The findings issued by the Virginia Governor’s commission yesterday are both fascinating and deeply frightening.

While the panel investigating the April shootings at Virginia Tech found a lot of room for improvements around the edges, the fact is that Virginia Tech had in place a top-tier campus security system, a highly trained and accredited campus police force and excellent working relationships with the local and state police. Emergency officials responded rapidly and effectively when the shootings began.

And while campus officials have been criticised for not ordering a lockdown immediately after the early morning murders in a dormitory, the panel concluded that a lockdown would have been highly impractical.

Put bluntly, there seems to have been little else the police, campus officials or anyone could have done once the events of that awful day were set in motion. No matter what kind of security upgrades are eventually made — more cameras, additional door lucks, siren systems that can alert the entire campus to trouble — large, open campuses will remain vulnerable to these sorts of attacks.

That’s why so much attention has been placed on identifying troubled students and intervening effectively before it ever gets to the point of violence. Cho gave ample warning that something was badly wrong in his life. Through his behavior, his writings and in comments to fellow students, there was enough cause for campus administrators to identify a potential threat and act on it. But serious confusion about the extent of their legal rights and obligations kept various arms of the campus — faculty, the police and student health agencies — from sharing all of the information they had.

The hope of the Virginia panel, and of campus lawyers nationwide, is that administrators will begin to err less on the side of withholding information and more on the side of sharing it. There’s already a lot of wiggle room within HIPPA and FERPA, the federal laws that govern medical record privacy and student record privacy, respectively. At this point, it’s mostly a matter of getting campus officials to understand that they have that room for interpretation.

One of the changes recommended is that privacy laws be re-written to include a specific “safe harbor” provision that would protect campus officials from legal liability if they acted with a good faith belief that disclosure was in the student’s best interest. That debate is likely to play out at the federal level in the coming weeks and months. As the panel noted, “it is an ideal time to establish best practices for intervening in the life of troubled students.”

The whole report is written in a surprisingly readable format, and anyone who has been following the Tech incident closely should take the time to look it over. More to come on this later.

- Eric