Controlling Custodianship of Information is How Agency Records Management Programs Limit Bureaucratic Power
Without a trustworthy agency records management system, Federal bureaucrats can deny access to agency information to anyone - even the agency's Secretary
🧵1/7 For many years after the 1950 passage of the Federal Records Act (FRA), agency records, almost exclusively maintained on paper, were routinely separated by records management staff between ‘active’ records and ‘dormant’ records.

Control of active agency records - these were the records in desk drawers, inboxes, office file cabinets, etc. - remained with the individual or organization that originally created them for as long as the records remained in active use.

After active records use began to drop - typically over a short period - these paper records would be recategorized as ‘dormant’. In compliance with the FRA, this change in status had two important implications.

First, the paper record was physically moved from wherever it was maintained in its active status to the agency’s onsite records preservation facility or an affiliated regional Federal Records Center.

Second, control (technically speaking, ‘custodianship’) of the paper record was legally transferred from the individual or organization that created the record to the agency, represented by the agency’s records management program.
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DOGE Says NIH Has 700 IT Systems That Don't Communicate with Each Other
It's the same at every other agency, too. And it is the single biggest source of inefficacy in the Federal government. Here's how we got here.
🧵1/10 The massive, expensive electronic records management repositories that I designed, built, and sold during the 2000s were based on a Department of Defense electronic records management application standard called the DoD 5015.2.

These repositories were designed to mirror the information lifecycle management processes used by the government for decades with paper records. This included an electronic ‘records center’ identical in concept to an agency’s paper records warehouse.
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AI Technologies Aren't Just Destroying Federal Records – They’re Also Creating Them
Microsoft's Copilot AI technology is creating Federal records with no human oversight or transparency. Over time, this could change the very nature of our government.
🧵1/8 The Federal government uses many different complex AI technologies for a host of unique requirements. But Microsoft's Copilot - a repackaged version of OpenAI's ChatGPT-4 series of large language models implemented on Microsoft's enterprise information management platform, M365, and Azure cloud environments - is far and away the leader in Federal government AI solutions.

Copilot is a solid, sophisticated AI technology, with a long list of impressive capabilities.

Some of these capabilities include:
- Summarizing long email threads
- Taking notes during a meeting
- Creating a summary of a Teams meeting
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[I posted this last year, but it was quickly suppressed. Seems like a good time to post again.]

The Ruling Elite, the National Archives, and the 1984 Blueprint for Tyranny
Orwell was right about building an authoritarian state...and the people in power were listening.
🧵1/9 “Is there somewhere or other a place, a world of solid objects, where the past is still happening?”
“No.”
“Then where does the past exist, if at all?”
“In records. It is written down.”
“In records. And-?”
“In the mind. In human memories.”
“In memory. Very well, then. We, the Party, control all records, and we control all memories. Then we control the past, do we not?”
- O'Brien interrogates Winston Smith, '1984'

To their credit, our ruling elite have long been studious followers of George Orwell. They understood, as Orwell did, that any authoritarian regime requires just two things to gain and maintain power: a system to control the minds of the people and a means to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.

Sometime in 2007, soon after powerful leftist politicians and members of the intelligence community decided that Barack Obama would be the Democratic Presidential nominee - and eventual winner - the ruling elite launched their plan for an authoritarian takeover of this country based on Orwell’s ‘1984’ blueprint.

Their first task was easy. They already had a system in place to control the minds of the American people: A compliant mainstream media that would obediently promote any narrative their tyrannical masters fed to them.

What the ruling elite didn’t have was a means to destroy the American public’s understanding of its past.
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[Given the recent reporting from @julie_kelly2 and others, I thought I would repost this piece on the MAL raid from last August.]

The Truth About Donald Trump's Presidential Records Matter You Won't Find Anywhere Else
The paper documents at Mar-a-Lago were not Presidential records by the government's own definition, and the National Archives had no right to claim them.

After more than 23 years managing White House and Federal agency records at the highest levels of the government, I am widely regarded by industry leaders and members of the Federal records management community as an authority on the policies, procedures, and technologies required for complying with the Presidential Records Act.

Here’s the truth about Donald Trump’s Presidential records matter that you won’t get from anyone else.
🧵 By the National Archives and Records Administration’s own rules, Presidential records born digitally must be preserved through their entire natural lifecycle - creation, distribution, use, maintenance, and disposition - in their native electronic format.