144
Opinion of the Court
Respondents contend that § 409 protects only materials actually created by the agency responsible for seeking federal funding for § 152 purposes. Brief for Respondents 22-23, and n. 2. On their view, if the Public Works Department collects reports of all the accidents that have occurred at a given intersection to prepare its § 152 application, those reports would not be protected by § 409, and a person seeking them from the Public Works Department would be entitled to obtain them.
The United States, as intervenor, proposes a third interpretation: § 409 protects all reports, surveys, schedules, lists, or data actually compiled or collected for § 152 purposes, but does not protect information that was originally compiled or collected for purposes unrelated to § 152 and that is currently held by the agencies that compiled or collected it, even if the information was at some point "collected" by another agency for § 152 purposes. Brief for United States 28-36. Respondents concede that this is a defensible reading of the statute. Brief for Respondents 23-24, 25. Under this interpretation, an accident report collected only for law enforcement purposes and held by the county sheriff would not be protected under § 409 in the hands of the county sheriff, even though that same report would be protected in the hands of the Public Works Department, so long as the department first obtained the report for § 152 purposes. We agree with the Government's interpretation of the statute.
2
We have often recognized that statutes establishing evidentiary privileges must be construed narrowly because privileges impede the search for the truth. Baldrige v. Sha-officer who witnessed an accident would not be permitted to testify about that accident, if the officer summarized what he saw in a report that was later "collected" for § 152 purposes. But see Brief for Petitioner 45-46 (asserting that testimony derived from sources apart from the protected documents is permitted under § 409).
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