Virginia Tech officials claim that federal privacy statutes prevent them from releasing the medical records of the campus shooter, Seung-Hui Cho, to the Governor’s panel investigating the murder of 32 students.
The Open Records Project has argued since its inception that federal privacy statutes and the Supreme Court rulings that preceeded them are not only not constitutional but create great harm by keeping wrongdoing from prying public eyes.
The Cho case would seem to an intesting example of balancing rights of individuals. On the one hand, did Mr. Cho have the right to be dangerously insane in anonymity?
On the other hand, did the 32 students and faculty who died have the right to know that their personal safetly and ultimately their lives were in danger from a crazy person?
The arguments for privacy appear to mostly about preventing individual hurt feelings, embarrassment, and shame.
The arguments for disclosure of information, whether it be about sex offenders, insane individuals, or those infected with AIDS, mostly relate to personal safety and in the case of Virginia Tech, life itself.
One of the attendees at the Virginia Tech student safety seminar following the murders argued that training students to survive a future attack was wrong because those who survived would only feel guilty about those who did not.
Distilled to its essence, feelings are more important than living. This would seem to be the case for some of the privacy statutes.
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