A shocking breach of personal information

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redre

Seems pretty cut and dried, doesn’t it?

Those words are about as holy as it gets to those of us in this profession. It’s the backbone of everything we do and without it, freedom as we know it in our country would cease to exist. That’s why our Founding Fathers, in all their wisdom, put that item first in the Bill of Rights.

Seems implausible, then, that the very “holy” passage mention in the First Amendment just had a horrible violation right here in Chico.

According to a story https:// www.sacbee.com/news/california/article253687118.html first published in the Sacramento Bee on Monday, and followed in this newspaper today, the personal information of some Chico State students who requested a religious exemption from a COVID vaccine — a vaccine required throughout the California State University system — was posted online on social media accounts after an apparent security breach earlier this summer.

The leaked Excel spreadsheet, authored by the Director of Labor Relations and Compliance Dylan Saake, contained requests for religious exemptions from 130 students, including names and phone numbers in some cases. It also included the reasons students gave for requesting a religious exemption.

There is so much here that’s a slap in the face to individual liberties we’re not sure where to start. Instead, we’ll start by restating our position on COVID vaccines — we’re in favor of them, and we think everybody should get them, unless they have a valid reason not to get them.

But that doesn’t mean people’s individual rights should be trampled along the way.

We were concerned from the get-go by one requirement of the CSU system regarding religious exemptions: That it had to be a “sincere” religious reason. The exact working is, a “sincerely held religious belief, practice, or observance.”

“Sincere” in the eyes of who? Who, ultimately, gets to sit and judge whether or not someone’s “religious” claim is valid or sincere? The U.S. Supreme Court has consistently ruled that “freedom of religion” is not limited to established or mainstream religions. But now, someone operating under the direction of a state university is going to decide what’s an “acceptable” religious reason and what isn’t?

And yet, the CSU system, no doubt after conferring with its legal team, took that avenue. It also said the information would be secure.

You can now throw that claim out the window.

The names, phone numbers and “reasons for religious exemptions” for several students ended up on social media because of a data breach. This not only is an incredible violation of students’ privacy rights, it exposes them to harassment on any number of fronts — including the highly personal reasons many gave for seeking an exemption.

One example, according to the Bee article, was this: “Students who said they were Mormon, Catholic and Serbian Orthodox were approved for an exemption. Many who stated the vaccine had fetal tissue and “abortion-derived cells” were denied.”

Remember, we not only have rejected (and accepted) applications floating around out there for people to copy, or avoid; we have names attached to some of them.

We completely understand the possibility of people trying to abuse the system by submitting fraudulent claims about beliefs they don’t actually have. It is a real concern and one that is not to be taken lightly; but, how far are we willing to exchange people’s civil liberties in the process of this still-developing (and always changing) pandemic mess?

Here we have people who actually made the leap of faith — passing along some highly personal information in the process — and somehow, that private information became public. It’s just one more reason a great number of people will give while continuing to fight these mandates with every ounce of passion they can muster.

How did this happen? Shouldn’t a state university have better cyber security than this?

Also concerning is the fact that Chico State still hasn’t come forward with any information about this to faculty, staff or most students, some of whom first heard about it while being interviewed by our reporter Tuesday.

Following a week in which their fall convocation was highlighted by the unveiling of a new logo and color scheme, that’s a bad look.

This episode is a mess, all the way around. Students (and staff) are now going to feel less secure than ever about giving out their personal information. People who are against vaccinations are going to point at it as a glaring example of what can happen when you “go along” with a government mandate issued under the guise of privacy and will dig in their heels more aggressively than ever before.

Also, none of this is going to help slow the spread of COVID. Quite the opposite.

We can’t put this genie back in the bottle. Chico State needs to find out exactly what happened and be as transparent as possible while attempting to reassure the community it will never happen again.