FOIA Advisor

Court opinions issued Jan. 5, 2023

Court Opinions (2024)Allan BlutsteinComment

Freedom Coal. of Doctors for Choice v. CDC (N.D. Tex.) -- determining that plaintiff’s request for 7.8 million free-text responses to agency’s COVID-19 vaccine safety monitoring system would not be unreasonably burdensome for agency to process, because: (1) the volume of the responsive texts would yield between as little as 83 thousand pages and at most 650 thousand pages; (2) CDC conceded that 93 percent of the responses would require no redaction at all; and (3) any necessary redactions of personal identifying information pursuant to Exemption 6 would be “simple” and “capable of automated assistance.”

Project for Privacy & Surveillance Accountability. v. NSA (D.D.C.) -- deciding that: (1) agencies were permitted to issue Glomar responses before conducting searches for requested records of the intelligence community’s acquisition and use of commercially available information pertaining to named Congressmen and former Congressmen; (2) agencies properly relied on Exemptions 1 and 3 in refusing to confirm or deny existence of “operational documents,” but were required to conduct a search for “policy documents.”

Summaries of all published opinions issued in 2024 are available here. Earlier opinions are available here.