ComputerForensicsDigest.com

Here's a great way to ruin the average public school administrator's day: have a team of federal computer forensics experts descend upon a district's IT department to search for electronic evidence.

Earlier this week, a U.S. District Court grand jury in Virginia issued a subpoena and search warrant authorizing federal agents to examine various NNPS computers for emails between Phil Hamilton, a part-time NNPS employee, and Old Dominion University. In addition to working as a leadership training coordinator for NNPS, Hamilton also recently landed a $40,000/year job as a consultant to ODU's teacher training center.

As a general rule, the fact that someone takes a second job to make ends meet (particularly in this economy) is not going to attract the attention of a federal grand jury. But Hamilton is not the your average semi-retired public educator. He is much more widely known, in fact, as a leading member of the Virginia House of Delegates, in which he has represented Newport News for the past 21 years.

More signficantly -- and this DID catch the grand jury's attention -- Hamilton is the ranking Republican on the House Appropriations Committee, and two years ago, sponsored the very legislation that created the Center for Teacher Quality and Educational Leadership at the ODU Peninsula Higher Education Center. Both ODU and Hamilton have denied that there was any connection between the $500,000 appropriation by the Legislature that helped fund the program and his subsequent hiring, but news of Hamilton's position has roiled Virginia politics and sparked an ethics investigation by the House leadership.

Hamilton alleges that the story is little more than a political tactic launched by his Democratic opponent, attorney Robin Abbott. With a difficult re-election campaign looming in his increasingly Democratic district, however, Hamilton resigned the ODU position and issued an apology for any appearance of impropriety.

Computer forensics will play a prominent role in how this matter unfolds. At issue is whether forensics experts can uncover any emails between Hamilton and ODU officials during the time the legislation was under consideration, and whether those emails indicate any quid pro quo for Hamilton's work on the Appropriations Committee.

So far, ODU has released numerous emails that were written by Hamilton from his NNPS account, but school officials have said that they cannot find the originals on their computers. It will be up to the federal forensics experts to see what traces may still linger.