[applause] good afternoon, everyone. It is an incredible honor for me to be here with you this afternoon an mark, thank you very much for that very kind introduction. In particular, i appreciate you recognizing our legal team in tsa. Francine is our chief council as you know. Mark called her an icon. You would call her an institution. She was one of the very first employees of tsa in 2001. Has served consistently through. She is now a member of the Leadership Council of our organization. The very top seven people in tsa that determine the course we follow going forward. I really could adopt my job without the experts of francine. She continues to serve as well. Francine, thanks very much. [applause] and i appreciate the recognition of nikki and susan too. Two fantastic members over the chief couple team. They contribute to our performance against the entire spectrum of what we do. Day in and day out. It is a privilege for me to keynote following joel. Joel is a great friend. We worked very, very closely together when he was with the department of transportation. Tsa as many of you know has its roots in the department oftransportation. We were established in 2001. The law establishing tsa, the aviation and transportation and security act signed by george w. Bush on november 19, 2001. Think of that in context to 9 11 to november. 69 days. A significant piece of legislation that established an agency that is responsible for ensuring our transportation security. Our tice with d. O. T. Endure. Our founding secretary had an influence on tsa from the very beginning all the way through to his passing late last year. Just a remarkable individual. Our top Leadership Award in tsa is the Leadership Award to recognize his key influence on the formation of a new agency. As mark mentioned we have responsibility not just for Aviation Security although thats what most people associate with us but also for Service Transportation security. If you think to have Service Transportation modes, we have a parallel security responsibility for each one of those modes and im really happy to say to all of you that our work with the department of transportation is very, very strong. We reenforce each other. Think of this if, you think of a coin and you have a coin on one side said safety and the flip side of that coin would say security because things we do in security can have a safety impact and things that the Safety Agency is doing have k have a security impact. It is very important we stay closely aligned with each other. It is a privilege for me and ill focus now on the aviation sector of transportation for the balance of my remarks. I will divert a little bit when i talk about cyber security. I found the Aviation Industry really a great industry to work with. We have established very strong partnerships across the board. It helps everybody when that curse because that means that the government makes better decisions and when we implement decisions we implement them together with the same understanding of the reason why. And i have found the Aviation Industry to be incredibly innovative in things they view day in and day out even through the pamed, a high level of innovation across the entire industry to include Passenger Transport and cargo transport. That is really important to us. Because we in tsa, i would submit to all youve, are a very, very innovative federal agency and i believe we are the only federal agency that has an innovation doctrine that says this is how we are going to approach innovation and this is what were going to do. These are the guidelines and characteristics ofour innovatio. I firmly believe those officers you see at the screen check opponents in blue uniforms as you travel, they know best what makes a good process for security. We should make sure they have a key, clear avenue to provide their recommendations for consideration and then for scaling potentially across the entire agencies. Process innovation. The other Spice Technology ino vague. I hope you see as you travel the progress we have made in technology that is in our screen checkpoints. I can remember before i came into this position, i would go into the tsa line and go up to the first officer i would see and that officer would ask me for my drivers license or passport. I remember handing over my drivers license and literally seeing a loop and a light being pulled out to verify whether or not that was an authentic drivers license. I always wondered how in the heck can you possibly know all of the characteristics of all of the drivers licenses in the United States. And make the decision to allow a passenger to proceed. We now have technology that does that and does it particularly well. That is kind over the core of one of the things that i have been been focused onto embed more and more technology into our system. When we look at technology there are three things that i consider, any technology sleult solution has to do these three things. It has to improve our effectiveness in Security First and foremost and secondly it has to improve the efficiency of security. There is no reason they cant make it much more efficient and third, more importantly, it has to enhance the customer or Passenger Experience. That is very important to all of us to make sure as passenger goes through our system, they look at the processes we have in the screening process and say to themselves, there is a lot of value in that. I pay for it. There is a lot of value in it and i appreciate the fact that those officers i just encountered have the right tools to do their job and they are doing it in most professional manner possible. One of the other things i would emphasize right upfront is the partnerships that we have across the aviation sector. I think they are incredibly strong. I dont know how they could get much stronger than they are today. We have very frank dialogue between the air carriers, the airports and the organized labor unions that represent organized labor within the aviation sector and other Partner Organizations across the spem spectrum. I think it is really health i didnt mean i think we collectively make much better decision and i think we all pull much more in the same direction when we do that i would just highlight those partnerships of our stake holders but also highlight in the federal sector the key relationships that with with we have across the board. Ill explain that more when we get to cyber. I think that is a really good use case of how were viewing federal collaboration and how federal collaboration translates to a more responsive federal government, owners and operators of the system. The thing highlight upfront is we have a terrific Advisory Committee formed by congress. It provides very, very good advice to us on a continuous basis. I just attended the meeting yesterday and spent 2 1 2 hours in the meeting with all of the members of oured a visit Advisory Committee. They gave us candid feedback on things that we are doing and i think it makes us stronger as a result. I think it is very, very important for any federal agency, even in some cases more so for a Security Agency to be as transparent as they can with the public. And so if you go on our public webpage tsa. Gov you will see our strategy and the direction that i have given. Called the administrators intercept how were going to execute on that strategy over the next two or threeyear period. You will see a series of road maps on topics that we find of particular concern that we need together to move forward. The other thing with respect to transparency is we have made very, very good use of social media. I think we have one of the very best instagram accounts in the federal government. It has a really good i think it is a really good sense of humor in it. The idea is to get people to read it. Because we want to prevent passengers from bringing something into a checkpoint that we dont allow, infinite checkpoint operations. When that happens, that chris inefficiencies and a passenger didnt creates infirst quarter sis. A passenger didnt e do that just from being a passenger. It creates something we really, really try to avoid. We use our social media platforms to get out as much as we can. I know you have a session this afternoon on advanced air mobility. There has been a lot of investment on the part of companies already. Some of the considerations we have with advanced air mobility you will have a high volume of low altitude flights over urban areas. You will have an increase in aircraft volume over Critical Infrastructure. The most significant events with respect to the number of people gathered. The super bowl is an event every year as is the state of the union. Youll have nontraditional airport locations. These might be parking lot roofs. Roofs of buildings for air mobility transport. There will be a need for passenger and employee screening and vetting within this sector, the aviation sector. I will say to all of you, we have a very Good Relationship with the manufactures of these systems, the companies that endeavor to operate these systems. I think that is really beneficial to all oust is trying early onto embed into the design of these systems which i think well see operating in the not too distant future. Fa has done a great job putting out rule making, updating the definition of some terms that are going to be different in the context of aviation. Certainly in airmen certification standards and air worthiness criteria. We have worked very closely with the faa and what they are proceeding on. I think it is a very Good Partnership we have with them. We have advanced air Mobility Work group within that committee i just mentioned to you a few minutes ago. We are part of department of transportations inner agency group on advanced air mobility fully engaged within the industry. I think this is going to be a robust discussion for a good number of years. Im glad were having it now and are having it where we can just lay out what the issues are and figure out what the best path forward is and really thinking of this capability and what it could mean to transportation within the United States. I know the unmannedded aerial systems or drones is of key concern for its the first of january of 2021. We have a law called the preventing emerging threats act of 2018 that gives us the authority to conduct counter operations as part of an Emergency Response to a security incident. Just listening to those words, its a fairly limiting grant of authority. What it means is we cant proactively and persistently protect transportation infrastructure at this point in time. We have been working very hard to close that gap and continuing to develop our national capability. Some of the things we are doing with the authority we have is a couple of testbeds in operation, one in Miami International airport and one at lax. It tests the track and identify technologies on the market. Our role is to test the technology, to assess whether or not it meets the requirements that the manufacturer has listed, and that it provides and meets the guidelines that the fcc and faa will have for the technology. It is really beneficial as a service we think to make sure what is out there and people can make decisions on that track and identify technology and make them with more information done by totally independent and is asian. Independent organization. The other thing we are doing is developing a concept of operations. Have an initial one four if there was a uis incident around one of the 30 largest airports in the country, how would we, the agencies and response agencies from the federal state, local, tribal, and territorial level responded to the incident . We had that in place and have been testing it to make sure that should Something Like this happened, the public will have confidence that collectively amongst all levels of government, the owners and operators of the airports and the carriers are working together. They see that synchronization among us. We are continuing to work to get more robust counter uis authority for us. The way i look at this is mark mentioned i served in the coast guard for 33 years. Midpoint through my 33 year career, we were worried in the coast guard about the ua s operations and around maritime facilities. I would say all these years later, we made some progress but not progress you would expect for that. That period of time. This is something we need to pay close attention to. The next topic to mention to you is on cybersecurity. We have done i think an incredible amount of work over the past year and a half on cybersecurity and we started out working cybersecurity in the pipeline sector. We had one of the major pipelines in the country suffer a Ransomware Attack in may of 2021, and as a result of that, one of the things that we saw that we needed to remedy right away was there was no universal reporting requirement for Ransomware Attacks or Cyber Attacks that the federal government had imposed on the terms rotation sector. When the owner and operator of that Pipeline System would call and say this is what happened to me, is this happening to other people or how many other people has this happened to you . Nobody really had the answer except for anecdotal responses. One of the first things we did in may the very same month was put out a requirement that established the cybersecurity reporting regime for pipelines. We required that pipeline owners and operators identify point of contact. Will got the report, we would have somebody that we could call evan by 24 seven by 24 to learn more information about that incident. Two important things that we did this past year is when we chose to regulate the pipeline sector we only rightly to pipelines that were the most critical to the infrastructure in the country. Agency called cis and art of department of Homeland Security work on identifying within each Critical Infrastructure sector, all 16 sectors, which were the most radical owners and operators. We took that list and put a regulation out that applied to just that list of owners and operators, which is also a fluid list. As a new company that might come in and meet criteria for criticality in that sector, they would be covered by those requirements your debts when the first things we did was focus on the most critical owners and operators. The second thing we did was decided that the reporting needs to come to one place in the federal government rather than multiple federal agencies. We decided that in our directive that reporting would go to cisa who would have the response would to provide the information not just to tsa but to the pipeline and Hazardous Materials agency and permanent transportation and energy and the fbi. We were all aware at the same time of what was happening and that was easier and simpler for Owner Operators to be able to put in place. One of the things going on down the federal government as you look across entire government in all critical instructor sectors, what is the current required cybersecurity reporting regime . How soon do owners and operators need to report and what is the criteria for reporting, and where those reports go . The effort is to harmonize as much as we can those cybersecurity reporting requirements. That will be going on for several more months, and with the report due up to congress. The other thing we required was owners and operators do a vulnerability assessment, do their own assessment which we assisted with and the fbi helped with two the able to determine for themselves where they were most vulnerable from a cyber perspective. Once they knew that, to submit to us the Incident Response plan. I have identified bible abilities. If one of my voter abilities is excluded, how would i respond as the owner and operator of the system . We have all the information. Then we decided that we needed to put more specific cybersecurity protections in place. You might remember back in july of 2021, we put another directive that was quite specific as to things that in Owner Operator needed to do with respect to Access Control, with respect to network and things like that. That was not widely viewed as positive on the part of the industry because their position, which we fully understand, was you are being way too specific. You might be forcing us to abandon some things that we think we are doing that are effective. We might have to change our entire Business Model based on what you are requiring. Could we find a better way . Over the. Period of the next year, there were roundtables and other engagements were totally revamp our cybersecurity regulations. Susan did incredible work in this regard. Now our cyber regulations for pipelines are issued for rail systems as well, same criteria. Soon to be issued for aviation systems. Basically it says you have to do the things that i mentioned before, but on those specific cybersecurity prevention measures, we went to a performancebased approach. We said there are four outcomes that you need to achieve. You tell us, Owner Operator, how you think best that you are going to achieve those outcomes. Submit a plan to do that to us. We will review it along with system and the bureau and cisa and the bureau and Permanent Energy and transportation on the pipeline case, and we will come back to you and tell you whether we approve, disapprove, or we would like you to modify the cybersecurity implementation plan. We have gone to the entire process with the sector, pipelines and we are largely through the rail sector. Once we prove it, it goes back to the Owner Operators and they can and clement the things that they have proposed or might have been modified in that process. Think of this for a second. This is a way to take a late outcomes without particular eating specific activities to provide flexibility to owners and operators and have really good ideas as to how different owners and operators will approach the very same problem. Additionally, from a security perspective, if an adversary figures out how you are protecting your Critical Infrastructure, and there is a recipe book for exactly how you are doing it, you are creating more bowl abilities vulnerabilities. They could exploit others once i understand it. The four outcomes for Access Control, patching, prioritized patching of your systems, implement, and continuous monitoring, and also segment your networks. Understand how your networks are structured. Do an architectural review and segments so people cant jump from your Business Systems over to your operating systems with ease and without detection. A lot of work on cyber. I will be happy to talk about that further. That is a really, really great use case of a federal agency rather than doing in some ways the easier route of just saying do these specific things. We are saying no, you can do it differently. We are going to prove it. We will use it in our compliance regime, your proposal. Well make sure your complaint compliant with those proposals. That provides more possibility and prevention capabilities and more resilience in the sectors. The other thing we are can turn concerned about his insider threats. We saw in 2014 there was weapons smuggling case in where the major airports in the country. In 2015, you might member the metro jet attack over egypt which was an insider attack. We are looking at security plan amendments to be able to address insiders. We do quite a bit with respect to insiders. We require everybody in aviation sector to have a Security Threat assessment done before they are allowed to begin work. We also do recurrent vetting with the fbi. Every persons background, criminal background gets checked literally every single day, so we know something pops up that might cause a concern by us or by their employer. We have also plummeted a good level of Access Control within the airport environment and the air cargo environment. Also, you might see teams of tsa officers roaming around airports with a curt. These are called atlas teams. Their job is to do random inspections at gates in different points in the airport to make sure that there is still compliance with our security requirements on the part of passengers. That there has been no hand off between passenger in another passenger or by an employee at the airport and a passenger. A lot of work on that sector. There is a roadmap on that one. We have done great work on identity management. For maryland residents, you can work with the maryland dmv and download onto your iphone, its closer to apple the current time, but it is will soon be available to other smartphone manufacturers. You can download a digital version of drivers license into your apple wallet. If you are precheck passenger at ragen airport in dallas airport, you can literally cap your iphone tap your iphone on a reader with that technology and will come up. Just think of this from a privacy perspective. It comes up and says, do you agree to send the following Data Elements from your drivers license to tsa echo just like with tsa . Just a boy from the podium, your data is erased from our system. There is no data retention. We are expose it on the private privacy impact statements and how we are protecting information on the part of passengers. I think we have done literally patient leaving work and perhaps traditional work on identities with mobile drivers license. We have partners working on Digital Identity solutions which we fully support. Digital identity is really good because it is harder to counterfeit a real id complaint drivers license than it is a nonreal id complaint drivers license. It is even harder still to counterfeit and electronic or digital form of identity. We are doing this as a way to continue to improve security and improve efficiency and Passenger Experience without question. The other thing we have been working on hard is biometrics. You see a good amount of reporting on this. We have done some really good ardent ships with one of the major carriers in the country on curb to curb biometric work where you can as a precheck passenger walked up and just using her face, check a checked bag. You go up and check your identity and it gives you a bag tag. You put the bag tag on it and drop it on can walk up to the precheck lane. There is a one to small number match of your image because we preload the images from your government passport onto our technology. You go through screening as you would but not having to take out your drivers license. The way this has worked is if you are a member of the clubs you can get access to clubs using your face. You can get access to the aircraft using your face as well. This has worked out really well. We are doing it in atlanta and detroit airports. So far, this operational assessment has been incredibly successful. Probably three other very quick things. One is on firearms. You might see some media releases that we put out recently. In calendar year 2022, tsa officers detected 6542 firearms at our checkpoint. That is the biggest number ever. The next biggest year was a year before. The trend is continuing to go up neared of that 6542 number, 80 were loaded. What passengers usually say is, i forgot. I had that firearm in my carryon bag. Thats another problem, right . This is an area of keen concern for us. We have just increased the fine for carrying firearms. We pursue civil penalty action on everything one of these cases that we encounter. If you are a precheck passenger, you will lose precheck algebra d for five years. If you are not a precheck passenger you will not be eligible for precheck for five years. We are working as hard as we can to bring these numbers down. A lot of public messaging and refining the messaging only goes so far. If it was really effective, we would not see these numbers going up to where they are. A key area of concern that i just went to highlight to you. One technology piece and then one really positive piece that i think you will see over the next 56 years. The technology piece, we are going to require when we purchased screening equipment, for example Xray Technology, Xray Technology must be in an open architecture framework. In other words, that we could take the data out of an xray system that lets say we were using in one airport in the country and transmitted in realtime to us here in washington we wanted to see it or transmitted between tsa and customs and border protection. The other reason for open architecture is we want to be much more agile in our reporting to bring Software Solutions to our technology. Sometimes we see a change in a threat that we know that our xray systems can detect. We just have to modify the algorithms that are in those systems to be able to provide that detention. Right now, that is a longer process because you have to rewrite essentially the entire Software Package in that xray machine. Open architecture will mean that we can just add a layer onto the existing software appeared we can compete that Software Develop meant amongst a series of secure vendors and give them 90 or 120 days to come up with a Software Solution. Rather than doing a manual workaround to a threat that we want to detect, we feel we can get to a very Quick Software solution using open architecture. It relates to the next topic and my last one which is the onestop security. Onestop security was authorized by the ndaa last year by the congress. A lot of work was done between us and others and members up on the hill. We had a lot of really great support for this. It a hugely positive advancement. What onestop means is that if you are coming inbound the United States from one of the last point of departure airports and going direct into the u. S. , if that is one of our onestop partners, then you dont need to get rescreened in the United States if you have followed on u. S. To mystic travel. If you are going from london, heathrow through jfk out to des moines, iowa, for example, once you land at jfk, you stay in the area and go through immigration. You dont have to go retrieve your checked bag as you if you have one because it will automatically go tail to tail at the airport. You dont need to go through spinning again because you stayed in the sterile area. It will shave off her passengers an hour or maybe two hours of built in time to go through those currently in the current processes that we have. Congress gave us the authorization to put a one at six International Airport for six years. We have a good amount of very, very helpful reporting that we can provide to the congress as we encounter this. Going back to open architecture for a second. Lets say that london heathrow is one of the last point of departure airports. One of our requirements for open onestop is going to be all the extra technology in that last point of departure airport needs to be computer tomography which is the technology we are using. If it was developed to open architecture standards, heathrow can send us a checked bag image in near realtime we could look at, ideally even run our own Software Algorithms against the data from the xray machine and determine whether or not that bad should be loaded on board the aircraft and that passenger should be permitted to proceed. There is a huge capability advancement, combining open architecture with onestop security. I am hoping that we will see the first onestop security airports identified over the next 612 months and we will start the work with partner nations and certainly those airports to get it incremented. Im really excited about this because i think it is going to very much help our International Travel inbound to the u. S. There are a lot of countries that accept u. S. Screening outbound their own screen purposes basically the entire European Union does already. This allows it to work in the other direction coming to us. With that, let me close. I would be happy to answer any questions if weve got time, mark for any questions that you might have on your mind. I dont want to take i know you have a busy schedule this afternoon so i will leave it up to you. [inaudible] throughout the covid pandemic, used about to make sure [inaudible] during that process. Know your organization suffered and people on your watch and you care deeply about that. My question is talk about the workforce challenges in the discussion are rolling out technology and workers [inaudible]. Talk about it from the tsa perspective. I think people dont realize it. David pekoske thank you very much. He is a terrific partner on capitol hill and i crocheted all the support of that he and the Commerce Committee have provided for us. An outstanding question. Tsa has got over 60,000 employees. Of those 50,000, about 50,000 are the frontline screening officers that you see when you travel. Those screening officers up until this year, were paid at a different pay scale than the rest of the federal government. They were paid about 30 less then if you took their position, went through the office of personnel management, classified this position because we did all this work, and then figured out what their salary would be. So, thanks to the work of ron and his colleagues and people on capitol hill, we in the omnibus appropriation act received the funding support to pay our workforce commensurate pay with the rest of the federal government. A huge step forward. It will make a big difference for us in our ability to recruit and to retain. I think across aviation sector, as we have all recovered from the pandemic, its been hard to hire people to work in airports, whether it is somebody working for tsa or retail on the airports or somebody handling bags at airports. Its been very hard. It may be harder if your pay is 30 less than if you went to any other federal agency. Its not just that raw celery, but you have to think about the government match on savings by contributions and things like that. Theres a lot that has gone on structurally for the workforce. Thank you to the support of the congress. We did get authorization and funding to do that and that becomes effective on the first of july. I think what you will see as it will be much easier for us to recruit. We will have our lanes more fully staffed than they would otherwise be aired that is really important because the summer of 2023 is going to be a very, very busy summer. We have all seen the demand for air travel. I just got back from chicago yesterday. You dont find middle seats anymore. They are awful. The demand is they are all full. The demand is there. That is a good step in the right traction. The other thing we ask for in the fiscal 23 budget which we got support for it was in tsa, the frontline screening workforce did not have full collectivebargaining rights. We wanted to provide them full collective parking rights. That costs a good amount of money to do and do in a way that is successful. We asked for the funds to be able to influence full collective bargaining and received those funds as well. We are in the process now of offering full collective bargaining to our screening workforce, which will help us a lot i think with workplace Job Satisfaction and morale in addition to the salary. Big, big change in the other thing that we got in the omnibus bill was 61 million to hire more officers above our baseline. I mentioned 22 a3 will be a busy summer. One of the things that is really hard for those officers is a lot of times they show up at 2 30 in the morning and get the checkpoint open before passengers arrive. They are on their feet all day long. When we are shortstaffed, we ask them to do additional overtime. If we dont get enough volunteers, then we require overtime. You can imagine if you are very shortstaffed at certain airports, you have limited flux ability and being able to take Vacation Time or just simply being able to work a 40 hour week. Might be working a lot longer and have only one day a week that you have off. All these things combined, having that funding and supporting those authorizations will help out our workforce overall. The other thing that we are incredibly focused on is i believe that when youre running and operating an agency, you need to understand how operations work. It is fundamental, but sometimes it is not. So, i spend a lot of time as mark mentioned, i travel a great deal. I spend a lot of time trying to be facetoface, oneonone in many cases with the officers, the federal air marshals, the inspectors, with the headquarters staff. We have lawyers that are around the country supporting our operation just to truly understand the kind of issues they are facing. Then we come back and really challenge the organization to be able to address them. I would submit to you that the strength of the Transportation Security Administration is in its people. You cant do screening without a lot of people. While we will introduce technology, the Technology Introduction for me as trying to reduce the risk that we have right now based on what we know terrorist organizations can do. That is a constant struggle for us and has been for 21 years to make sure we keep pace with what terrorist organizations are capable of doing. But also to see if we cant automate some of the process much more so than we do today and really upscale our workforce to be able to be in the resolution phase of it. When you go through checkpoint, you can look across and see all the xrays. Those are the biggest machines in the checkpoint. Well see an officer sitting next to an individual xray. You have to ask yourself is that necessary . Secondly, why do they have to look at every single image that comes up . Cant we put a Software Solution in place that will allow us to automatically identify explosives and weapons of any type, nice including firearms. We already had the unmedicated vacation for explosive that we have had for years but not for all prohibitive items. When you have something there that is looking at images, 45 seconds of a look and youre doing that for an entire shift, that gets to be very, very fatigued aired one of the things that we would like to do and we are doing at Laguardia Airport is taking some them off the floor and put them in a separate room so they can focus on that particular function. Eventually, i think we will have the ability to port those images anywhere we want to and perhaps, we place those Image Resolution operations in lower cost of living locations around the country, have some redundancy so if one goes down we can port to another. This is from a secured Security Effectiveness standpoint. The individual officer sees only what goes through their lane. You cant aware in our current structure of what is happening two or three lanes over from meat . A supervisor might be, but at a large checkpoint, thats a pretty challenging assignment. If we could bring on this imagery into one location, we can see things that might collectively put together and raise a concern that we are right now largely unaware of. Thanks, ron. Thank you. Appreciate it. [applause]