Opinion ID: 552755
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Author/Subject Fallacy

Text: 27 Notwithstanding the Supreme Court's reference to any particular individual, the dissenters' new conceit is that in order to be a 'similar file,' a file must contain personal information about the subject (not just the author or maker) of that file. Dis. op. at 1016-17. This restriction on the scope of Exemption 6 does not even pretend to any legislative parentage. 3 And it casually ignores binding precedent that establishes the scope of Exemption 6: in Washington Post, the Supreme Court instructed us to look not to the nature of the file[ ] in which the information [is] contained, 456 U.S. at 599, 102 S.Ct. at 1960, but solely to whether the information in the file applies to a particular individual, id. at 602, 102 S.Ct. at 1961-62. An author may be a particular individual, and as such may have a privacy interest cognizable under Exemption 6. 28 A second difficulty with the dissent's distinction between the subject and the author of a file is that it implicitly, and erroneously, presupposes that every file has an inherent and discoverable subject. Such an assumption would invite every FOIA plaintiff, and the district courts to which they repair, to describe the subject of disputed files opportunistically in order to bolster the case for disclosure. 29 In this case, for example, whether the astronauts are a subject of the Challenger tape depends upon the information that one seeks to extract from that tape. The dissenters say that the subject [of the file], for Exemption 6 purposes, would be the operation of the shuttle. Dis. op. at 1017. That is no doubt one fair statement of the subject of the transcript (or of some of it, perhaps not including such lines as Feel that mother go, or the final entry, Uh-oh). But it is mechanistic in the extreme to insist that it is also the only fair statement of the subject of the tape, which adds to the transcript the astronauts' voice inflections. Yet insist the dissent does--as though the world were neatly divided and labeled according to the rules of English usage. And as though it were not clear--for it is undisputed--that NASA's interest in retrieving [from the ocean floor] the voice and data recorded on that tape was to determine what the crew was aware of during the flight, Moorehead Decl., Jan. 27, 1987, Ex. 1, Defendant's Motion for Summary Judgment, New York Times Co. v. NASA, 679 F.Supp. 33 (D.D.C.1987), and not, as the dissent would have it, to assess the operation of the shuttle. 30 The suggestion that, in some borderline cases, a court must make a context-specific inquiry to determine what or who is the subject of a file, dis. op. at 1014 n. 4, fails to recognize that the relevant context is a function of the purpose of the inquiry. Divorced from the statutory purpose of identifying information which applies to a particular individual, a context-specific inquiry is an experiment without a hypothesis, a useless thing, yielding only arbitrary or incoherent results. 31 Suppose that the purpose for which an agency created and maintains a file is the study of voice inflections, or research into computerized voice recognition. In a file of audio tapes classified by type of voice inflection, this one might be under the heading mortal fear. In a file created in the course of voice recognition research, it might be found under the name of the person whose voice it is. Obviously, there is no unique subject inherent in the text of the file. One could equally well say of the Challenger tape--depending upon the filing system in which the agency maintains it--that the subject is an air disaster, last words, astronauts, voices of famous people, or, as the dissent classifies it, the operation of the shuttle, dis. op. at 1017. The logic of the dissent offers no criterion by which we, or a subsequent court, could be guided in the bootless search for the subject of a file; one could stop arbitrarily at any point and announce a result, as one likes. 32 This is amply illustrated by the dissent itself, which attempts to distinguish the case of the Apollo 1 tape, dis. op. at 1018, by suggesting that over the course of a few seconds the authors of that tape were somehow transformed into its subjects. Why is there no similar metamorphosis in the crew of the Challenger? Even the Times acknowledged what the dissenters would now deny, viz. that it is the question of how long the astronauts in the capsule survived ... to which this tape directly relates. Transcript of Hearing on Cross Motions for Summary Judgment, May 14, 1987, at 33, New York Times Co. v. NASA, 679 F.Supp. 33 (D.D.C.1987). No explanation is, or could be, provided because the approach taken by the dissent offers no criterion of judgment. 33 As for incoherent results, suppose next that someone doing research for a biography of Commander Scobee seeks disclosure under the FOIA of all cockpit and other voice recordings of Commander Scobee, or of a (hypothetical) NASA file, Oral Statements of Commander Scobee, containing every voice recording he ever made in the course of his work for the agency. By the dissenters' approach, the subject of each individual tape might well be something like the operation of the shuttle. Yet it is inconceivable that the subject of the file of collected tapes would not be the person whose voice is their unifying theme, viz. Commander Scobee. Disclosure would thus depend upon whether the tapes are scattered among files relating to different missions, as opposed to being collected in the single file instanced above. 34 These context-specific searches for the subject of each file sought under the FOIA and withheld under Exemption 6 are neither useful nor necessary. An inquiry into the reason a file was created, or the manner in which it is maintained, does not appear to be any different from an inquiry into the label on the file, which the Supreme Court emphatically rejected in Washington Post. Under that case, our concern must be solely with whether the information applies to a particular individual, not with the nature of the file[ ] in which the information [is] contained. 456 U.S. at 599, 102 S.Ct. at 1960. 35 Finally, there is no warrant for the dissenters' fear that we are abandoning the norm of narrow construction applicable to exemptions under the FOIA. The operation of Exemption 6 will be limited in the manner the Congress and the Supreme Court expected it to be limited: at the balancing stage. It is the rare file indeed for which the Government could, in good faith, assert an interest in authorial privacy, simply because it is most unusual for a government file to yield up any meaningful information about its author. 4 (In fact, research reveals no case in which the Government has ever before even asserted the privacy interest of the author of a file.) Even more rarely, of course, will the author's interest outweigh the public interest in disclosure of the government file that he or she authored. 36 For precisely that reason, all but the most unusual assertion of authorial privacy would easily be disposed of under the categorical approach to Exemption 6 claims, without any need to resort to ad hoc balancing. See National Ass'n of Retired Fed. Employees, 879 F.2d 873, 879 (D.C.Cir.1989), quoting Department of Justice v. Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, 489 U.S. 749, 109 S.Ct. 1468, 1483, 103 L.Ed.2d 774 (1989) (categorical decisions may be appropriate and individual circumstances disregarded when a case fits into a genus in which the balance characteristically tips in one direction). Thus, a claim to exemption from disclosure based upon a fear that the author's syntactic felicity, or lack thereof, would reveal information about the depth and breadth of his or her education, dis. op. at 1015, or upon a fear that the taped voice inflections of a person delivering a speech would reveal that person's emotional state, would involve such trivial privacy interests that the claim simply could not rise to the level of a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy. 5 U.S.C. Sec. 552(b)(6). Hence, the objection made by the dissenters is as unwarranted as their own highly imaginative approach is unworkable. 37 Numerous government files may contain the type of non-lexical information we have identified as meeting the similar files requirement, but that cannot justify our raising the Exemption 6 threshold above the level set by the Supreme Court. If the information applies to an individual, then it might harm that individual; for that reason it crosses the threshold, and the privacy interest of the person to whom it applies must be considered and balanced against the public interest in releasing it.