From Silverman v. Ariz. Health Care Cost Containment Sys., decided Thursday by the Arizona Court of Appeals (in an opinion by Chief Judge Kent E. Cattani, joined by Judge Cynthia J. Bailey and Vice Chief Judge David B. Gass):
This public records case presents a narrow issue of potentially broad import. Arizona law does not require a public entity to create any new record in response to a public records request. But does using encryption to redact non-disclosable information stored in an electronic database necessarily constitute creation of a new record? We hold that it does not.
This concept is particularly important in a case like this one, in which the public entity uses non-disclosable data as a critical part of its database structure (as the relational keys linking different tables). Thus, requiring the agency to use a one-way cryptographic hash function to redact the non-disclosable data—substituting a unique hashed value that masks protected information without destroying its function in the database—is necessary to ensure a requestor receives, to the extent possible, a copy of the real record.
And because such encryption only hides a limited aspect of the record—without adding to, aggregating, analyzing, or changing any of the underlying information—it does not create anything new and does not result in the creation of a new record. Accordingly, and for reasons that follow, we reverse the superior court's dismissal of the journalists' public records lawsuit at issue here and remand for further proceedings consistent with this opinion….
