There's a long history of nearly every major freedom supporter or civil rights supporter being investigated and wrongly imprisoned and even killed across the world. And that's just the famous ones we've heard of. There are an order of magnitude more who were done with well before they became historically famous and no one even knows about them.
This bumper sticker quote doesn't really track in the real world.
So are you meaning to say that California is afraid these Stanford researchers are going to imprison people, wrongly or otherwise? Come on. This isn't the police, these are academic researchers.
The "shallow platitudes" cut through the BS. The government is trying to gag researchers because they want to hide their own failure. The narrative that the government is afraid of PII being revealed during a trial is straight horse shit. The courts themselves will decide what is or isn't appropriate information for a witness to share on the stand.
Furthermore, am I to believe these researchers are trusted not to share student PII when doing their normal academic research, but at soon as they become witnesses against the state that trust is no longer warranted? Bullshit. If protecting PII were the motivation they would not allow researchers to access that PII and publish their findings. What they're actually doing is preventing those researchers from testifying against the state. They're not protecting students, they're protecting the state's interests.
Shallow platitudes are themselves BS - populist soundbites that can be weaponized both for things you like and things you don't. There are better conversations happening elsewhere in this very comments section that don't have to lean on them as a crutch.
The world is too messy for naive morality and honesty. People are too easily swayed by anecdotes or irrelevant facts.
In your "moral" world of brutal honesty: the children of serial killers would never find work, people who were caught cheating on a test in kindergarten would never be allowed in positions of power, and people with non-mainstream interests would be sidelined in favor of those that people more closely identify with.
Is it right to hide things from people who would use that information incorrectly and to society's detriment? I think so, and that's why I believe people should have a right to privacy.
I don't think you'd feel the same if you were the defendant in a lawsuit, even if you had a rock solid case.
You might be completely vindicated, but bankrupted.
Or, perhaps your lawyer is a dud, and fumbled the ball.
Or perhaps the jury were idiots.
Or perhaps the law has some unknown (to you) technicality that you end up hanging for.
Or perhaps during the investigation you honestly misremember something or misspeak and the police / investigators become convinced you're guilty and spend all their time and resources trying to pin it on you. Or maybe they're just lazy, and you end up being an easy target. Don't worry, if you plead guilty you'll avoid a lengthy court battle that you can ill afford, and potential prison time if found guilty (are you that confident in your lawyer, your finances, the jury, and the legal system?). If you plead no-contest, you avoid jail, weeks or months of time off work defending yourself, and just do probation. But wait, I thought you had the Truth on your side?
