Supreme Court SNAP data ruling bodes ill for journalists - Entrepreneur Generations

On Monday "the Supreme Court limited public and media access to government records by expanding a federal law's definition of what can be deemed confidential," Jonathan Ellis and Richard Wolf report for the Argus Leader in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. "At issue was whether confidentiality, as used in a section of the Freedom of Information Act, means anything intended to be kept secret or only information likely to cause harm if publicized."

During oral arguments in April, the justices "appeared conflicted between upholding the spirit of the Freedom of Information Law, and the desire to stick to the literal meaning of the word 'confidential,'" Ellis reported then.

"FMI and the federal government "had argued for a broad definition that would leave ample room to keep data from the public. Media organizations and public interest groups favored a more narrow definition requiring harm, which would make confidentiality apply to fewer FOIA requests," Ellis and Wolf report.

The Argus Leader had been fighting in court for almost a decade to gain access to Department of Agriculture data on how much money grocers and other food retailers get from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or food stamps. The paper filed suit in 2011 against the Food Marketing Institute, a retail trade lobby, arguing that the public has a right to know how taxpayer money is spent. The FMI argued that the records should be confidential because releasing it would harm some businesses' ability to compete with other retailers.

The Supreme Court ruled in favor of FMI in a 6-3 vote, with justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, and Sonia Sotomayor dissenting.

In the ruling, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote: "At least where commercial or financial information is both customarily and actually treated as private by its owner and provided to the government under an assurance of privacy, the information is 'confidential' under the meaning of (FOIA)."

In the minority opinion, Justice Breyer wrote: "Given the temptation, common across the private and public sectors, to regard as secret all information that need not be disclosed, I fear the majority's reading will deprive the public of information for reasons no better than convenience, skittishness, or bureaucratic inertia."

from The Rural Blog http://bit.ly/2XFeUln Supreme Court SNAP data ruling bodes ill for journalists - Entrepreneur Generations

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