Friday - October 30, 2009

Huh? Congress Ethics Inquiry Doc Leaked by "Peer-to-Peer" Software  @9:00 AM

Can anyone explain how this Congressional ethics inquiry document leaked? (The document, from July, summarizes internal investigations into members of Congress, most of which were previously known, some of which were closed.) "The report appears to have been inadvertently placed on a publicly accessible computer network," is how the Washington Post put it in their email blast last night, and then "it was provided to The Washington Post by a source not connected to the congressional investigations." (Which means someone was digging through this network looking for docs, and then sent it to the paper.) And in the paper, they write: "The committee's review of investigations became available on file-sharing networks because of a junior staff member's use of the software while working from home, Lofgren and Bonner said in a statement issued Thursday night. The staffer was fired, a congressional aide said." Like, was it in his iTunes and stuff? Did he put it in his Limewire shared mp3 folder? This is more obscuring than informative! 4