Opinion ID: 496195
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Deference Owed DoD's Judgment On Damage to National Security

Text: 15 The standard to be applied in assessing DoD's decision to withhold has been described as follows by the District of Columbia Circuit: 16 Because  '[e]xecutive departments responsible for national defense and foreign policy matters have unique insights into what adverse affects [sic] might occur as a result of public disclosure,'  however, courts are required to  'accord substantial weight to an agency's affidavit concerning the details of the classified status of a disputed record.'  Salisbury v. United States, 690 F.2d 966, 970 (D.C.Cir.1982) (quoting S.Rep. No. 1200, 93d Cong. 2d Sess. 12 (1974), U.S.Code Cong. & Admin.News, 1974 pp. 6267, 6290). Accordingly, an agency is entitled to summary judgment if its affidavits describe the withheld information and the justification for withholding with reasonable specificity, demonstrating a logical connection between the information and the claimed exemption, id. at 970, and are not controverted by either contrary evidence in the record nor by evidence of agency bad faith. Military Audit Project v. Casey, 656 F.2d 724, 738 (D.C.Cir.1981). 17 Abbotts v. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, 766 F.2d 604, 606 (D.C.Cir.1985). We adopt that standard here. 18 DoD's concern here is that, by looking at all of the TAB entries, a person could draw useful inferences about the direction of U.S. research into weapons or defensive technologies. AFSC responds that, when a project begins to approach fruition it will stop appearing in the TABs, as it will if DoD concludes that the project is not worthy of further exploration. DoD acknowledges this, but contends that the disappearance of a given project from the TABs will still give those seeking such information help in ascertaining what projects should be the target for their own intelligence work. AFSC's rejoinder to this contention is that 19 one would have no way of determining whether [the subject's disappearance from the TABs] was because research had been terminated (or for what reasons), or because it had reached fruition, so that further reports were classified Top Secret and/or their titles were themselves classified. 20 Appellant's Br. at 11. 21 We do not find this a satisfactory rejoinder. Even if a hostile nation could not tell which of the two alternatives was correct, it would be able to infer that one of them was. This would enable it to concentrate its intelligence resources on those areas which were likely to be most important.