In the case of Federal Bureau of Investigation et al. v. Abramson, 1981, the Supreme Court ruled that documents originally exempt from disclosure under Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) do not lose their exemption status when they are incorporated into non-exempt agency records. The plaintiff, Abramson, requested access to certain FBI records related to him which were held by the White House and had been obtained through illegal surveillance activities during Nixon's presidency. The FBI refused on grounds that these were "investigatory records compiled for law enforcement purposes". While a lower court sided with Abramson stating that once information was used in non-exempt files it lost its original exemption status; this decision was reversed by the Supreme Court in a 5-4 vote asserting that Congress intended exemptions to apply regardless of subsequent use or location within an agency’s record system.

In the dissenting opinion for the FBI v. Abramson case, Justice Brennan argued that Congress intended to protect individuals from government misuse of personal information when it enacted the Privacy Act. He contended that this protection should extend to derivative files - records created by an agency based on information obtained from another source. In his view, if a record is exempted at its source but then used in a new file, it should not retain its exemption status because doing so would undermine individual privacy rights and contradict congressional intent. Furthermore, he expressed concern about agencies circumventing privacy protections by simply recompiling exempted records into new files. Thus, he disagreed with the majority's interpretation of "maintain" as only applying to physical possession rather than including use or control over records.