Alliance Defending freedom. You have to pamphlets going out to students and a letter going to the administration. Its a wonderful way to impact Public Schools. If the Church Orders 10 packs to five have to have 500 for students, they give us the names of 10 schools and that church can have a huge impact on all of the schools in that community. More with a church group that wants to do this, we look to see if there is an overlap of schools. We will make sure every school gets one and find one that hasnt been included in a list so your reaches even farther. I encourage you to get involved in that. The next thing i want you to do is celebrate religious freedom day. What is religious freedom day . The president has declared january 16 religious freedom day. Every president has called on the nation to recognize and celebrate the religious liberties we have in america. On legislation James Madison and Thomas Jefferson put together. It was very influential. Want to decided we proclaim and recognize this day. What we are calling schools to do is recognize the day. If you have any kind of connection with your governors, guilty or Governors Office to proclaim the day religious freedom day for your state. We would love to see greater awareness religious freedom day. Day, we did one with a number of school principals. We are going to have to do a School Assembly and have all of the faith leaders. It will be offensive and its going to be a headache. I said wait. You dont need to include anybody. Dont talk about anybodys faith. He talk about the principle of religious freedom. Just have the teachers say today is religious freedom day. Coming up, religious freedom day. The president asked us to celebrate the religious freedoms in america. Tos a great opportunity revisit the issue of religious expression helping students understand the freedoms they have. What can you do for religious freedom days . Tell your students about religious freedom day. Explain their liberties. Its a wonderful opportunity. My classroom is a safe place for you to express your religious values. Respected. Tell parents about religious liberties and religious freedom day . Pass a school board resolution. Call for the distribution of the u. S. Department of education guidelines on student religious freedom. Kingin with Martin Luther day. It is often very similar to january 16, around the same time. ,artin luther king as a pastor his ability to express his faith in word and in deed had a tremendous impact on his civil rights actions. Celebrating religious freedom day is very important. Encourage prayer in your school. In 34 states there are moments of silence laws. Half of those are mandatory. The other half are optional. Even in some of those they leave it up to the teacher. You can go to our website, find your state, download the long that deals with that. Help you then as a church a schoolteacher cannot distribute these but we encourage churches to distribute this prayer card. It looks like this. It has a beautiful prayer on it. You can download a sheet of these. This prayer comes from a rhode island high school. They had a banner hanging on the wall that had a beautiful prayer on it. An atheist student sued the school and said that is a prayer. The court agreed that it served no academic purpose. I was fine with that. I think we christians often go for symbolism over substance. We had that prayer on the wall. Was anybody reading it . It had been gathering dust. Students should actually say the prayer, right . Lets put it on something that they will pray and they will look cap. Voluntarily to pray the prayer. We put this on a business card. Heavenly father, grammy each day best, to beo do my kind and helpful to my classmates, to be honest with myself and others, help me to be a good sport and smile when i lose as well as when i win. Help me conduct myself to bring credit to my school. Amen. When that be wonderful if millions of students in these 34 states were praying that prayer during the moment of silence . I encourage you might get these cards. Encourage them to put them in their pockets. Pray silently during that moment of silence. Do isurth thing you can encourage educators in your community. We call it helping a move from fear to freedom. We do a seminar, a halfday seminar. Teaching about the bible and christianity is legally supported. Fact ther the bible and christianity can be included in many states. What they are doing is academic, not devotional. It fits with the culture. It is part of their community. We help them understand that. It is morally imperative. We go through the research that shows it has a great impact on their behavior and academic success. This forms the foundation it is illegal, it is academic it is legal, it is academic, it is good. How do you make this work in the classroom . We go across the curriculum. A lot christian teachers lead with their christian hearts, not their christian heads. They bring in their church in talladega mentality. We show them how to think academically where there is an appropriate intersection. We help them understand religious freedoms and we detailed those religious freedoms and address the holidays and how to acknowledge the holidays. We dont encourage them to celebrate holidays. Everybody is equally celebrating this holiday. That might not be the case. You can acknowledge those holidays and teach what they mean. Just teach the truth of what the holiday is. In the evening we do a parent seminar. How to help your children graduate with your faith and values intact. How to navigate the Public Schools. How to think with a global view. This can be a real life changer. Onres a three minute video teachers talking about how it impacted them and their students. I have been a teacher for 18 years. I have been terrified of mentioning the name of god, mentioning anything having to do with the bible. I have come across a number of teachers who thought that the and state was a solid wall. It cant come up. I have taught for 38 years. Several years ago i began fairing fearing. I got someone would Say Something and i would get in big trouble. Helped because now i know i dont have to throw away the bible. This is the first time it was presented specific here is what was legal, here is what you cant do. How toave me a guideline present these things, how to use them in the classroom, strategies i can use. Clear thatade very there is a line at some point. We are not trying to use this as a way to evangelize. We want them to know what you can do. At thes so surprised things i can do. I had got what i wanted philosophically. I got more than i expected practically. They are going to learn so much. They gave me a lot of freedom. We are required to say the pledge every day before lunch and many students, they like to sit down. They resist doing it. They say it is because it says under god. Their wheels were turning. They were thinking. He started saying the pledge of allegiance and looking like they meant it. It has been a big change for them. I took the materials back to school and passed them out. I decided to add the bible to my classroom library. It is the most read book in my classroom. It brought tears to my eyes. I am no longer afraid. 18 years not understanding. In that one morning it cleared up for me. I was able to be a better teacher. Eric in conclusion, lets look at the things you can do. I hope those of you watching through the internet will take away these four things and do these in your community this year. Distribute the free to speak pamphlets. Its the simplest thing you can do. Just give them the material they need. , a fifth grader in washington state, he got the pamphlet from his mom. There was an assignment where he was allowed to express his faith. He was walking out the door that morning. His mom said are you sure you want to turn in that assignment . He said no problem. I have my pamphlet in my backpack. It can be equipping for students. Celebrate religious freedom day. Help the students understand what their religious freedoms are. If you are in those 33 states that have moments of silent laws, encourage students to pray that prayer. And host a seminar in your community. We can give practical help. It is wonderful when teachers see one another and often times they feel alone. They get very encouraged and supported. I remember i was speaking at a church in southern california, talking about the things they could do. As is often the case, you couldnt have scripted this better. The gentleman says i just retired. In my 30 years of teaching i never knew i could have done all the things you said i could have done. And he walked away. Another man had tears in his eyes. He said, first year teacher. Not been so frustrated knowing what i could do. This changes everything. You can be influential changing everything for the teachers in your community. A lot of times we look the Public Schools and say it is so huge and so entrenched. There are so many problems. How can we make a difference . There are christians throughout the system. They just need to be encouraged. Founders when they looked at that huge task. Im inspired by the words of famous henry when his give me liberty or give me death speech. I would encourage you to read it. It is inspirational. The revolution was about to get started. The colonies were getting active. The year was 1775. They were going backandforth that what they should do. Patrick henry rosen said these words. They said, they tell us we are weak. When will we be stronger . Will we gather strength by an action and it resolution . Armed in theple holy cause of liberty are. Nvincible by any force we will not fight our battles alone. Will is a just god and he raise up friends to fight our battles for us. The victory goes not just to the strong but to the vigilant, the active, the brave. Our brethren are in the field. Why do we stand here idle . They changed the course of history. Our brothers and sisters are already in the field in their schools. Idle whenstand here we have the tools and equipment to help them move from fear to freedom and create faith friendly Public Schools . Join with us. Course ofnge the history. Thank you very much. [applause] we have some time for questions. Can i start with one quickly . I actually was curious, you have spoken on the offensive, being prepared. We focus on religious liberty quite a bit. Quick suggestions you have if a student finds themselves in this position . If they are older they may say ok and dont even tell their parents. If they are younger they may tell their parents. Just suggestions . You may not be aware and give them that information. I encourage parents to approach a teacher with i thought you would find this helpful. Not an attacking way. Just i think you would find this helpful. There are wonderful organizations. I encourage them to contact. You can find Contact Information for those organizations. They are willing to step in. Most the time its a simple clarification letter the administrator has never understood what religious liberties are. Commentcould do a quick than a question. The most unbelievable step to me was not the 84 having kids in Public School, it is the 50 of teachers who are churchgoing christians. That was surprising. And freedom Public Schools seminars, how many education schools have you reached out to and colleges . Eric last year we reach 3000 students. Universities will include it in their course of study by a textbook. The purchase access to the online program. It is an existing course the university has. 3000 a year. Any other questions . Ok. So nice to know i have answered everybodys questions. Hello. Happy to have heard everything you have to say. A lot of people will find a cathartic to know there are options they can implement that are legal. As you know the headlines are that there is more of a islamic influence in how america is being perceived as being open to religious freedom from the muslim standpoint. Do you anticipate conflict in terms of people expressing their feelings that may not necessarily be well core with christian viewpoints . Eric i would say welcome to america. Every religion has freedom of religion and expression. If you have a Muslim Student in your classroom, a buddhist student, they all have equal freedom to express themselves when it comes to discussions, homework assignments, free reading time. That applies across the board. I dont think we should say this is only for christians, or we only want christianity to have that freedom in the classroom. Im with the church of scientology. Back in 1995 there was a coalition of people who got together and published a booklet. In the publicng schools. After that meeting with president clinton, as i have mentioned it was a Large Coalition of the areas faiths. My question would be, your seminars are awesome, are they open to people of all faiths . Eric certainly. Our focus is on how to address the bible and christianity. Our experience is that a lot of teachers have no problem teaching about world religions. That is very multicultural. There is a lot of hesitancy about that. On the bible and christianity in helping students understand and cherish that as american judeochristian heritage. When people say how come you dont include the other faiths . If you taught students and teachers how to teach about algebra and somebody saying how about you dont teach about calculus . We are focused on teaching algebra. That is what we do. We are open to anybody who would like to come and learn what can be done in their schools. Way for the microphone. Personyou explain how a who wants to organize or invite you to host an event would do so in a community . Multiple schools . Eric thank you. I appreciate that. If you are interested in having us come to your Community Contact our office. If you go to the website you will see the information on how to contact our office. This is done through a coalition of churches. We want our schools to be more responsive to the issue of the bible and christianity and make sure our teachers are doing it right. A lot of schools do some good things. They actually go too far and do things that step over the line and then they get slapped down recoils. And everybody i want to encourage them to do it right and academically with integrity in a way that is even more robust. I will often tell them look, i am for substance over symbolism. There is a time and place for symbolism. Im more interested in substance. How does a teacher make a in anve to their subject appropriate way . Limits and howe to have integrity regarding those limits. If they will contact our office we are happy to schedule that in their community. We call it a two for one day. We can reach out to more schools and invite teachers to come in. I have another one. Sorry. I was overseas attending a seminar in israel and met students from all over the world who work in ministry capacities. Denmark what they do is because denmark is so liberal they are actually permitted to come in and present the gospel. There are people of all faiths that present their faith. I have another friend in australia. One of the things is the same thing. They go into schools and talk about christ. To me that was almost a helpful thing because i think that is territory that has been taboo but as our culture moves in a more liberal way it is possible we may get to that point and that may be a hopeful sign. Im curious of your perspective . Im not familiar with denmarks arrangement. Europe often has the state church. I think that is done a lot to kill religion in those countries. It is part of the institution. It is better and america where we have competitive, making the case for your fate and attracting people to your faith. For turning our Public Schools into Christian Schools. There is a time and place for that. A teacher asked me, one of my students wants to be a christian. He wants to become a christian. What should i do . We honor parental rights. You dont want to do this behind the parents back. You want to call the mom, and explained to her what her son would like to do. If she is fine with that, would she be willing to meet you for coffee with her son. They went to a coffee shop. Sharedt of the mom, he here is what being a christian is. The moms attitude was whatever makes my boy a better boy. But in front of the mom was able to lead the boy to christ and he became a christian. That was done in personal time outside of school honoring parental school, doing it out f. That is the right way to do it. What im against is when teachers feel like they are trying to sneak something in. It is inappropriate in a Public School setting. There are a lot of places where that can take place. It can take place in student clubs. It can happen in afterschool programs. It can happen in evening programs. But on a personal level, the Teacher Needs to be careful about that and work directly with the parent had. We are done. Thank you so much. I would be happy to answer any other questions you may have. [applause]