Opinion ID: 552755
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Similar Files Under Exemption 6

Text: 7 The only question before this court is whether the tape passes the threshold requirement, not the strength of the private and public interests at stake. The nature of the Times's interest is relevant to the threshold issue, however, because it makes clear that the file contains something beyond the content of the words in the printed transcript--information which applies to a particular individual, namely his or her voice inflection at a particular moment. Thus, while the taped words do not contain information about the personal lives of the astronauts, disclosure of the file would reveal the sound and inflection of the crew's voices during the last seconds of their lives. 1 Therefore, the tape contains personal information the release of which is subject to the balancing of the public gain against the private harm at which it is purchased. 8 The FOIA makes no distinction between information in lexical and that in non-lexical form; all information is equally covered by the general norm of disclosure, and equally subject to the same specific exemptions therefrom. The lexical and non-lexical aspects of a file may convey different information, however, and when the government asserts that only the non-lexical aspect is exempt from disclosure, the court must consider whether the information that would be newly revealed by that disclosure is or is not exempt. A textual report accompanied by a picture, for example, provides more information than the text of the report alone. In a particular case, the picture might be exempt from disclosure while the text is not (or vice versa). 2 9 Lest there be any doubt that voice inflections can contain personal information, recall the 1967 fire in the cockpit of the Apollo 1 spacecraft, which killed Edward H. White, 2d, Roger B. Chaffee, and Virgil I. (Gus) Grissom. In that tragedy, too, NASA had a tape of the last moments of the astronauts' lives. The New York Times was then content, however, to publish an article based solely upon the verbal description given by NASA, without gaining access to the sounds on the tape. Here is how the Times recounted the last few seconds in the cockpit: 10 Fire ... I smell fire, an unidentified astronaut reported over the intercom. 11 Two seconds passed. 12 Fire in the cockpit! cried Colonel White. 13 This time the voice was sharp and insistent. It was identified as Colonel White's by Donald K. Slayton, a former astronaut and now chief of crew operations. 14 There was silence for three seconds--then a hysterical shout from an unidentified astronaut:There's a bad fire in the spacecraft! 15 A longer gap followed, about seven seconds. There were sounds of frantic movement, unintelligible shouting. Finally, after four more seconds, Commander Chaffee cried out the last words of distress: We're on fire--get us out of here! 16 N.Y. Times, Jan. 31, 1967, p. 1. The description alone is chilling. One can hardly doubt that the horror in the voices on the tape would convey additional information that applies to the astronauts in the throes of their deaths. 17 In the Washington Post case, this court, in a holding subsequently rejected by the Supreme Court, decided that to qualify as 'similar' files, within the meaning of Exemption 6, the recorded data must incorporate 'intimate details' about an individual, information of the same magnitude--as highly personal or as intimate in nature--as that at stake in personnel and medical records. Washington Post Co. v. Department of State, 647 F.2d 197, 198-99 (1981) (citations omitted), rev'd, 456 U.S. 595, 102 S.Ct. 1957, 72 L.Ed.2d 358 (1982). The Supreme Court admonished that in crafting Exemption 6, Congress had concluded that the balancing of private against public interests ... should limit the scope of the exemption. 456 U.S. at 599, 102 S.Ct. at 1960. Thus the Supreme Court requires that in applying the threshold test, we look not [to] the nature of the files that contain the information sought in a FOIA request, but to the nature of the information requested. Id. The information need not be intimate; the threshold for application of Exemption 6 is crossed if the information merely applies to a particular individual. Id. at 602, 102 S.Ct. at 1961-62. As this court subsequently put it, the threshold is minimal. Washington Post Co. v. HHS, 690 F.2d 252, 260 (1982) (This ensures that FOIA's protection of personal privacy is not affected by the happenstance of the type of agency record in which personal information is stored.). 18 There is, of course, a very good reason why the Exemption 6 threshold was set at a low level: information that fails to cross that threshold must be released without regard to any invasion of personal privacy that may result, and without regard to whether there is a sufficient public interest in its release to warrant the harm caused by that invasion of privacy. A threshold that excludes too much would undermine what the Supreme Court described as the Congress's objective of provid[ing] a proper balance between the protection of an individual's right of privacy and the preservation of the public's right to Government information. H.R.Rep. No. 1497, 89th Cong., 2d Sess. 11 (1966), U.S.Code Cong. & Admin.News 1966, 2418, 2428, quoted in Washington Post, 456 U.S. at 599, 102 S.Ct. at 1960. 19 The panel opinion affirming the district court rejected NASA's argument that voice inflections constitute personal information because of the perceived consequence that every tape recording of audible human utterances, regardless of its content, [would be] invariably a similar file.... Mere shifting of the focus from the nature of the information recorded to the manner in which that information was conveyed would in this case render the similar-files threshold meaningless. 852 F.2d at 607. In this the panel twice erred. 20 First, in treating the words recorded as the totality of the information ... conveyed, it failed to acknowledge that information is not conveyed by words alone. The information recorded through the capture of a person's voice is distinct and in addition to the information contained in the words themselves. Reading the libretto of a Verdi opera is not the same as hearing the opera performed. So, too, the meaning of Marc Antony's speech over the body of Caesar is not to be found in the disembodied words on the printed page, but in the voice that contradicts them. 21 Second, it is simply not correct that recognizing non-lexical information as one type of information that can apply to an individual would render the similar files threshold meaningless. Not every government file contains information about an individual. There are surely millions, perhaps billions, of government documents that say nothing about any individual, being composed instead of financial or scientific data, statistics, crop reports, and so on. Even when such a file does contain information apart from and beyond the content of the words used, it may not be possible to identify the individual to whom that information applies. Or there may be multiple authors, each of whom may have contributed to the file non-lexical information that cannot be traced to, and therefore does not reflect upon, any one person. Examples might include an unidentified voice or likeness in an audio or video tape, or such non-lexical information as might be gleaned from a file compiled by numerous unnamed and unknown government employees. The Government could not cross the similar files threshold to assert a privacy interest in such information. 22 Indeed, the Supreme Court explains in Washington Post that a broad interpretation of what constitutes personal information does not render meaningless the threshold requirement that the information be contained in a similar file. There the Court states: 23 As petitioners point out, there are undoubtedly many Government files which contain information not personal to any particular individual, the disclosure of which would nonetheless cause embarrassment to certain persons. Information unrelated to any particular person presumably would not satisfy the threshold test. 24 456 U.S. at 602 n. 4, 102 S.Ct. at 1962 n. 4. What petitioners in that case had pointed out was that 25 Disclosure of financial records of a large corporation might, for example, prove embarrassing to the corporation's officers or board of directors.... But that financial information would not, simply by virtue of the damaging impact, become personal information that meets the threshold test of Exemption 6. 26 Pet.Br. at 21 n. 7, Washington Post (No. 81-535). Recognizing the potentially personal quality of non-lexical information would no more render the threshold meaningless, therefore, than does the Washington Post decision itself: the financial records of a large corporation, which the Supreme Court instanced, still do not pass the threshold because they do not contain information personal to any particular individual.