In 2016, the Supreme Court, in Gilleran v. Bloomfield Tp., for the first time addressed OPRA’s exemption for security information which, if disclosed, would jeopardize security of a building or create a risk to a person’s safety. The Court held that the exemption applies to footage from a building’s surveillance camera. Since this Supreme Court opinion, there has been almost no case law dealing with this security exemption, except for a single, unpublished 2018 Appellate Division opinion that determined the exemption covers computer security information.

The Appellate Division recently issued another unpublished opinion concerning the security exemption. Zezza v. Evesham Tp. Bd. of Ed. Although this opinion is not precedential, and breaks no new legal ground, it’s still worth noting, in view of the lack of case law in this area of OPRA.

The court held that the Board incorrectly denied an OPRA request for 35 seconds of footage from surveillance cameras on the grounds of a school, because it had made no showing that release of the video would compromise security. The Board did not submit any certifications describing security concerns, and in addition, the trial judge concluded that disclosing such a small amount of video footage would not expose any “surveillance weaknesses.”

The Appellate Division correctly determined that under these circumstances, there’s no basis to apply the security exemption. It noted that in Gilleran, the Supreme Court expressly said that to rely on this exemption, “the governmental entity must establish that the security tool (here, the camera) produces information that, if disclosed, would create a risk to the security of the building or the persons therein because of the revealing nature of the product of that tool.”