Central Intelligence Agency v. Sims

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1985 US Supreme Court decision on FOIA exemptions

1985 United States Supreme Court case

Central Intelligence Agency v. Sims, 471 U.S. 159 (1985), was a decision of the U.S. Supreme Court . In the case, the court ruled that the Central Intelligence Agency was permitted to withhold the identities and institutional affiliations of scientific researchers who worked on Project MKUltra . The project was conducted by the CIA, and focused on human experimentation . The case held that the Central Intelligence Agency could, in fact, classify the researchers as intelligence sources, and thus withhold their names from disclosure to the public, in addition to their institutional affiliations. The decision by the Supreme Court reversed, in part, the decision made prior by the lower district and appeals courts on the case.

Background

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Main article: MKUltra

From 1953 to 1973, the Central Intelligence Agency operated Project MKUltra, subjecting U.S and Canadian citizens to experimentation without their prior knowledge or informed consent .

The project involved the use of LSD on American and Canadian citizens, as well as experimentation with further drugs such as heroin and morphine , among others. The CIA had, during the course of the project, utilized the assistance of 185 individual researchers spanning across around 80 institutions.

History of the case

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The plaintiffs were John Cary Sims and Sidney M. Wolfe , an attorney and director of Public Citizen respectively. The two plaintiffs originally filed a Freedom of Information Act request against the CIA in the public interest, based upon the discovery of new documents by the CIA in relation to the MKUltra project in 1977 relating to the names of researchers and facilities, which were originally presumed to be destroyed in 1973 prior to investigations into the project. They requested information about both the grant proposals and contracts awarded by the CIA in relation to the MKUltra project, and the names and institutional affiliations for the researchers who worked on the project, as well as the names of research facilities.

The CIA granted the request for information about grant proposals and contracts, as well as the request for names of most of the research facilities, though declined to provide information in relation to the names and affiliations of researchers, and retained knowledge of 21 other research facilities used in the project. Based upon the denial of the remainder of the information request by the CIA, both Sims and Wolfe filed suit against the Central Intelligence Agency.

The plaintiffs sued the Central Intelligence Agency in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia . The District Court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs originally, and held that the names of the researchers involved in the MKUltra project did not constitute "intelligence sources" under the law, and thus could not be withheld from Freedom of Information Act requests by the public. The Central Intelligence Agency challenged this ruling to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit , which resulted in a remand of the judgement of the District Court, with the Court of Appeals determining the District Court did not have a sufficient definition for an intelligence source. The District Court reviewed evidence submitted regarding the applicability of the Court of Appeals' definition of an intelligence source on remand, and determined that researchers who had previously received a guarantee of confidentiality were exempt from disclosure, but that the other remaining researchers were not intelligence sources, as the Central Intelligence Agency had not promised them confidentiality. This decision was again appealed to the Court of Appeals, who remanded the case again to the District Court, determining that the District Court had erred in using the lack of a promise of confidentiality as a basis of determining the applicability of the term of intelligence source. The Central Intelligence Agency then appealed the decision to the Supreme Court.

Case law

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Under the Freedom of Information Act , any citizen can make a request of the government for production of records held in an agency's possession, with some exceptions for records deemed to not be releasable under the Act. The third exemption specified in the Act, however, authorizes the refusal to disclose information that is classified subject to a relevant statutory basis. Both the National Security Act of 1947 and the Central Intelligence Agency Act were used to justify the Central Intelligence Agency's refusal to disclose records. The CIA Act, however, was largely intended by the drafters of the act to apply to the CIA acting in foreign countries, not domestically within the United States.

The case, from its inception, involved primarily the application of the National Security Act of 1947. This act assigned the responsibility for the protection of "intelligence sources and methods" to the Director of the CIA . The act did not make an explicit definition of an intelligence source, and the definition of an intelligence source has generally been subject to the interpretation of the courts. This left the Director of the CIA to produce an interpretation of the applicability of the term to the researchers working on the project, of which the district court reasoned led to an "overbroad interpretation".

Decision of the court

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The Supreme Court justices who decided Central Intelligence Agency v. Sims

The decision of the court was unanimously in favor of the Central Intelligence Agency, with Chief Justice Warren E. Burger delivering the opinion of the court, joined by Justices White, Blackmun, Powell, Rehnquist, Stevens, and O'Connor. The Court thus concluded that someone who is an intelligence source "provides, or is engaged to provide, information the agency needs to fulfill its statutory obligations", which fit the researchers at issue in the case. The majority opinion both considered the National Security Act and established a definition that the Court used to determine the validity of an intelligence source in being withheld from a FOIA request.

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