ii. Public Interest

As with Exemption 6, in addition to any argument that there are no legitimate privacy concerns raised by the disclosure of the record at issue, you should also be prepared to argue that even if such an interest exists, it is outweighed by the public interest in disclosure. In doing so, you should demonstrate that the public interest in disclosure is significant — one “more specific than having the information for its own sake” — and that release of the information will “likely advance that interest.”⁹⁸

Most importantly, “[t]he only relevant public interest in the FOIA balancing analysis” is “the extent to which disclosure of the information sought would ‘she[d] light on an agency’s performance of its statutory duties’ or otherwise let citizens know ‘what their government is up to.’”⁹⁹ That is, you must make an argument as to why disclosure will help shed light on government activities and/or decision making. (For further discussion of this point, see the section in Exemption 6 titled “Asserting the Proper Public Interest”).

Like Exemption 6, the following factors — among others — may impact the public interest in the records (you can clink on the hyperlinks to view the corresponding page in Exemption 6):

• Where disclosure will inform an ongoing public policy discussion regarding the topic of the records, this will increase the public interest in release.¹⁰⁰

• If the information would confirm or refute allegations of government wrongdoing or negligence, this generally elevates the public interest, but you must “produce evidence that would warrant a belief by a reasonable person that the alleged Government impropriety might have occurred.”¹⁰¹

• Asserting “derivative uses” for the information — that is, that the public interest in them arises from the fact that they can be used to obtain additional information from elsewhere — might heighten the public interest in release.¹⁰²