Court Opinion

ID: 9467656
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 01:53:21.151124+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:40:27.118511
License: Public Domain

MARKEY, Chief Judge,
dissenting in part:
I join Chief Judge Wright’s typically lucid opinion for the court, dissenting, with utmost respect, only from the conclusion that a remand in respect of Exemption 3 is either necessary or advisable.
Three years is enough. Plaintiffs filed their request in August, 1977. After more than a year of delay, they filed suit in November, 1978. After a year of litigation, they prevailed in 1979. It is now September, 1980. The information sought is at *576least 14 years old. Absent some imperative, plaintiffs should not be forced to return for further litigation in the district court.
I agree that courts, while shirking none of their statutory responsibilities under FOIA, should approach with sheathed swords when our nation’s security is involved. The CIA is not the EPA or the FAA. Here, however, the Agency has specifically declined to refuse disclosure on national security grounds.
Indeed, the Agency has declined and disdained the deference-in-depth shown it by the district court. It has elected to confront the courts with a broad interpretation of Exemption 3, declining the district court’s grant of additional time to consider Exemption 1, to assert a contract theory, to contact the researchers, and to show facts indicating that its interpretation of “intelligence sources” as here applied is not so overbroad as to amount to untrammeled agency discretion. Before us, the Agency presents policy questions more properly presented to the Congress. The resulting impression is one of noblesse oblige. It does the Agency no injustice to remark that one who appears to have thrown down a gauntlet should not be surprised when it appears to have been picked up. The Agency’s implicit invitation to supply a usable definition of “intelligence source,” as that phrase is employed in Section 403(d)(3), has been well met in Chief Judge Wright’s opinion.
The clarity and applicability of that definition to the facts of record, coupled with the conduct of the Agency, prompt my view that remand is unnecessary and inadvisable.
It is true that neither the Agency in 1977, nor the district court in 1978, had the present definition available. Nonetheless, the differences between the definition here established and that employed by the Agency are not, in light of the record, such as to compel remand.
The present definition is broader in some senses and narrower in others.1 It is broader in substituting “provides, has provided, or has been engaged to provide” for the Agency’s “is engaged to provide, or in fact provides.” It is narrower in eliminating “medium,” and in supplanting the broad terms “substantive information” and “having a rational relation to the nation’s external national security” with a more usable “information of a kind the Agency needs to perform its intelligence function effectively.” It is narrower also in adding the eminently appropriate requirement that the information be of a kind the CIA “could not reasonably expect to obtain without guaranteeing the confidentiality of those who provide it.”
The Agency’s definition effectively reads “intelligence source” as “information source,” requiring protection of all sources of all information “rationally related” to national security.2 As the majority opinion makes clear, that sucks into secrecy’s maw too many sources of too many kinds of information. That the Agency’s definition is unacceptable, however, is not alone sufficient basis for remand here.
*577Application of the standard, that is, the majority’s definition, does not in my view require determinations “conceptually distinct” from those made by, or foreclosed by the Agency to, the district court. Further, I find the implicated factual concerns identical.
Presumably, remand is thought necessary to allow the Agency to show that the 21 institutions and 185 researchers provided “information of a kind the Agency needs to perform its intelligence function effectively, yet could not reasonably expect to obtain without guaranteeing the confidentiality of those who provide it.” But, as the record shows, the Agency has already established the “kind” of information here involved (research data on behavior modifying drugs). It has established its claimed need for the information, that is, to counter use of such drugs by potential adversaries and to develop its own capacity for their use. Whatever may be said of the wisdom or morality of the MKULTRA program and its operation, the Agency’s need for the research data “to perform its intelligence function effectively” has not been challenged on this record. Hence, a remand is unnecessary to prove that element of the standard.
That leaves only the question of whether the information was of a kind the Agency “could not reasonably expect to obtain without guaranteeing the confidentiality of those who provide it.” Yet proof of the answer to that question is precisely what the Agency has adamantly refused to seek or present, though the district court twice invited it to do so. The Agency effectively refused the district court’s request for evidence of express or implied confidentiality promises by the Agency. It declined the district court’s suggestion that it ask the researchers, in connection with Exemption 6, whether they even expected confidentiality. A remand to enable a party to do what it had specifically refused to do when initially before the district court, thereby allowing that party to force the conduct of piecemeal litigation, is in my view entirely inappropriate.
Further, what there is in the record on the subject indicates that the Agency had good reason for not attempting to prove the information unobtainable without a guarantee of confidentiality. From all that appears, the information was obtained without that guarantee, express or implied. The Agency dealt primarily through a front organization. If the Agency had promised confidentiality, explicitly or implicitly, it could have so established in the court below. That it did not, even in response to the court’s invitation, should be taken as evidence that it could not and cannot do so on remand.3
Though the “substantial weight” standard was initially phrased in relation to classified records and those here are declassified, it is not necessary to base a present refusal to remand on that ground. That the court in Halperin gave substantial weight to the Agency’s assertion respecting the effect of disclosure of the names of attorneys under contract for the CIA might have relevance if we were considering a “factual showing” of the effect of disclosure here.4 The district court and this court have here been denied that showing, though the Agency has had more than ample opportunity to make it and to rely on a “substan*578tial weight” standard. If, as the majority correctly says, it would be “inappropriate for a court to abdicate any part of its responsibility to decide” when presented with such a factual showing, even in the face of a substantial weight standard, it would appear even more inappropriate for an appellate court to remand when the district court was specifically and unequivocally denied that showing.5
Hence I cannot join the conclusion that the district court applied an improper legal standard to the Exemption 3 defense. That defense rested on the Agency’s definition of “intelligence sources.” The district court, viewing that definition as overbroad (a proper legal standard), held the defense inadequate. We do the same, on the same ground. That we also “provide guidelines” will be helpful to the Agency, to others, and to the interests of judicial economy in future cases. Where, however, as here, the Agency cannot meet those guidelines, indeed, declined to even try meeting them when the district court (in different words) invited that effort, I would not remand. I would affirm the district court’s judgment respecting Exemption 3.

. For convenience, the definitions are juxtaposed:
Present definition:
“[A]n ‘intelligence source’ is a person or institution that provides, has provided, or has been engaged to provide the CIA with information of a kind the Agency needs to perform its intelligence function effectively, yet could not reasonably expect to obtain without guaranteeing the confidentiality of those who provide it.”
The Agency’s definition:
“An ‘intelligence source’ generally is any individual, entity or medium that is engaged to provide, or in fact provides, the CIA with substantive information having a rational relation to the nation’s external national security.”

. We deal here only with Exemption 3, not with Exemption 1. Considerations of national security may go beyond inquiries on whether a potential adversary may already have certain information, and may encompass inquiries on whether the adversary knows the Agency knows, whether the adversary may learn the Agency is interested in knowing, and, of course, whether the adversary may learn of the Agency’s source or sources of that certain information.

. Similarly, reclassification of the names, reliance on Exemption 1, or similar post-appeal actions in avoidance of disclosure by the Agency, would create an impression of playing fast and loose with the judicial process. With three years to consider reclassification, and more than two years to consider reliance before the courts on Exemption 1, the Agency may be presumed to have no sound basis for those actions. A contrary view would make the Agency appear to have engaged in judicial gamesmanship, holding back some defenses while it tries out others through an appeal, a practice not required to obtain a judicial pronouncement on the defenses asserted. The courts’ treatment here of two defenses could have easily included a third.

. The Agency has not here asserted that the institutions or researchers were working under a contract with the Agency or were otherwise “employees” under 50 U.S.C. § 403g (1976).

. It is true that courts should not require the impossible, and that predictions of what others might do if the names here sought were disclosed are necessarily speculative, but the time for those considerations is in my view past. Moreover, nothing of record remotely hints that the Agency will be able to do any more than repeat the bald assertions already made, namely, that disclosure of these names will impede willingness of others to work with the Agency. Whether the public today perceives the Agency as a pariah is not established on the record, but the disclosure of the names of institutions and researchers who were under the impression that they were not working for the Agency cannot be assumed to impede a willingness of others to work for the Agency when asked to do so. Presumably, also, those employing the FOIA to obtain the names here sought do not intend to risk continued viability of the statute by unnecessarily exposing those institutions and researchers to public ridicule solely on the ground that they were caught up without their knowledge in MKULTRA.