Competitive Enterprise Institute v. NASA

The district court for the District of Columbia granted in part and denied in part NASA’s motion for summary judgment. The court directed NASA to produce responsive documents from a certain directory on the Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS) computer system, including computer programs and data files that would require a computer program or commercial visualization tool in order to be intelligible. The court also ruled that a GISS scientist’s emails relating to the blog RealClimate, to which he contributed, constituted agency records to the extent that they “traveled” on the NASA email domain and related to agency business, regardless of whether the scientist used his RealClimate or NASA email account. The court otherwise found that the NASA/GISS search for responsive records had been adequate, determining, among other things, that the scientist’s emails located only on an “@columbia.edu” domain were not in the agency’s control and therefore not susceptible to a FOIA request.