Opinion ID: 546873
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Fitzgibbon's Claims in Light of Sims

Text: 27 Sims invalidates all of Fitzgibbon's claims. First, as noted above, Fitzgibbon asserts that publication of much of the withheld material would not disclose a source because it is unclear from the information whence it was derived; it may as well have come from a magazine or newspaper, or a CIA or FBI employee, as from a foreign intelligence service. Brief for Fitzgibbon at 22. The Supreme Court has unequivocally held that the Director of Central Intelligence may protect all intelligence sources, regardless of their provenance. Sims, 471 U.S. at 171, 105 S.Ct. at 1888. Similarly, the fact that the District Court at one point concluded that certain contacts between CIA and foreign officials were nonsensitive does not help Fitzgibbon because apparently innocuous information can be protected and withheld, id. at 176, 105 S.Ct. at 1891, and because the Supreme Court has indicated that information from ordinary private citizens--information derived from contacts that are as nonsensitive as any imaginable--is a vital part of the Agency's congressionally-mandated function and indeed composes  'one of the greatest repositories of intelligence that we have.'  Id. at 171, 105 S.Ct. at 1889. See also id. at 171-72, 105 S.Ct. at 1888-89 (General Vandenberg spoke of 'the great open sources of information upon which roughly 80 percent of intelligence should be based,' and identified such sources as 'books, magazines, technical and scientific surveys, photographs, commercial analyses, newspapers, and radio broadcasts, and general information from people with knowledge of affairs abroad.' ). 28 Second, the District Court committed no error when, in light of Sims, it reversed its prior disclosure orders concerning information, related to intelligence methods, that the District Court had earlier considered so basic and innocent that its release could not harm the national security or betray a CIA method. Fitzgibbon, 578 F.Supp. at 722. The Sims Court stated that, along with sources, methods constitute the heart of all intelligence operations. Sims, 471 U.S. at 167, 105 S.Ct. at 1887. It is not the province of the judiciary, the Supreme Court emphasized, to determine whether a source or method should be (or should not be) disclosed: 29 [I]t is the responsibility of the Director of Central Intelligence, not that of the judiciary, to weigh the variety of complex and subtle factors in determining whether disclosure of information may lead to an unacceptable risk of compromising the Agency's intelligence-gathering process. 30 Sims, 471 U.S. at 180, 105 S.Ct. at 1893-94. In this case, the Director of Central Intelligence attested that 31 [s]ix foreign intelligence services are directly involved, including services of both allied and non-allied countries.... [Disclosure] would significantly reduce the quantity of substantive intelligence information provided to this Agency inasmuch as other nations will not entrust their most sensitive secrets to an organization unable to protect them. The loss of the information and assistance that these services provide to the United States would substantially damage United States security interests. 32 JA at 1299. 33 Third, Fitzgibbon's argument that methods that might be generally known--such as physical surveillance, or interviewing, or examination of airline manifests--must be disclosed, see Brief for Fitzgibbon at 24-26 & n. 22, fails for the same reason. As the Supreme Court said in Sims, [a] foreign government can learn a great deal about the Agency's activities by knowing the public sources of information that interest the Agency. Sims, 471 U.S. at 176-77, 105 S.Ct. at 1891-92. This Court has established that in considering the potential harm arising from disclosure of a source or method,  '[w]e must take into account ... that each individual piece of intelligence information, much like a piece of jigsaw puzzle, may aid in piecing together other bits of information even when the individual piece is not of obvious importance itself.'  Gardels v. CIA, 689 F.2d 1100, 1106 (D.C.Cir.1982) (quoting Halperin v. CIA, 629 F.2d 144, 150 (D.C.Cir.1980)). As the Director of Central Intelligence attested to the District Court: 34 [D]isclosure [of intelligence methods] would directly permit hostile governments to either neutralize [the disclosed methods] or utilize them as a vehicle for disinformation. Hostile intelligence services and governments are not omnipotent; they cannot watch all potential sources and guard against all possible methods of collection. For example, the procedure of monitoring international telecommunications is one of the most simple intelligence collection methods, but its superb utility stems from the sole fact that hostile powers do not know which communications are seized and which channels are open to compromise. Therefore, protection of the fact of CIA use of even the simplest methods in certain situations keeps this Nation's adversaries guessing as to the goals of United States intelligence activities and the means of carrying them out. 35 JA at 1300-01. 36 Fourth, Fitzgibbon's contention that unwitting or potential sources must be disclosed. Brief for Fitzgibbon at 26-28, cannot stand after Sims. Because the existence of the MKULTRA program was a closely kept secret, the researchers in Sims were obviously unwitting sources. In a literal sense, Fitzgibbon is correct in noting that all persons are potential sources, yet his argument proves too much, as the Supreme Court noted in Sims: If potentially valuable intelligence sources come to think that the Agency will be unable to maintain the confidentiality of its relationship to them, many could well refuse to supply information to the Agency in the first place. Sims, 471 U.S. at 175, 105 S.Ct. at 1891 (emphasis supplied). See also id. at 176, 105 S.Ct. at 1891 (We seriously doubt that a potential intelligence source will rest assured.... There is no reason for a potential intelligence source to have great confidence in the ability of judges....). Moreover, refining distinctions between and making comparative evaluations of veteran sources, new sources, unlikely sources, and potential sources is a task to which judges and courts are unsuited, and section 403(d)(3) gives us no reason to think otherwise. 37 Fifth, we reject Fitzgibbon's contention that the District Court was under an obligation to consider the effect of the passage of time on the documents in question. As our discussion above establishes, the Supreme Court in Sims made it clear that Congress intended intelligence sources and methods to be protected, and that the Director of Central Intelligence is charged with that function. Our discussion above also establishes that maintaining the confidentiality of intelligence sources' identities has two purposes: protection of persons or entities that are or have been sources, and insurance (or inducement) both for current sources to remain so and future, potential sources to become sources. Thus,  '[t]he Government has a compelling interest in protecting both the secrecy of information important to our national security and the appearance of confidentiality so essential to the effective operation of our foreign intelligence service.'  Sims, 471 U.S. at 175, 105 S.Ct. at 1891 (emphasis supplied) (quoting Snepp v. United States, 444 U.S. 507, 509 n. 3, 100 S.Ct. 763, 765 n. 3, 62 L.Ed.2d 704 (1980) (per curiam)). The appearance of confidentiality would hardly be enhanced if sources and future sources were to learn that their safety--and often their lives--were to depend upon judicial oversight. 38 In its earlier rulings requiring disclosure, the District Court apparently imported the exemption 1 standards for national security protection into exemption 3. Exemption 1 allows, under certain circumstances, the disclosure of old national security information. See Fitzgibbon, 578 F.Supp. at 716-21; id. at 721 (In this effort [to determine whether an individual, if he or she is still alive, might be embarrassed or harmed by revelation], the Court has in the main followed the rationale of [a recent executive order], in that it has presumed that an individual who imparted information to the CIA over 20 years ago is not a source whose revelation would damage national security today.). Our prior decisions have not been entirely consistent as to whether the scope of exemption 3 in the context of section 403(d)(3) and section 403(g) 4 is equal to or broader than the scope of exemption 1. Compare Ray v. Turner, 587 F.2d 1187, 1196 (D.C.Cir.1978) (equal to exemption 1), with Baker v. CIA, 580 F.2d 664, 668-69 (D.C.Cir.1978) (under section 403(g), exemption 3 broader than exemption 1), and Hayden v. NSA, 608 F.2d 1381, 1390 (D.C.Cir.1979) (under National Security Agency's exemption 3 statute, 50 U.S.C. Sec. 402, exemption 3 to be construed more broadly than exemption 1). Given the Supreme Court's sweeping language in Sims and the fact that these exemption statutes were congressionally designed to shield processes at the very core of the intelligence agencies--intelligence-collection and intelligence-source evaluation--we must conclude that the importation of standards into the exemption 3 analysis from the exemption 1 analysis is improper, at least insofar as the latter analysis could be read to require the court to consider the effect of the passage of time on materials withheld under exemption 3. 39 For these reasons, we conclude that the District Court correctly applied Sims and correctly construed section 403(d)(3) and exemption 3 in its consideration of Fitzgibbon's claims. This conclusion disposes of Fitzgibbon's claims on appeal. 40