Opinion ID: 522131
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Public Availability of Information Contained in the Contested Documents

Text: 79 The district court's determinations that the administrative record was inadequate for judicial review, and that a remand was required, were based upon its finding that the record did not contain the public sources from which the General Counsel concluded that the information for which Occidental sought confidential treatment was already public. Specifically, the court found that [t]he prior release of information noted by the SEC, which information Occidental claims is still confidential, is only vaguely indicated and is not entirely reproduced in the administrative record. 662 F.Supp. at 500. The SEC asserts that the administrative record nonetheless contains adequate documentation to support the General Counsel's conclusion regarding prior public availability. 80 The difference between the SEC and the district court seems to turn on the meaning of public availability. As the district court pointed out, the thrust of the General Counsel's reasoning is that the allegations of bribes and questionable payments are a matter of public record; the SEC maintains that this is sufficient to support the General Counsel's determination to release the documents gathered by the Commission in the course of its investigation. The district court, on the other hand, reasoned that a public news report of the inquiry ... cannot alone make all underlying documents containing commercial information automatically public if not found in the news report. Id. 81 The court is clearly correct in this. First, the SEC's suggestion that publication of an allegation renders public, and thus subject to release on that ground alone, all information obtained in the course of the ensuing investigation is illogical, incorrect as a matter of fact, and insensitive to the Congress's purpose to protect confidential business information from disclosure. On the SEC's reasoning, a company that announces that it has developed a new product would lose its ability, at least in the context of a reverse-FOIA proceeding, to prevent the federal government from disclosing its trade secrets about the product. No such cavalier attitude toward valuable intellectual property can be squared with the terms of Exemption (4), which qualifies, to the extent necessary to protect commercial information, the general FOIA norm of citizen access to files that bear on the workings of the government. 82 Thus, the only question before the General Counsel, broadly stated, was whether the contested documents contained trade secrets and commercial or financial information [that was] privileged or confidential. 5 U.S.C. Sec. 552(b)(4) (1982). The primary focus of that inquiry was limited to the narrower question whether disclosure of the contested documents would cause competitive harm to Occidental under the test of National Parks & Conservation Ass'n v. Morton, 498 F.2d 765, 770 (D.C.Cir.1974). In this inquiry, it is simply irrelevant that, as the General Counsel suggests, Occidental may be seeking confidential treatment for the documents in order to avoid disclosure of bribery-related information that might be damaging to its reputation. The General Counsel may or may not be correct that the allegations of harm flowing only from the embarrassing publicity attendant upon public revelations concerning ... illegal or unethical payments to government officials are insufficient to establish competitive harm under National Parks. We need not decide that question today. See Public Health Research Group v. Food and Drug Administration, 704 F.2d 1280, 1291 n. 30 (D.C.Cir.1983) (dictum). Occidental's right to an exemption, if any, depends upon the competitive significance of whatever information may be contained in the documents, not upon whether its motive is to avoid embarrassing publicity. The SEC's role, therefore, is not to assess the overall damage, regardless of its nature, that would result from disclosure of any non-public bribery-related information to be found in the documents, but rather to determine whether any non-public information contained in those documents is competitively sensitive, for whatever reasons. Particularly in light of the General Counsel's further narrowing of the issue to the question whether the contested information was already a matter of public record--an inquiry which, as discussed more fully below, is inherently fact-specific--we cannot fault the district court's finding that, after a reverse-FOIA movant has made a positive showing, 662 F.Supp. at 498, of competitive harm from disclosure, a conclusory statement such as You have not demonstrated that release of these documents would result in competitive harm is unreviewable. 83 Moreover, the administrative record does not in fact appear to contain all of the public materials upon which the General Counsel relied, at least not in any form that is practically reviewable by the district court. For example, while the Venezuelan Bicameral Report may be part of the record in the sense that it is among the 8,000-plus documents at issue in this dispute, it does not appear to have been included in the slimmer set of documents that was presented to the district court (in the form of a 900-page binder) as the administrative record. Nor (in most cases) does the General Counsel's decision relate specific information in the disputed documents to those portions of the public materials in which the information is allegedly contained. We cannot, therefore, find any error in the district court's conclusion that the record before it did not permit the court, as a practical matter, to assess the General Counsel's conclusion that whatever competitively sensitive information may have been contained in the contested documents was a matter of public record.