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For six months, Ken Abbott managed BP’s engineering documents for “Atlantis,” BP’s deep water platform nearly 200 miles south of New Orleans. He turned into a BP whistle-blower in February 2009 after finding what he says were thousands of Atlantis engineering documents and drawings that were neither complete nor reviewed properly by BP. That, Sawyer now says, was a serious safety violation.

Abbott and his lawyer quickly hired Mike Sawyer, a safety engineer consultant, who examined the BP documents in question. Sawyer tells CNN that oil rig “engineering drawings and specification are the primary means that workers use to ensure that they can operate the platform safely, and can ensure that they can shut it down or at least control any unsafe event.” Atlantis’ engineering documents and drawings, says Sawyer, were so incomplete that he fears another environmental disaster from BP.

Abbott shared his information with Arizona Rep. Raul Grijalva, who found it so disturbing that he and 18 other lawmakers sent a letter to the Department of the Interior and the Minerals Management Service (MMS), the agency that regulates the oil industry.

“…This platform [Atlantis],” they wrote, “may be operating without crucial engineering documents, which, if absent, would increase the risk of a catastrophic accident…”

BP told us in a statement it conducted its own investigation after Abbott filed a false claims lawsuit in 2009. The government declined to join that lawsuit. A few weeks ago, a judge ordered the case to go forward.

BP still insists though “Atlantis … absolutely is safe…”

But, that’s not enough any more. The consumer advocacy group Food and Water Watch posted this Web ad after joining forces with Abbott. Together, they’ve filed a lawsuit against MMS for failing to provide proof Atlantis is “absolutely safe.”

Food and Water Watch’s Wenohah Hauter says, “BP Atlantis should be shut down until the safety information can be verified … [and] there should be an investigation of all the operating platforms, beginning with BP’s, to be sure that their safety information is available and is in order.”

But the Obama administration – and MMS – have no plans to order Atlantis to halt operations. MMS now says it has “launched its own investigation into safety operations on the Atlantis…”

The Ohio Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that an officer’s visual estimation of speed is enough to support a conviction if the officer is trained, certified by a training academy, and experienced in watching for speeders. The court’s 5-1 decision says independent verification of a driver’s speed is not necessary.

Greer was arrested by Florida Department of Law Enforcement agents this morning at his Oviedo home about 9:15 a.m. and booked into the Seminole County jail about 45 minutes later.

At a lunchtime press conference in Orlando, Statewide Prosecutor William Shepherd said Greer developed a scheme to take money from the Republican Party through a shell company he created, Victory Strategies. He used the money for his personal expenses — at least $100,000, Shepherd said.

A statewide grand jury indicted Greer on six felony charges: organized scheme to defraud, money laundering, and four counts of grand theft.

Greer was forced to resign in January amid allegations of extravagant overspending.

Since then, he’s become the subject of a criminal investigation for income he earned from Victory Strategies LLC, a fund-raising company that kept 10 percent of all major donations it raised for the party. Greer owned a 60-percent stake of the company.

Shepherd also said Greer sent e-mails directing additional party funds to Victory Strategies, “per the chairman.” He did not specify how much.

Greer was backed for the chairmanship job in 2006 by then-Gov. elect Charlie Crist, and an Orlando Sentinel analysis of party spending found Greer dramatically increased spending and the use of American Express charge cards during his three-year tenure.

The high spending, frequent national travel, and Greer’s decision to endorse Crist in his U.S. Senate primary against Marco Rubio ultimately prompted party leaders to seek his ouster.

But it was only after Greer announced his resignation that details of a secret fundraising contract came to light.

The contract for Victory Strategies to take over major donor fundraising was withheld from top GOP finance officials. It led Attorney General Bill McCollum and legislative leaders to dismiss former party executive director Delmar Johnson and hand over documentation of the contract and payments to Greer to state investigators in March.

The Pentagon’s far-out research arm has been zeroing in on the danger of mutating pathogens, and the corresponding problem of drug resistance, for years now. The agency is already funding tobacco-based vaccine production, a seven-day plan to thwart biothreats, and prescient viral infection detectors. And they’ve even set their sights on psychic medics, with a 2007 program that sought to turn docs into all-knowing illness predictors.

Now, Darpa wants the powers of premonition to wipe out viral threats altogether. They’re hosting a workshop for a new program, called “Prophecy,” that’ll develop methods to predict the rate, location and likely mutations of viral agents.

First, the agency wants novel lab-based methods to reproduce “virus-host interactions,” in different environments. After that, researchers will sequence different viral genomes, and test how they adapt and change under diverse conditions.

Ideally, that’ll yield a host of algorithms, capable of accurately predicting “the rate, direction and phenotype of viral mutations.” From there, scientists will be able to develop appropriate attack strategies in the right geographic locations. Most notably, Darpa wants to see mere mortals outdo the forces of nature, by creating “high energy evolutionary boundaries” that keep genetic mutations at bay.

The activist siphoned more than a million documents as they traveled across the internet through Tor, also known as “The Onion Router,” a sophisticated privacy tool that lets users navigate and send documents through the internet anonymously.

The siphoned documents, supposedly stolen by Chinese hackers or spies who were using the Tor network to transmit the data, were the basis for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s assertion in 2006 that his organization had already “received over one million documents from 13 countries” before his site was launched, according to the article in The New Yorker.

Only a small portion of those intercepted documents were ever posted on WikiLeaks, but the new report is the first indication that some of the data and documents on WikiLeaks did not come from sources who intended for the documents to be seen or posted. It also explains an enduring mystery of WikiLeaks’ launch: how the organization was able to amass a collection of secret documents before its website was open for business.

Tor is a sophisticated privacy tool endorsed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other civil liberties groups as a method for whistleblowers and human rights workers to communicate with journalists, among other uses. In its search for government and corporate secrets traveling through the Tor network, it’s conceivable that WikiLeaks may have also vacuumed up sensitive information from human rights workers who did not want their data seen by outsiders.

The interception may have legal implications, depending on what country the activist was based in. In the United States, the surreptitious interception of electronic communication is generally a violation of federal law, but the statute includes a broad exception for service providers who monitor their own networks for legitimate maintenance or security reasons. “The statutory language is broad enough that it might cover this and provide a defense,” says former U.S. federal prosecutor Mark Rasch.

The New Yorker article did not indicate whether WikiLeaks continues to intercept data from the Tor network. Assange did not immediately return a call for comment from Threat Level.

WikiLeaks uses a modified version of the Tor network for its own operations, moving document submissions through it to keep them private. WikiLeaks computers also reportedly feed “hundreds of thousands of fake submissions through these tunnels, obscuring the real documents,” according to The New Yorker.

The intercepted data was gathered from Tor sometime before or around December 2006, when Assange and fellow activists needed a substantial number of documents in their repository in order to be taken seriously as a viable tool for whistleblowers and others.

The solution came from one of the activists associated with the organization who owned and operated a server that was being used in the Tor anonymizing network. Tor works by using servers donated by volunteers around the world to bounce traffic around, en route to its destination. Traffic is encrypted through most of that route, and routed over a random path each time a person uses it.

Under Tor’s architecture, administrators at the entry point can identify the user’s IP address, but can’t read the content of the user’s correspondence or know its final destination. Each node in the network thereafter only knows the node from which it received the traffic, and it peels off a layer of encryption to reveal the next node to which it must forward the connection.

By necessity, however, the last node through which traffic passes has to decrypt the communication before delivering it to its final destination. Someone operating that exit node can therefore read the traffic passing through this server.

According to The New Yorker, “millions of secret transmissions passed through” the node the WikiLeaks activist operated — believed to be an exit node. The data included sensitive information of foreign governments.

The activist believed the data was being siphoned from computers around the world by hackers who appeared to be in China and who were using the Tor network to transmit the stolen data. The activist began recording the data as it passed through his node, and this became the basis for the trove of data WikiLeaks said it had “received.”

The first document WikiLeaks posted at its launch was a “secret decision” signed by Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, a Somali rebel leader for the Islamic Courts Union. The document, which called for hiring hit men to execute government officials, had been siphoned from the Tor network.

Assange and the others were uncertain of its authenticity, but they thought that readers, using Wikipedia-like features of the site, would help analyze it. They published the decision with a lengthy commentary, which asked, “Is it a bold manifesto by a flamboyant Islamic militant with links to Bin Laden? Or is it a clever smear by US intelligence, designed to discredit the Union, fracture Somali alliances and manipulate China?”

The document’s authenticity was never determined, and news about Wikileaks quickly superseded the leak itself.

Since then, the site has published numerous sensitive documents related to the U.S. military, foreign governments and corporations. WikiLeaks made headlines in April when it published a classified U.S. Army video showing a 2007 attack by Apache helicopters in an Iraqi neighborhood. The raid killed at least 18 people — including two Reuters employees — and injured two children.

WikiLeaks, whose website is hosted primarily through a Swedish Internet service provider called PRQ.se, never reveals the sources of its documents, and in the case of the Apache video, Assange has said only that it came from someone who was angry about the military’s frequent use of the term “collateral damage.”

The New Yorker doesn’t identify the WikiLeaks activist who was the source for the documents siphoned from Tor, but the description of how the documents were obtained is similar to how a Swedish computer security consultant named Dan Egerstad intercepted government data from five Tor exit nodes he set up in 2007 — months after WikiLeaks launched — in Sweden, Asia, the United States and elsewhere.

Egerstad told Threat Level in August 2007 that he was able to read thousands of private e-mail messages sent by foreign embassies and human rights groups around the world by turning portions of the Tor internet-anonymity service into his own private listening post. The intercepted data included user names and passwords for e-mail accounts of government workers, as well as correspondence belonging to the Indian ambassador to China, various politicians in Hong Kong, workers in the Dalai Lama’s liaison office and several human rights groups in Hong Kong.

Egerstad, who says he has no association with WikiLeaks and was not the source for the intercepted Tor documents the site received, told Threat Level at the time that he believed hackers were using the Tor network to transmit data stolen from government computers and that he was able to view the data as it passed through his node unencrypted.

Egerstad was never able to determine the identity of the hackers behind the data he intercepted, but it’s believed that he may have stumbled across the so-called Ghost Net network — an electronic spy network that had infiltrated the computers of government offices, NGOs and activist groups in more than 100 countries since at least the spring of 2007.

The Ghost Net network was exposed by other researchers last year who discovered that hackers — believed by some to be based in China — were surreptitiously stealing documents and eavesdropping on electronic correspondence on more than 1,200 computers at embassies, foreign ministries, news media outlets and nongovernmental organizations based primarily in South and Southeast Asia.

While Congress and President Barack Obama have been bashing big American banks as the cause of the nation’s economic troubles, foreign banks have been quietly increasing their presence in Washington with unprecedented lobbying and campaign spending.

The foreign companies have found a lucrative niche, essentially acting as brokers for the federal government’s bailout money. Domestic banks with the size and expertise for that role are largely banned from competing for the contracts because they have been recipients of the emergency funds.

“There is tremendous opportunity for the foreign banks, and it makes an enormous amount of sense for them to build up their lobbying power in Washington,” said Dick Bove, a financial strategist at the research firm Rochdale Securities.

“The foreign banks have come to Washington to take advantage of the shift in financial business that’s occurring in this country because of the anti-financial sentiment of the American government,” Bove said. “There is an opportunity here. They got the money. They got the freedom to operate. And we need the money, and we’re constricting the ability of our banks to function.”

Put simply, he said, “everything is right for them to come in and pick the bones of American banks.”

Like U.S. banks, the lobbyists are also engaged in monitoring and influencing the Wall Street reform legislation working its way through Congress, which has huge ramifications for the industry. The Institute of International Bankers, a foreign bank trade group, spent $810,000 lobbying last year, almost twice its 2008 total.

“Everybody has upped their game. We’re not alone,” a lobbyist for a foreign bank said. “We always have to watch for anti-foreign sentiment. The issues are meaty. The discussion is, shall we say, lively.”

And so is the spending.

Deutsche Bank spent more than it ever has on lobbying last year with close to $1 million flowing out of its one-man, in-house lobbying shop. And the seven-year old operation is on track to top that spending this year, having spent close to $750,000 in the first quarter alone.

The money has bought the services of Washington veterans Peter Madigan, a former Treasury official under President Ronald Reagan, and Jeffrey Peck, a former Senate aide to Vice President Joe Biden.

But the spending of the Frankfurt-based bank so far this year is only about half JPMorgan Chase’s 2010 lobbying bill. The U.S. bank’s $1.5 million tab makes it the top-spending American commercial bank, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a government watchdog group that tracks political spending.

Still, Deutsche’s comparatively modest advocacy budget appears to be paying off.

The German bank was selected in an open-bidding process to auction the stock options of 11 banks on behalf of the Treasury Department. After the banks repaid their bailout money, Treasury needed to sell the stock options it had been given in exchange for its investments. When Treasury and the banks couldn’t come to terms on a price, Treasury hired Deutsche to auction them off to investors, netting the government at least $3.2 billion.

…

Holder said during a trip to New Orleans that the government was reviewing whether BP and federal regulators had violated federal laws in the lead-up to the explosion of a BP-leased rig in April, which triggered the massive, ongoing oil spill.

“We will make certain that those responsible clean up the mess they have made and restore or replace the natural resources lost or injured in this tragedy,” Holder said in his remarks. “And we will prosecute to the full extent any violations of the law.”

Holder delivered his remarks following a meeting in Louisiana with prosecutors from Gulf Coast regions, which have been affected by the aftermath of the ecological disaster.