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Page Number: 19

4  FOOD MARKETING INSTITUTE v. ARGUS LEADER MEDIA 

Opinion of BREYER, J. 

ernment records.”  CIA v. Sims, 471 U. S. 159, 166 (1985). 
Its purpose is to “permit access to official information long
shielded  unnecessarily  from  public  view”  and  “to  create  a
judicially  enforceable  public  right  to  secure  such  infor-
mation  from  possibly  unwilling  official  hands.”    EPA  v. 
Mink, 410 U. S. 73, 80 (1973).  To that end, we have con-
tinuously held that FOIA’s enumerated exemptions “must 
be narrowly construed.”  Department of Air Force v. Rose, 
425  U. S.  352,  361  (1976);  see,  e.g.,  Milner  v.  Depart-
ment  of  Navy,  562  U. S.  562,  565  (2011)  (same);  FBI  v. 
Abramson,  456  U. S.  615,  630  (1982)  (noting  our  “oft-
repeated caveat that FOIA exemptions are to be narrowly 
construed”).

The  majority’s  reading  of  Exemption  4  is  at  odds  with
these  principles.    The  whole  point  of  FOIA  is  to  give  the 
public access to information it cannot otherwise obtain.  So 
the fact that private actors have “customarily and actually 
treated”  commercial  information  as  secret,  ante,  at  11, 
cannot be enough to justify nondisclosure.  After all, where 
information  is  already  publicly  available,  people  do  not
submit  FOIA  requests—they  use  Google.  Nor  would  a 
statute designed to take from the government the power to
unilaterally  decide  what  information  the  public  can  view, 
see Mink, 410 U. S., at 80, put such determinative weight 
on  the  government’s  preference  for  secrecy  (what  the
majority  calls  the  government’s  “assurance  of  privacy”), 
ante, at 11. 

For  the  majority,  a  business  holding  information  as
private and submitting it under an assurance of privacy is
enough to deprive the public of access.  But a tool used to 
probe  the  relationship  between  government  and  business 
should  not  be  unavailable  whenever  government  and 
business  wish  it  so.  And  given  the  temptation,  common 
across  the  private  and  public  sectors,  to  regard  as  secret
all  information  that  need  not  be  disclosed,  I  fear  the  ma-
jority’s  reading  will  deprive  the  public  of  information  for