Earlier this month, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit published an interesting decision related to accessing information in government databases.

The decision, in the case of The Center for Investigative Reporting v. United State Department of Justice, held that “the use of a query to search for and extract a particular arrangement or subset of existing data from the [Firearms Tracing System] database [maintained by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives] does not require the creation of a ‘new’ agency record under [the federal Freedom of Information Act].”

The court’s decision contains a lot of good discussion about this important issue, mostly starting on page 37, such as: “[I]f running a search across these databases necessarily amounts to the creation of a new record, much government information will become forever inaccessible under FOIA.”

Importantly, the decision is in line with existing Pennsylvania case law regarding the Right-to-Know Law.

For example, in Gingrich v. Game Commission, the Commonwealth Court held: “Providing data from an agency database does not constitute creating a record.” And in Department of Environmental Protection v. Cole, the Commonwealth Court held: “An agency can be required to draw information from a database.”

In our training sessions for requesters, the Office of Open Records often discusses this issue. You can find more about the RTKL and information in government databases on slides 29 to 32 of this presentation, and you can listen to me discuss the issue here.