Obama just said the following in China, according to TechCrunch and various other news outlets:

"I have never used Twitter but I'm an advocate of technology and not restricting internet access."

Some of the Twitterati are taking it hard. Just WHO have they been Following??

@netWire "Shocking, given that his account with 2.6 million followers has even been "verified" by Twitter headquarters' !!!

@BuzzEdition "WHOA...I thought Obama HAD used twitter...so sad now....."

@Amadeus3000 "I thought he used his account himself in early campaign days.."

@funuhu "Shocking! I am sad."

The rest of us can take solace in the fact that the most powerful man in the world knows he has far bigger issues on his plate than cranking out tweets. The only person who should be embarrassed is his ghostwriter, who is averaging less than two tweets per day. HOPE needs to spread faster than that!

Scientists had no clue a thirty-foot meteor was hurtling toward the Earth (see attached video) until it exploded with the force of 50,000 tons of TNT, in the atmosphere, according to the Telegraph. If it had been twice as large, the astronomers add, it could easily have killed a bunch of people — and still been nearly impossible to detect ahead of time.

Tim Spahr, director of the Minor Planet Center... said: "If you want to find the smallest objects you have to build more, larger telescopes. A survey that finds all of the 20-metre objects will cost probably multiple billions of dollars."

And guess who has to figure out how to pay for it: "The White House is to develop a policy on the space object impact threat by October next year. " Not like those people have anything else to do, other than build a space shield, with communism.

(Video via YouTube)

Well, it's probably not as swash-buckling as it sounds, but Facebook did take down the poll and a Secret Service spokesman confirmed the site's cooperation in finding the perp: "We worked with Facebook to take it down, and we are currently investigating the matter."

Facebook, meanwhile, insists it will do everything in its power to find the pollster, and the company's policy spokesman used the occasion to distance the all powerful site from any and all responsibility, because polls are organized by a third-party:

People contact us all the time if they see things that are inappropriate. And we investigate all those reports. We take action by taking it down, by issuing a warning or by reporting it to law enforcement. At the same time, we want Facebook to be open to discuss ideas. We don't pre-approve postings.

As for the poll's results, those aren't being released.

Update: A man named Vann came out as the poll's mastermind, but gave few details about himself other than that he's an Obama supporter who lives on the West Coast but once lived in Illinois.

The Obama administration just announced a new cloud-computing initiative. It claims it merely wants to streamline $75 billion in federal IT spending. So what's with the "mind mapping" component of the plan? And why so cozy with Google?

The "mind mapping" software is listed under "productivity apps" on the cloud computing initiative's website. Glenn Beck, call your office! To paint the president as a socialist big brother, a monster computer "cloud" that centralizes sensitive government information and is deeply interested in your brain is a boon.

Especially when it is tied, however loosely, to that all-seeing corporate eye in Mountain View, California, Google Inc. Google is the leading proponent of cloud computing, in which shrink-wrapped PC software (like, say, Outlook) is replaced with Web applications (like, say, GMail). In fact, NASA Ames CIO Chris Kemp, who is in charge of NASA's cloud computing program, has quoted Google's CEO as an inspiration for it. NASA Ames is where today's federal announcement is being made, so presumably Kemp's work is now spreading.

It seems likely Google will be on hand for the announcement: NASA has announced that "top Silicon Valley information technology leaders are scheduled to attend," and, besides, adjoining Moffett Federal Airfield is where top Googlers park their private jets, per arrangement with NASA. Google cronies at private zeppelin company Airship Ventures are also allowed use of the field. Kemp, in turn, has apparently used a Google jet for NASA "meteor hunting," and heralded the release of high-resolution NASA imagery for use on moon.google.com (see 9/17 entry here). He has also hosted "VIP guests," including from the Silicon Valley tech scene, at a space shuttle launch.

This must all seem, no doubt, perfectly innocent to Kemp, who is steeped in the startup world. The 31-year-old worked as chief architect at Classmates.com before being "pushed aside" as co-founder of vacation rental broker Escapia and detouring into the public sector. But amid the increasingly paranoid partisan rancor of Washington, DC, the Obama Administration's "mind mapping" cloud computing plans and ties to Google will inevitably be re-marketed on the distinctly irrational market that is national politics.

(Top image via, second pic via)

Yes it was. In the summer, the coastal elites hailed Twitter's brilliant simplicity for allowing the microblogging service to route around authoritarian sensors and transmit poignant messages that made otherwise apathetic Americans really care about Iranian activists, as evidenced by their willingness to turn digital avatars green.

But now they're starting to fret that Twitter and its social networking brethren, like Facebook, are not so much simple as simplistic; reductive media that distill a complex debate like universal health care down to its most emotional, televisable sideshows. Of course, we've seen this flip flop before: Hollywood celebrities fell in love with Twitter as a free marketing channel, then despised it as a haven for uncouth and often unchecked imitators; earnest liberals loved what social nets did for Barack Obama's presidential campaign, but hated the eternal platform they have given birthers.

Of course, this dysfunctional, love-hate relationship is basically endless. The brands might change from year to year, but the practice of ultra-concise and often crude networked communication is only going to become more common. The lessons for the future are, as always, in the past; it was the current president who showed there was an emotional and reductive way to package online the candidacy of a novice black politician with a Kenyan father and a liberal political platform. There's got to be a way for him to similarly distill the health care debate. He could start by asking Michael Moore for tips.

An unrepentant Yahoo won't say what, exactly, Johnson did wrong. His comments were about Barack Obama's support of a bill allowing the government to suppress torture photos. They were attached to seemingly relevant images from the president's recent trip to Cairo to ring in a new era of U.S.-Middle Eastern relations.

"I thought, this is an opportunity I can use to let the administration know how I feel about some of its policies," Johnson told us in a phone interview.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.The Virginia man's initial 10 or so comments, which went up Wednesday night, were deleted without explanation by Friday. That night, Johnson posted roughly ten more to different White House photos, this time linking in another Flickr user's Abu Ghraib picture, as allowed by Flickr's comment formatting (see Johnson's reproduction of his comment, left, taken from his post to freedom-of-information hub Cryptome).

In the midst of this second round of commenting, Johnson found his account was gone. There had been no warning of any sort from Yahoo, he said. Johnson would later work his way up Flickr's customer service tree, eventually leaving a message for the vice president of customer service and other bigwigs. He even left a message for Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz — a noted fan of frank discourse — on Bartz's home answering machine.

Johnson, who lives outside Richmond, still has no answers. More crucially, he also doesn't have access to any of the 1,200 pictures he uploaded to Flickr under his paid "Pro" membership. Many of the pics, he said, were "completely irretrievable — I didn't back them up on any disks, I just spur-of-the-moment loaded it up and deleted the flash" memory originals.

Asked about all this, Yahoo issued us a statement (see below) saying its policies prevented it from discussing Johnson's account and pointing us to Flickr's community guidelines.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.But if the company expects people to move their data to its servers, via sites like Flickr and Yahoo Mail, it's going to have to do better than that. Users won't feel safe moving their data into Yahoo's "cloud" if it can vanish without a trace with no warning.

Similarly, Flickr's user base of photographers is notoriously sensitive to any hint of censorship, so the company would be well-advised to come up with a coherent explanation for why the most powerful man in the world needs to be so ruthlessly protected against a slightly aggressive internet commenter. Where's Carol Bartz's straight talk when you need it?

[via Cryptome] [top image by vanson on Flickr]

Flickr statement:

In accordance with Flickr's policy, we cannot disclose information to third parties concerning a member's account. However, in joining Flickr, all of our members agree to abide by our Community Guidelines. These guidelines require that all of our members be respectful of the community and flag content that may not be suitable for "safe" viewing. Our members have always done a great job of identifying inappropriate and offensive content on Flickr and bringing it to our attention. We encourage all members to continue to make Flickr a safe place to share photos and videos.


Flickr is a very large community made up of many types of members from all over the world, and we respect the viewpoints and expressions of all of our members. In crafting the Community Guidelines, Flickr weighed the rights of the individual vs. the rights of the overall community, and built a system that would enable members to choose what they want to view. As with any community, online or off, there are members who may disregard the Community Guidelines. When this happens, Flickr may have to take action accordingly towards building a respectful community. For more information: http://www.flickr.com/guidelines.gne

Chopra serves as Virginia's Secretary of Technology, giving him oversight of the Virginia Information Technologies Agency. That agency, which oversees state government IT, was forced to scramble to figure out what happened earlier this month after hackers held ransom 8 million records in a patient database operated by the state's Department of Health Professions. The agency promised better security going forward.

As we've noted, the incident was something of a political blemish. Chopra didn't operate the servers, but he was in charge of the people who were supposed to; the IT agency's top-listed priority is "Governance of the Commonwealth's information security programs" — the very programs that failed during the security breach.

So it was worth asking if Chopra was the best Chief Technology Officer for the U.S., as under the Obama Administration's plans.

But that issue didn't come up in Chopra's testimony before the Senate Commerce Committee today. He got just one question, on using technology to improve health care, the Wall Street Journal reports, leaving Government Technology to conclude his confirmation "could come as soon as this week."

He was helped along by the committee member who "introduce[d] him," fellow Virginian Mark Warner. Warner gave Chopra a "glowing" recommendation, the Journal said. Highlights:

"Last year Government Technology magazine named him one of the 25 Doers, Dreamers and Drivers, and as someone who has spent a great deal of time with Aneesh — keeping up with all of his ideas — he's a bit of a whirlwind, and I know that he'll bring that same energy to this new position," Warner said.

Such praise! Of course, it's probably worth noting that Chopra has donated close to $2,500 to Warner over the past year and a half.

It's no scandal that America's first geek-in-chief knows how to navigate the political landscape. But it's at least worth noting, as no one in the press seems to have done today, the full scope of his relationship with his political shepherd. And we suspect some Virginias are thankful Chopra's job is to "promote technological innovation" rather than oversee American's information security.

Google has a plan to extend its dominance in search and online advertising into every part of the information economy. It's no secret — it's in the company's mission statement. But antitrust cops look askance at efforts to use market power in one field to move into another.

When Obama appeared at the Googleplex in November 2007, his candidacy was far from preordained. Gullible techies hailed his platform as "Google-friendly." Sure, Google will be helped by support for faster broadband connections. And cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin share a cleantech obsession with Obama.

Schmidt was so lackadaisical about courting Obama that he only endorsed him in the waning days of the campaign, threw an inaugural ball, and got rewarded with a token appointment to a science council. For those obviously halfhearted gestures, he didn't get what he wanted: a free pass on antitrust issues.

When it comes to enforcing competition laws, the White House sees Google as just another big, overweening corporation. Assistant Attorney General Christine Varney, appointed last month, mused about Google as the next big antitrust target last summer.

And sure enough, Google is facing two antitrust cases already: one about book search, and another about its board's overlap with Apple. They come after antitrust cops unexpectedly shot down a search deal with Yahoo last year.

The investigation into Apple's board, half of whom are either Google board members or Google advisors, really has to do with the mobile-phone industry. Google makes an operating system for mobile phones, but it's free, so it's hard to argue that, say, T-Mobile's G1 Googlephone competes with Apple's iPhone. But that's a red herring.

The real problem is the potential for collusion in mobile search. Google used to brag about how much search traffic the iPhone generated for it — 50 times more than any other handset, Google executives said last year. One hasn't heard Google trotting out those kinds of statistics lately. Why make it easy for government antitrust prosecutors to see the connection between Apple's iPhone sales and Google's mobile search traffic?

Google executives seem deluded about the company's antitrust risks. In a video interview with BusinessWeek, Dana Wagner, Google's top antitrust lawyer, refuses to use the word "antitrust" to describe what he does. He calls himself a "competition counsel."

Who's going to get Google out of this mess? Not its outside lawyers, Wilson Sonsini. They prepared an analysis of the kind of board conflict Google faces with Apple, which concluded that there was a high risk of collusion. When John Paczkowzki of AllThingsD called to ask questions about it, the document got yanked off of Wilson's website, and deleted from Google's cache curiously fast. Conveniently, Microsoft, which has hired the lobbying firm where Eric Schmidt's ex-girlfriend works to stir up antitrust trouble for Google, still has a copy in its search engine's cache.

No, not that kind of drug problem. But Chopra, before getting named White House CTO, served as Virginia's secretary of technology. He made his name automating Virginia's healthcare industry. One of the specific achievements he was lauded for was getting the state's scattered doctors' offices and clinics to file electronic prescriptions. Web 2.0 fanboys love him. Sounds great, right?

Sure, until we heard that hackers had broken into a Virginia state drug-prescriptions database and are demanding ransom for more than 8 million patient records. A state official said the FBI was investigating. Chopra, as the state's tech boss, may not have configured the server personally — but he should have made sure something like this never happened.

An FBI investigation: Where have we heard that before? Oh yes, at Kundra's previous job. Before becoming White House CIO, Kundra ran Washington, D.C.'s Office of the Chief Technology Officer, which has been mired in a bribery scandal. He was briefly suspended, even though he hadn't been named as a target of the investigation.

The natural conclusion to draw: Obama's techie hires talk a good game. But when it comes to actually keeping our nation's servers safe from attacks within and without, they've fallen down on the job. President Change deserves better than a bunch of smooth-talking PowerPoint jockeys. He needs hackers, not hacks.

Given the widespread belief that Obama invented the Internet, many will scoff at the idea that the Bush White House had a Twitter account. But it did — and the administration handed over twitter.com/thewhitehouse at noon on Inauguration Day, just like it did with the whitehouse.gov website. Google still has the old account, with Obama's tweets, in its cache.

Valleywag alum Paul Boutin suggests on Gadgetwise that this is a simple rationalization of accounts, matching the definite-article-free "whitehouse" username the Obama team uses on Flickr and YouTube. But Obama's Twitterers didn't just change the username on the account; they started fresh, wiping out all of the White House's existing Twitter followers, and the entire archive of messages.

Perhaps it's safe to assume that the dwindling fans of the Bush White House wouldn't want to transfer their allegiances. And many of the Bush tweets were just broken pointers to pages on 43's now-archived website. But there ought to be something about the White House that transcends its occupant. A new president doesn't move his residence from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. There's something about this move that smacks of change for change's sake.

Update: It's alive! The White House Twitter account, previously protected, is now tweeting. Nothing personally typed by Obama yet.

C-SPAN interviewed Kundra and friends camped in a tent outside the Supreme Court, as the justices prepared to usher George W. Bush into office. (Kundra is four minutes into the online clip.) Sounding a bit stoned, Kundra told C-SPAN that he as "very interested in the political landscape of the United States." And now he's CIO! The American dream lives.

Schmidt got a big scare when the Bush administration moved to block a deal to have Google sell search advertising for Yahoo, a move the companies made to fend off Microsoft. In the last weeks of the campaign, he loudly endorsed Barack Obama and signed up as an economic advisor. Schmidt and other Google executives shelled out for pricey tickets to Obama's inauguration, and Google threw its own inaugural ball. The White House even hired a Googler, Katie Stanton, to run its Web outreach efforts.

But another hire has caused consternation in the Googleplex. Christine Varney, the lawyer Obama nominated to run antitrust enforcement, said last year that "Microsoft is so last century" and the new, more compelling problem in antitrust was Google's "monopoly in Internet online advertising."

So much for Schmidt's cozying up to the administration.

Varney is a bright, respected lawyer, and may well prove a formidable opponent for the brainiacs of the Googleplex. But it doesn't take a brilliant mind to notice Google's outsized profit margins, which fund lush perks for employees and wasteful spending on pet projects sponsored by its quirky founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Analysts believe that just by taking a scalpel to that waste, Google will prove able to ride out the recession with ease.

But that ease is coming at someone else's expense: Namely, anyone who advertises on the Internet, where Google is an inescapable force, especially since its acquisition of banner-ad broker DoubleClick. The rates they pay are ultimately reflected in the prices they charge, which is where consumers feel the pain.

So it seems like a hubris-filled Schmidt is tempting the gods when he calls for other companies to be broken up into smaller, manageable pieces. When will his own turn come? The government was ready to sue over the Yahoo deal before a chastened Google hastily abandoned it. A Google antitrust suit seems like a matter not of if, but when. A notion Schmidt might entertain: spending less time opinionating on other people's businesses, and more with his lawyers.

Here's the rest of his BBC interview:

At Business Insider, Eric Krangel wisecracks:

Is there some backstory about how Vivek was dead broke and needed a dress shirt for a job interview? Because right now, we not only think Vivek is a petty thief, we think he's a petty thief with bad taste in clothes.

No wonder White House officials were so cagey about Kundra's crime, which they wrote off as a "youthful indiscretion". The Obama administration reinstated Kundra to his CIO job after placing him a five-day leave, which followed the arrest of Yusuf Acar, an IT manager who worked under Kundra in his previous job as chief technology offer for the D.C. city government, for an alleged $6 million bribery scheme.

That case continues to widen. D.C. officials have fired 23 contractors who worked for a firm owned by Sushil Bansal, a Virginia businessman also implicated in the scheme, as well as 5 city employees.

Kundra was not implicated in the bribery charges. But the misdeeds are said to have unfolded on his watch.

Here's the real scandal: Kundra, a former marketing executive, has no real tech chops. The credulous geek fanboy community has embraced him as one of his own, forgiven his scandals, and cheered his return to office. Why? He's nothing more than a Web 2.0 flimflam artist, best known for giving speeches about how the government should be more like Wikipedia and YouTube — the kind of happy talk that wins him kudos on Twitter, but has nothing to do with the hard work of making government IT systems work better.

The J.C. Penney thing? It's not a "youthful indiscretion." It's a signal note of Kundra's character — the foolish thought that something can be had for nothing. But in that, he shares a lot in common with the faddish Silicon Valley crowd which jubilated over his appointment.

How funny that a young man who helped elect Barack Obama and who's championed sharing, openness, and transparency would put himself out of circulation for a cover story in ... Fast Company, the forgotten bible of booms of yore. Was this really worth staying away from the rest of the press during his ex-boss's inauguration?

The best parts of the profile are the personal ones, where Hughes talks about how touched his parents were when Obama recognized his efforts, or where he describes how he came out as gay in boarding school. But as a business profile — the "Company" in Fast Company — it disappoints.

I'd been pursuing Hughes since January, when I noticed that Obama's former social-networking guru wasn't part of the new White House Internet team. A cryptic answer from a White House flack spurred my curiosity as to what he'd be up to next. And the Fast Company story doesn't really answer that question.

It's an odd time to cover Hughes's third act. The two powerful acts of creation he participated in — Facebook's founding and Obama's campaign — are still inchoate in their results. And Hughes himself doesn't really know what he wants to do next, which is why he's pursued stopgap (if well-paying) gigs in venture capital and PR. A cover story about someone whose career is pretty much pure potential? It makes a certain sense, if you think about how tarnished anyone with actual accomplishments is.

Kundra has returned to the White House. He'd been placed on a five-day leave after a bribery scandal unfolded in D.C.'s Office of the Chief Technology Officer, which Kundra ran before joining the federal government.

Valleywag reported this morning that Kundra had pleaded guilty to a theft charge. The irony: Kundra has been a champion of transparent government and open, Internet-accessible records. But in pleading guilty and agreeing to a legal maneuver probation before judgment, he attempted to avoid having a conviction on his record. The case nevertheless remained in Maryland state records, where anyone with a Web browser could find it.

The reinstatement apparently came after a call by Kundra's former employer and career patron, Governor Tim Kaine of Virginia, whom Kundra advised on technology before he became D.C.'s chief technology officer. The New York Times describes Kaine's intervention:

The governor called the White House and pleaded Mr. Kundra's case, according to the person familiar with the matter although a spokesman for Mr. Kaine said he was unaware of any contact. It is not clear who he spoke with. But the person familiar with the situation said that Mr. Kaine said that since Mr. Kundra was not under investigation, he should be reinstated. Otherwise, he said, Mr. Kundra's reputation would be ruined and the administration would miss out on having someone with valuable skills help with its important task of making the government more transparent.

The person familiar with the situation also said that Mr. Kundra had told him that he had disclosed the youthful arrest, made in 1996 when Mr. Kundra was 21, to the White House and to all of his previous employers.

Nick Shapiro, a White House spokesman, said tonight: "Twenty years ago, Vivek committed a youthful indiscretion. He performed community service and we are satisfied that he fully resolved the matter."

The Gray Lady then indecorously suggests — without even asking, say, the outlet who reported the incident — that the theft story was some kind of dirty political trick:

It was still not clear what the incident was or why someone leaked information about it while Mr. Kundra was on leave.

To be clear: A longtime tipster, with no political agenda known to us, pointed out Kundra's case. But it was not "leaked." Again, anyone with a Web browser could have found it. What we still don't know: Do Obama's vetters know how to use the Google? And have they reappointed Kundra out of embarrassment over their own ineptness?

Unlike the part-time PR gig he announced last week, this is a real full-time job. Except not quite. Venture capital firms hire entrepreneurs in the Silicon Valley equivalent of a Hollywood first-look deal; they pay EIRs a salary in exchange for the chance to invest in their next big thing.

So Hughes has a business card and a place to call home — but he's still figuring out what to do next. After cofounding Facebook and helping elect the most powerful man in the world, almost anything would seem like a comedown. Lucky for him, he's found someone willing to pay him while he figures it out.

Kundra is currently suspended from his White House job as Yusuf Acar, a manager in the D.C. office Kundra headed, faces bribery charges unrelated to Kundra's 12-year-old theft. When Kundra, an advocate of free Web-based software like Gmail, was first named to the CIO post, tech enthusiasts hailed his nomination as proof that Obama took their concerns seriously. They have fallen strangely silent as Kundra's reputation has grown tarnished. One of Kundra's few remaining defenders, TechPresident's Micah Sifry, noted Kundra's work in "theft and fraud prevention" as he wrote Sunday, "We believe people are innocent until they're proven guilty, right?"

Right. Here's some guilty for you!

Maryland state records show that a Vivek Kundra pleaded guilty to a theft of less than $300, for which he received supervised probation before judgment and a fine of $500, $400 of which was suspended.

The Hot Air blog wondered if this was the same Kundra nominated by Obama. Wonder no more: A search of public records reveals that the Gaithersburg, Md. address listed in the case record matches a previous address for Kundra himself and a business, Kundra Consulting. Press biographies report that Kundra, who was born in New Delhi, moved with his family to Gaithersburg, Maryland, when he was 11.

What is "probation before judgment"? The Maryland Lawyer Blog:

Lawyers routinely tell their clients who receive a PBJ that they can legally state that they have not been convicted of a crime.... while a PBJ is not generally considered to be a conviction, there are times when it will be treated as a conviction and penalties will be assessed just as if a defendant was convicted. This illustrates the need for all lawyers to review their client's situation beyond just the facts of the charge. Clients, like everyone else, have a life which can sometimes be impacted by a PBJ in much the same manner as if they received a conviction.

A life in which, for example, they are named as a top official overseeing the government's technology infastructure. Kundra's lawyer at the time of the 1997 arrest, Gary Segal, has not yet responded to a request for comment.

There are two equally disturbing possibilities here: Either the army of White House lawyers vetting candidates just didn't bother to check Kundra's criminal records. Or they agreed that Kundra's probation-before-judgment maneuver meant the crime he admitted committing in court was nothing to worry about.

It certainly casts a new light on the accusations against Acar, who bragged to a government witness about bilking $6 million from the D.C. tech budget.

Kundra's 1997 theft case:

TechPresident's Micah Sifry leaked Obama Web guru Katie Stanton's complaint about government bureaucracy.

Boing Boing adventuress continued her travels in Africa.

Jake Tapper, ABC's resident hunk of red hot newsmeat, gave an incomprehensible update about President Obama's quest for culinary knowledge.

VentureBeat blogger Eric Eldon exemplified the South By Southwest work ethic.

As did Air America radio hostess and frequent alcohol seeker Ana Marie Cox.

The investigation does not involve Kundra. The White House, in a statement, said Kundra's leave came from "an abundance of caution," after a series of embarrassments with Obama appointees.

Though Acar was a minor figure in the D.C. government's technology operations, he had authority over hardware and software budgets which, according to an FBI agent investigating the case, allowed him to conduct a wide-ranging bribery operation. The agent's affidavit has some grandiose quotes from Acar and his alleged accomplice, a D.C. tech executive named Sushil Bansal, which are worthy of deposed Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich. Maybe Acar will write a book, too? Here's the transcript of a phone conversation between Acar and a cooperating witness ("CW"):

ACAR: Nothing. Eric's deal, okay? I was clear about that. I said I want fifty. You should, you should get fifty. And then whatever left behind, you should, he should get it.

CW: Exactly.

ACAR: It's hundred thirty dollar PO, hundred twenty dollar PO, he should get twenty. That's more than enough. More than [expletive] enough. We are- The risk is not equal, I'm sorry. The risk is not
equal.

CW: Yusuf (UI) is not equal. I mean, you know what can happen if God, God forbid, you know, if today things, uh, things uh crash.

ACAR: Yeah.

CW: You don't even have a couple hundred dollars that you can, for your family, to survive.

ACAR: No, nothing. I mean, I will jump on the next plane, go to Turkey and disappear. That's fine.

CW: And you don't have nothing!

ACAR: Yeah. Exactly.

CW: (UI) you going to run away with what, a couple hundred? What are you going to run with?

ACAR: Yeah.

CW: I mean, Yusuf, I'm telling you we need to talk to this guy.

ACAR: Look, I mean, look.

CW: We need to talk to him.

ACAR: [CW], this is beginning, okay? This is just like uh a scratch on the surface. We have a six million dollars. Six million mother [expletive] dollars. You and I should make at least three of that.

CW: And, and, and then we have only four months to do this.

Later, Acar asked the witness, "Are we going to jail?"

The key question for Obama's White House isn't Acar's crimes, which the FBI seems to have documented quite completely. It's how such a wide-ranging bribery scandal unfolded in Kundra's own office without his awareness. No one is saying Kundra is anything but innocent. But how can he be expected to manage the government's vast technology budget if he let such large sums slip out the door at a much smaller agency?

The full complaint, via Washington City Paper:

Yusuf Acar Bribery Affidavit