iv. Examples of Sufficient/Insufficient Public Interest

Other examples where courts have found a public interest sufficient to override a privacy interest under FOIA include:

• The addresses, but not the names, of those who received disaster assistance payments from FEMA following hurricanes, as the public’s interest in evaluating how FEMA handled disaster relief claims and the requesters’ evidence that the agency may have engaged in “fraud, waste, or abuse” outweighed any privacy interests.¹¹¹ The requesters explained that they would cross-reference the path of the disasters with the addresses where FEMA money was disbursed in order to identify any “outlier” homes that may have improperly received FEMA aid.¹¹²

• The identification numbers of U.S. Occupational Health & Safety Administration employees who underwent beryllium testing, as the public interest in assisting research concerning the agency’s response to beryllium sensitization among its employees outweighed any invasion of privacy in the release of the numbers, which — while originally consisting of the last four digits of the employees’ social security numbers — could be replaced with new numbers that had since been adopted by the agency.¹¹³

• A government employee’s self-assessment of his performance, officials’ recommendations and ratings on his performance, and a final decision and justification for his rating, where he was of high rank (“the de facto third in command” within the department), the requester alleged and provided some evidence of the employee acting in a way that exceeded his authority, and the public’s interest in assessing his government activity outweighed the employee’s privacy rights in that information.¹¹⁴

• The names of unsuccessful applicants for presidential pardons, where the court found such information did not reveal the type of sensitive information that would result in a clearly unwarranted invasion of privacy, the applicant was petitioning the government to perform a public act, and any privacy right was outweighed by the interest in allowing the public to compare successful and unsuccessful pardon applicants to understand the government’s decision making.¹¹⁵

• Voting lists containing the names and addresses of employees and marks identifying those who voted at an NLRB-sponsored union election, where the agency’s “assertion that the disclosure . . . will chill future voting” was “purely speculative, completely unsupported, and highly improbable,” and the public interest in allowing the requester to investigate potential voter fraud and corruption outweighed the privacy interests.¹¹⁶

In contrast, courts have found that the stated public interests were not sufficient under FOIA to override a privacy interest in the following information:

• The phone numbers called — or from which calls were received — by the Secretary and Deputy Solicitor of the Department of Labor, where the requester sought the information to “ferret[] out ‘undue influence’ on the agency by labor organizations. But the records sought included calls to private persons as well and so it was “not at all clear that disclosure of these phone numbers would actually advance this rarefied interest in this particular case.”¹¹⁷

• Construction workers’ payroll records — containing their names, addresses, and wage information — where the requester sought them in examining the government’s enforcement of a federal law governing wages on publicly funded projects, as disclosure of this list “would be of interest to people interested in marketing goods and services to people working in the construction trades,” and could lead to its use by marketers.¹¹⁸

• The personal e-mail addresses of those who were considered for but not selected for a human rights non-profit board, as release of such information “would not reveal ‘what the government is up to.’”¹¹⁹

• The names of federal employees who received hurricane assistance payments, as release of this information would “not reveal anything about the conduct of the [agency] or any official,” and the agency had already disclosed the amounts given and the factual bases for the amounts.¹²⁰

• The names and addresses of people who submitted auto safety complaints to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, as the requester’s interest in contacting the complainants in its efforts to encourage auto safety was outweighed by the complainants’ privacy interest in avoiding junk mail, phone calls, “commercial exploitation,” or the potential release of information about injuries.¹²¹