Providing a strange backdrop to the Twittered excitement over U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra's speech at FOSE this morning was the breaking news that the FBI had raided Kundra's former offices at the DC CTO headquarters. What's the deal? The details are shaking out, but it seems that the Chief Security Officer under Kundra, Yusuf Acar, was the target of a federal bribery investigation. A second man, Sushil Bansal, was also arrested. Bansal, it seems, is a former DC employee who is now CEO of the DC-based Advanced Integrated Technologies Corporation, an "end-to-end Technology and Business Process Outsourcing Services company." AITC has received $350,000 in DC government contracts, and the AITC site lists the District's CTO office as the client for projects modernizing the city's "information systems in health, social services, education, courts, and related agencies" and its IT security systems. In fact, four of the five case studies on the AITC site have to do with worked preformed for the DC city government.

The arrests and raid are no doubt a headache for Kundra, the Obama White House, and administration vetters (who are no doubt buying Advil by the kilo at this point.) But it's worth noting that the newly-appointed CIO hasn't been implicated in the case.

Something else jumps out of the Washington Post's reporting on this affair. The DC office of CTO has 298 employees and a budget of $69 million? At first glance, that seems to be a healthily-sized office for a city of about half a million people.

UPDATE: Video of Kundra's FOSE talk is now up online.