The Supreme Court today ruled that corporations do not have personal privacy rights under FOIA Exemption 7(C). The ruling can be found here.
The issue was in a case brought by AT&T, whether a corporation could be considered a person pursuant to Exemption 7(C) and therefore be provided "privacy" rights for its information under the exemption. Chief Justice Roberts wrote the opinion, which was unanimous 8-0 decision (Justice Kagan did not participate in the proceedings). The Court, in a decision which is as much a grammer lesson as a FOIA issue, found that corporations are not the same as humans pursuant to Exemption 7(C) and do not have privacy for corporate material under the exemption.
Update: Here's a breakdown of the issue from DailyKos.
It seems the Supreme Court is playing fast and loose these days with their rulings. The Citizen's United ruling, which is a travesty, ruled that corporations and unions are persons in the case of free speech in political advertising, however, in the case of AT&T seeking personal privacy rights, they are saying "personal" is different than "person". In my mind, personal privacy means privacy of a person, or privacy belonging to a person. Where is the difference?...not that I am for corporations having any personal rights at all as a corporation. Funny I didn't hear of this ruling in the main stream media, but then Japan has been taking most of the airtime.
Thank you for your blog. It provides me an excellent resource for my political blog, and I will be using this information found here today.
Posted by: CC | March 17, 2011 at 07:13 AM