Opinion ID: 610872
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Public Interest Analysis

Text: 21 Amicus argues that due to the agency's refusal to either confirm or deny the existence of the requested files, the district court did not have an adequate factual basis for performing the balancing required in an Exemption 6 analysis. According to amicus, there is a public interest in knowing the identity of Government employees who have engaged in wrongdoing; therefore, the OPR's refusal to either confirm or deny the existence of documents that might reveal wrongdoing by them ignores this potential public interest and leaves the district court without an adequate foundation on which to balance the competing interests. 22 Amicus, in a substantial shift of position from that of plaintiff below, asserts that the OPR should conduct a review of its files to determine whether they contain credible evidence (or, as defined at oral argument, a finding) that the individual employees in question have violated any statutes, rules, regulations, or standards of agency conduct. If no such evidence exists, amicus argues, then the agency should so state in a detailed affidavit. If the agency uncovers any documents fitting this description, however, amicus suggests that the agency must at least disclose that such documents exist. 23 The public's interest in disclosure of personnel files derives from the purpose of the Act--the preservation of the citizens' right to be informed about what their government is up to. Reporters Committee, 489 U.S. at 773, 109 S.Ct. at 1482 (internal quotation marks omitted); see also Ray, --- U.S. at ----, 112 S.Ct. at 549; Rose, 425 U.S. at 361, 96 S.Ct. at 1599. This statutory [302 U.S.App.D.C. 291] purpose is furthered by disclosure of official information that sheds light on an agency's performance of its statutory duties. Reporters Committee, 489 U.S. at 773, 109 S.Ct. at 1482; see also Ray, --- U.S. at ----, 112 S.Ct. at 549. Information that reveals little or nothing about an agency's own conduct does not further the statutory purpose; thus the public has no cognizable interest in the release of such information. See Reporters Committee, 489 U.S. at 773, 109 S.Ct. at 1482. The identity of one or two individual relatively low-level government wrongdoers, released in isolation, does not provide information about the agency's own conduct. 24 That point is illustrated by [the Supreme Court's] decision in Rose. Id. In Rose, the Court held that the United States Air Force should submit disciplinary hearing summaries maintained in the Academy's Honors and Ethics Code reading files for in camera review, Rose, 425 U.S. at 381, 96 S.Ct. at 1608, as the summaries, taken together, contained information that would explain how the agency's disciplinary mechanisms functioned. Id. at 367-70, 96 S.Ct. at 1602-03. All parties agreed, however, that any information that might identify particular cadets should be redacted: [T]he names of the particular cadets were irrelevant to the inquiry into the way the Air Force Academy administered its Honor Code. Reporters Committee, 489 U.S. at 773, 109 S.Ct. at 1482. For this reason, the public interest that supported the decision in Rose would have been inapplicable to a request to identify specific cadets accused of wrongdoing. See id. at 774, 109 S.Ct. at 1482. 25 The public interest identified by amicus is akin to a request for the names of the Air Force Academy cadets in Rose: Beck seeks information that would identify two specific government employees as the subjects of findings of wrongdoing. The Supreme Court has made clear, however, that because there is nothing in such information that would in itself shed light on the employer agency's actions, there is no public interest in its release. See id. at 773-74, 109 S.Ct. at 1481-82. 26 Amicus nonetheless argues that our decision in Stern v. FBI, 737 F.2d 84 (D.C.Cir.1984), compels a different conclusion. According to amicus, Stern held that neither Exemption 6 nor Exemption 7(C) justified the nondisclosure of the name of an FBI agent who had knowingly participated in a coverup. The Stern case is distinguishable from this one, and from Rose, in one critical, factual dimension: That case occurred against the backdrop of a well-publicized scandal, and the public was aware that certain employees had been censured, one of them for having deliberately suppressed evidence. See id. at 86-87. 27 The Stern court noted that none of the public interests that generally arise in requests for government investigatory records, such as the public's interest in knowing that a government investigation had been comprehensive, or that a report had been accurate, or that disciplinary measures had been adequate, are satiated ... by the release of the names of the censured employees. Id. at 92; see also Dunkelberger v. Department of Justice, 906 F.2d 779, 781 (D.C.Cir.1990) (quoting Stern ). [T]he public interest in the disclosure of the identities of the censured employees is only in knowing who the public servants are that were involved in the governmental wrongdoing, in order to hold the governors accountable to the governed. Stern, 737 F.2d at 92 (emphasis in original). 28 In weighing the censured employees' privacy interest in not being publicly associated with criminal activity, the Stern court reversed a district court order directing the disclosure of the identity of two FBI agents who had contributed inadvertently to the coverup, id. at 92-93, while affirming the order with respect to a senior FBI official because of his complicity in it. It did so on the basis that [t]he public has a great interest in being enlightened about that type of malfeasance by this senior FBI official--an action called 'intolerable' by the FBI--an interest that is not outweighed by his own interest in personal privacy. Id. at 94. 29 Although Stern was decided before the Supreme Court's decision in Reporters Committee sharpened our understanding of the nature of the public interest that is served by FOIA, we need not assess whether the circumstances of that case would have met Reporters [302 U.S.App.D.C. 292] Committee 's more exacting standard. It suffices to note that the public interest identified inStern was based on the widespread knowledge that certain FBI employees had been censured for their participation in a notorious criminal investigation. Here, by contrast, there is no evidence, let alone any public knowledge, that wrongdoing has occurred. Beck has failed, in short, to identify any such public interest in this case. Cf. Dunkelberger, 906 F.2d at 781 (public interest must be defined with sufficient specificity to enable court to balance it against protected privacy interests). 30 Amicus argues that to draw a distinction between a case in which there is some evidence that wrongdoing has occurred and this case is to impermissibly cast the burden on the requestor to prove wrongdoing. This argument, though clever, is unpersuasive. A requestor does not have a right to have his case decided on a hypothetical set of facts that strengthen his position; rather, he must see his case succeed or fail on the facts before the court. Our decision today does not require that Beck prove that a scandal exists; it merely requires that a claim of public interest be based on the known facts. 31 In the usual case, we would first have identified the privacy interests at stake and then weighed them against the public interest in disclosure. See Ray, --- U.S. at ---- - ----, 112 S.Ct. at 548-50; Dunkelberger, 906 F.2d at 781. In this case, however, where we find that the request implicates no public interest at all, [w]e need not linger over the balance; something ... outweighs nothing every time. National Ass'n of Retired Fed'l Employees v. Horner, 879 F.2d 873, 879 (D.C.Cir.1989); see also Davis, 968 F.2d at 1282; Fitzgibbon v. CIA, 911 F.2d 755, 768 (D.C.Cir.1990). 32 There can be no dispute that there is something on the private-interest side of the equation. A government employee has at least some privacy interest in his own employment records, an interest that extends to not having it known whether those records contain or do not contain information on wrongdoing, whether that information is favorable or not. See Dunkelberger, 906 F.2d at 782. In light of our finding today that there is no public interest in identifying whether these agents are wrongdoers, something outweighs nothing, and we find that the OPR did not violate FOIA in withholding the requested information.