An "independent" investigation into the Lower Merion School District laptop scandal has concluded that there's no evidence that students were being spied on. This is despite the existence of 58,000 photos surreptitiously taken of students on or around their computers and e-mails between district IT people commenting on the entertainment value of the photos. The 72-page report (PDF) from law firm Ballard Spahr claims, however, that most of the photos were not seen by anyone and that the district merely failed to implement proper record-keeping procedures.

The report starts out by recounting facts about the district's policies when issuing laptops to students, offering details about the machines themselves and the acceptable use guidelines that each student is required to sign. However, the firm notes right away that the district did not adopt official policies when it came to the use of the district's TheftTrack software—instead, the IT department came up with its own policies "that varied over time and were not followed consistently," and record-keeping was informal.

As we learned earlier in the case, the IT department was known to activate the webcams on student laptops if they were thought to be stolen or lost, or in some cases, when the student failed to pay the required $55 insurance fee in a timely manner. According to the report, there were "a number of instances" in which the tracking was left active for extended periods of time after a laptop was found or recovered. As of February 23 of 2010 (the date the server was shut down and the investigation started), there were 30,564 webcam photos and 27,428 screenshots stored by the IT department.

Ballard Spahr admits that there is no way to determine how often the images were viewed, but says it found no evidence that the IT staff had viewed any of the images. Additionally, it says there was no evidence that district administrators knew how TheftTrack worked or even understood that large numbers of images were being collected in the first place.

This, of course, is the problem: because there was very little record-keeping going on and no official policies, there are few ways to know who knew what and when. However, claiming that there's no evidence whatsoever that IT staff saw the images seems disingenuous, considering the fact that e-mail records were dug up last month that showed at least two IT administrators chatting about the photos. One staffer that has since been put on leave, Carol Cafiero, described the pictures as "a little [Lower Merion School District] soap opera," while another staffer responded, "I know. I love it!"

This is on top of the fact that the whole brouhaha was kicked off because a 15-year-old student was disciplined by the assistant principal of his school for "improper behavior" at home. The administrator cited a photograph taken from his laptop's webcam, so it certainly seems as if staffers were aware of the software's capabilities and were using them to carry out what they considered to be everyday business.

One detail of note is that Ballard Spahr was hired by the Lower Merion School District itself to carry out the investigation, casting doubts on the true "independent" nature of the report. Still, the firm's findings place responsibility predominantly on the IT staff, so it doesn't let everyone off scot-free. Higher-level district administrators should be also held responsible to some degree, if only for failing to follow up with IT to ensure that the district's activities were legal.