Case Detail
| Case Title | COLE v. COPAN et al | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| District | District of Columbia | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| City | Washington, DC | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Case Number | 1:2019cv01070 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Date Filed | 2019-04-16 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Date Closed | 2021-06-22 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Judge | Judge Dabney L. Friedrich | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Plaintiff | DAVID COLE | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Case Description | David Cole submitted a FOIA request to the National Institute of Standards and Technology for specific records concerning the fire safety investigation of the 9/11 collapse of the World Trade Center. The agency acknowledged receipt of the request and told Cole that it was required to consult with an outside party that had an ownership right in the records. The agency withheld all but one of the records under Exemption 3 (other statutes) citing the National Construction Safety Team Act. Cole filed an administrative appeal. The agency denied his administrative appeal. Cole then filed suit. Complaint issues: Litigation - Vaughn index, Litigation - Attorney's fees | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Defendant | WALTER G. COPAN DR., in his official capacity as Director of the National Institute for Standards and Technology | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Defendant | NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF STANDARDS AND TECHNOLOGY | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Documents | Docket Complaint Complaint attachment 1 Complaint attachment 2 Complaint attachment 3 Complaint attachment 4 Opinion/Order [20] FOIA Project Annotation: Judge Dabney Friedrich has ruled that the National Institute for Standards and Technology properly responded to David Cole's FOIA request for audio recordings of 116 interviews conducted with first responders concerning the agency's investigation of the collapse of the World Tower buildings as a result of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. After conducting a search in response to Cole's FOIA request, NIST located nine sets of notes regarding the content of interviews. The agency sent Cole a link to the publicly available McKinsey Report. The agency disclosed the notes from a single interview with the job title of the interviewee redacted and withheld the notes of the remaining eight interviews under Exemption 3 (other statutes), citing section 7(c) of the National Construction Safety Team Act, which prohibits disclosure of voluntarily provided safety-related information if the information is not directly related to the building failure being investigated and the NIST Director finds disclosure would inhibit voluntary provision of that type of information. Cole filed an administrative appeal, but the agency upheld its original decision. Cole then filed suit. Cole argued that the agency had failed to conduct an adequate search, pointing to a reference in a 2005 report referring to transcriptions of the interviews. Siding with the agency, Friedrich noted that "NIST asserts that the word 'transcribed' refers only to the hand-written notes originally taken during the interviews. Given the ambiguity of 'transcribed' in this context, NIST's explanation is a reasonable one, and Cole has offered no other evidence that verbatim transcriptions exist." Cole also faulted the agency for not searching ATLAS.ti, a subscription database that included some of the interview materials. However, Friedrich pointed out that "NIST had no obligation to examine the ATLAS.ti database because it no longer subscribes to the database." Challenging the Exemption 3 claim, Cole argued that the interviewees, who all worked for New York or Nee York City, had a legal duty to report the information contained in the interviews and that submission of the information could not be considered voluntary. Friedrich, however, noted that "any duty to report arising out of these individuals' government employment would not have been owed to any entity beyond the state and municipal government that employed them." She also rejected Cole's contention that the interviews were directly related to the building collapse. Instead, she observed that "eyewitness observations about the sights and sounds observed on September 11 my give rise to various references about the structural factors that ultimately caused the towers to fall. But such observations are not 'directly related' to the building failures in the sense that they shed direct light on the complex engineering questions surrounds the collapse of multiple skyscrapers. The focus of the interviews in question was the emergency response and the evacuation procedures employed on September 11, 2001, not the details concerning the structural integrity of the buildings being evacuated." Friedrich also agreed that the agency had properly withheld personally identifying information from the one set of interview notes under Exemption 6 (invasion of privacy) but indicated that NIST had not shown that it conducted an adequate segregability analysis. She sent that issue back to NIST for further explanation.
Opinion/Order [35]Issues: Exemption 7(C) - Invasion of privacy concerning law enforcement records FOIA Project Annotation: Judge Dabney Friedrich has ruled that interview notes collected as part of the National Institute for Standards and Technology's investigation of the building collapses at the World Trade Center as the result of the 9/11 terrorist attacks were properly withheld from researcher David Cole under Exemption 3 (other statutes). Cole originally requested the records of NIST's investigation in 2011. The agency withheld the records under Exemption 3, citing section 7(c) of the National Construction Safety Team Act, including eight sets of interview notes. However, due to an oversight, the Director of NIST failed to make a finding under the National Construction Safety Team Act with respect to former employees of Salomon Smith Barney. Nonetheless, NIST withheld those interview notes under Exemption 6 (invasion of privacy). In her previous opinion issued August 27, 2020, Friedrich found NIST had failed to show that there were no segregable portions of the interview and gave NIST an opportunity to provide further justification. After the current Director of NIST made the required finding pertaining to the National Construction Safety Team Act, the agency dropped its reliance on Exemption 6 and justified its withholding of the interview notes under Exemption 3 instead. Cole argued that under Maydak v. Dept of Justice, 218 F.3d 760 (D.C. Cir. 2000), in which the D.C. Circuit held that agencies must claim all applicable exemptions at the district court, NIST had forfeited its right to change its exemption claims. But Friedrich pointed out that "courts typically find the government forfeited the right to claim an exemption when an agency asserts the exemption for the first time only after the district court has already ruled in the other party's favor, such as, for instance, in a motion for reconsideration. This is not the case here." She noted that "if the court exercised its discretion and required the 'government to make some threshold showing of good cause to avoid a finding of forfeiture,' NIST has adequately done so. As NIST explained at the outset of this litigation, it failed to invoke Exemption 3 with respect to the notes from Interview 1041704 because the NIST Director's 2008 finding unintentionally omitted former Salomon Smith Barney employees 'due to an oversight.' And NIST invoked Exemption 3 shortly after the NIST Director issued a supplemental finding to address this error." Having found that NIST could invoke Exemption 3 to withhold the interview notes, Friedrich examined whether Exemption 3 actually applied to the information. She noted that "but while an agency must demonstrate that the withholding statute it invokes in conjunction with Exemption 3 'was in effect at the time of the request,' neither Exemption 3 nor ยง 7306(c) preclude NIST from relying on findings made after a plaintiff's FOIA request was submitted."
Issues: Exemption 3 - Statutory prohibition of disclosure | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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