Grant Gross
Senior Writer

FBI raids former office of Obama CIO appointee

news
Mar 12, 20092 mins

The raid resulted in two arrests, though unnamed sources say Vivek Kundra himself is not a target of the investigation

The FBI has raided the office of the Washington, D.C., CTO and arrested two men there, the FBI said.

The CTO’s job was until recently held by Vivek Kundra, appointed last week by U.S. President Barack Obama to be CIO for the U.S. government. A White House spokesman didn’t immediately respond to an e-mail asking for comment on the raid. A number of news reports have cited unnamed sources saying that Kundra is not a target of the FBI investigation that prompted the raid.

[ Related: Meet the nation’s first CIO | Here are 10 IT agenda items for Kundra | Check out Kundra’s 2008 InfoWorld CTO 25 profile. ]

Arrested in connection with the raid were Yusuf Acar, reportedly an information security and contracting officer in the CTO’s office, and Sushil Bansal, CEO of Advanced Integrated Technologies, a Washington-based tech services and outsourcing firm.

The CTO’s office has used Advanced Integrated Technologies for several projects, including an IT security support contract announced in May 2008 and the installation of more than 20,000 McAfee software packages, announced in August 2008, according to information on the company’s Web site.

Those contracts were awarded when Kundra was CTO.

The raid is part of an ongoing investigation, an FBI spokeswoman said. Early press reports said the two men were arrested on bribery charges, but the FBI spokeswoman said the charges are under seal and not yet public.

The Association of Indians in America’s Washington chapter selected Bansal for its Entrepreneur of the Year Award last August.

A spokeswoman for Washington Mayor Adrian Fenty wasn’t immediately available for comment.

Grant Gross

Grant Gross, a senior writer at CIO, is a long-time IT journalist who has focused on AI, enterprise technology, and tech policy. He previously served as Washington, D.C., correspondent and later senior editor at IDG News Service. Earlier in his career, he was managing editor at Linux.com and news editor at tech careers site Techies.com. As a tech policy expert, he has appeared on C-SPAN and the giant NTN24 Spanish-language cable news network. In the distant past, he worked as a reporter and editor at newspapers in Minnesota and the Dakotas. A finalist for Best Range of Work by a Single Author for both the Eddie Awards and the Neal Awards, Grant was recently recognized with an ASBPE Regional Silver award for his article “Agentic AI: Decisive, operational AI arrives in business.”

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