Were US Privacy Laws Partly To Blame For The Virginia Tech Tragedy?
Ask university officials in the US why their hands are so often tied when they see a student beginning to spiral into disruptive madness and some will cite federal laws that prohibit discrimination against the mentally ill. Others will mention procedural obstacles that can make it hard to expel a youngster over anything short of a serious crime. But nearly all will circle around at some point to the extraordinary set of laws we have enacted in the name of privacy, prohibiting the sharing of personal information about individuals. One of these laws FERPA, otherwise known as the Buckley Amendment is unique to students and universities. But perhaps equally far-reaching in its implications is HIPAA, the four-year-old health-privacy law, which covers the medical records not just of students but of Americans generally. Under HIPAA, it would have been unlawful for the psychiatric hospital that treated student Cho Seung-Hui, who shot 32 people at Virginia Tech university this week, to compare
