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Aleynikov, 39, told the agent around 1 a.m. on July 4 that he had logged into Goldman’s computers through remote access from his home and sent encrypted files to a repository server with the URL identifier svn.xp-dev.com, according to a copy of his FBI statement in court files in Manhattan federal court.

Xp-dev.com is registered to London resident Roopinder Singh, who describes himself on a blog linked to the site as a trading systems developer working in London’s financial services industry. The site offers “subversion hosting,” letting users track current and previous versions of programming code and other documents.

Singh told his customers in the blog yesterday that he’d been contacted by “local UK authorities,” who had seized his hard drives to examine them and shut his service down for 45 hours, beginning on July 6, two days after Aleynikov’s arrest.

“It turns out that some idiotic moron a user had uploaded data on to the service that he/she was not authorized to have,” he said, crossing out the words “some idiotic moron.” “This is your basic intellectual property theft case here.”

Singh didn’t immediately respond to phone calls and e- mails. FBI spokesman Jim Margolin and Rebekah Carmichael, a spokeswoman for Acting U.S. Attorney Lev Dassin, declined to comment.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Facciponti said at Aleynikov’s arraignment July 4 that the alleged theft is the “most substantial” that the bank can recall.

‘Worth Millions’

“The proprietary code, worth millions of dollars, lets the firm do “sophisticated, high-speed and high-volume trades on various stock and commodities markets,” prosecutors said in court papers. Facciponti said a person misusing the code might be able to “manipulate markets.”

On his personal blog, Singh wrote that he provides his service free and that any code stored there is kept safe and encrypted before being backed up every night “off-site.”

Aleynikov, who holds dual U.S. and Russian citizenship, told the agent the files he sent to Singh’s server “have been not shared with any person or corporation” and that it “was not my intent be involved in any malicious action.”

Facciponti said at the arraignment that Aleynikov transferred the code to a computer server in Germany and that others may have had access to it, a claim that Aleynikov denied in his statement to the Federal Bureau of Investigation agent, Michael McSwain. The prosecutor said the U.S. was investigating whether other code was sent to the server.

Internet records indicate Singh’s Web site is located in Bavaria.

Other Instances

Aleynikov told McSwain he used the server on other instances.

“I have uploaded files to svn.xp-dev.com on multiple occasions over the last couple months,” Aleynikov said in the FBI statement. The phrase, “over the last couple months” is crossed out.

It was unclear if he used the server to store Goldman software or other code.

“The files that are proprietary information of Goldman Sachs has not been shared with any individual or corporation,” Aleynikov repeated near the conclusion of the three-page statement.

In the statement, Aleynikov laid out what had happened from the downloading of the files to their transfer to the server and his retrieval of them from it. He said that on June 5 he “created a tarball in an effort to collect open source work on Goldman Sachs server to which I had an account.”

Tarball

A tar file, which is sometimes called a tarball, is a compressed file.

“I had previously worked on the files,” he said.

He said he encrypted the files, then erased the encryption software and the tarball.

“I then erased the bash history,” he said, referring to a method of recalling commands used in previous computer sessions.

Goldman security measures prevent such deletions, which tipped the firm off to his activities, prosecutors said.

Aleynikov said in his statement that he downloaded the Goldman software to his home computer, his laptop computer and his thumb drive.

“The reason I uploaded to svn.xp-dev.com was because it was not blocked by Goldman Sachs security policy,” Aleynikov wrote. The phrase, “not blocked by Goldman Sachs security policy,” was crossed out and he added: “I wanted to inspect the work later in a more usable environment.”

More Than Intended

Aleynikov said that he later opened the files to inspect them.

“At that point I realized that I downloaded more files than I intended,” he said.

Aleynikov, who lives in New Jersey, was arrested on July 3 after arriving at Liberty International Airport in Newark. He was charged with stealing the trading software and is free on a $750,000 bond.

Teza Technologies LLC, a Chicago-based firm co-founded by a former Citadel Investment Group LLC trader, said after his arrest that it had suspended Aleynikov, who started there on July 2. Aleynikov had told co-workers at Goldman that he was joining a new firm at triple his salary of $400,000 a year.

Michael DuVally, a spokesman for New York-based Goldman, declined to comment.

Aleynikov said Teza wasn’t involved. “I have signed an agreement with my new employer not to bring any unlicensed software,” he said. “I have not violated that agreement.”

Studied Math

Aleynikov studied applied mathematics at the Moscow Institute of Transportation Engineering before transferring to Rutgers University, where he received a bachelor’s degree in computer science in 1993 and a master’s of science degree, specializing in medical image processing and neural networks, in 1996, according to his profile on the social-networking site LinkedIn.

Before joining Goldman Sachs, he worked for about eight years at IDT Corp., the U.S. vendor of prepaid calling cards, where he led the team responsible for developing routing systems, according to the profile.

His profile on LinkedIn describes him as a vice president in equity strategy at Goldman Sachs and includes two recommendations from colleagues at the firm.

”We may end up averting a crisis. That’s our hope,” said President Barack Obama, who took time away from the G-8 summit in Italy to telephone another summit back home — the 500 state and local health officials meeting to prepare for swine flu’s fall threat.

”We want to make sure we aren’t promoting panic, but we are promoting vigilance and preparation,” Obama said.

Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of Health and Human Services, told the swine flu summit some H1N1 vaccine should be ready by mid-October.

”Scientists and public health experts forecast that the impact of H1N1 may well worsen in the fall, when the regular flu season hits or even earlier, when schools start to open, which is only five or six weeks away,” she said.

Florida already is planning for such vaccinations, said Dr. Ana M. Viamonte Ros, Florida surgeon general, as she emerged from the summit.

As part of a revision to defamation legislation, the Dail (Irish Parliament) passed legislation creating a new crime of blasphemy. This attack on free speech, debated for several months in Europe, has gone largely unnoticed in the American press.

The text of the legislation is provided at the end of this post.

How does this impact free speech? Just don’t be rude.

* Atheists can be prosecuted for saying that God is imaginary. That causes outrage.
* Pagans can be prosecuted for saying they left Christianity because God is violent and bloodthirsty, promotes genocide, and permits slavery.
* Christians can be prosecuted for saying that Allah is a moon god, or for drawing a picture of Mohammed, or for saying that Islam is a violent religion which breeds terrorists.
* Jews can be prosecuted for saying Jesus isn’t the Messiah.

Is it really THAT big a deal?

Ireland’s Blasphemy Bill not only criminalizes free speech, it also gives the police the authority to confiscate anything deemed “blasphemous”. They may enter and search any premises, with force if needed, upon “reasonable suspicion” that such materials are present.

* The local Freethinkers society, with its copies of Hitchens’ God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.
* The video store, with copies of The God Who Wasn’t There.
* The history teacher, who uses The Dark Side of Christian History to teach her class.
* The library, with its collection of books deemed blasphemous.
* Even the homeowner who lets the wrong person know he has a copy of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses could find his door broken in by the Thought Police, his bookshelves ransacked, and his books burning in the front yard!

Satirizing religion in any way, shape, or form, if it “causes outrage”, is now a prosecutable offense in Ireland. Saying anything negative about a religion, if it “causes outrage”, can now be prosecuted as a crime. Just like in Muslim countries.

Witness the return of the Dark Ages.

The text of the legislation:

36. Publication or utterance of blasphemous matter.

(1) A person who publishes or utters blasphemous matter shall be guilty of an offence and shall be liable upon conviction on indictment to a fine not exceeding €100,000. [Amended to €25,000]

(2) For the purposes of this section, a person publishes or utters blasphemous matter if (a) he or she publishes or utters matter that is grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion, thereby causing outrage among a substantial number of the adherents of that religion, and (b) he or she intends, by the publication or utterance of the matter concerned, to cause such outrage.

(3) It shall be a defence to proceedings for an offence under this section for the defendant to prove that a reasonable person would find genuine literary, artistic, political, scientific, or academic value in the matter to which the offence relates.

37. Seizure of copies of blasphemous statements.

(1) Where a person is convicted of an offence under section 36, the court may issue a warrant (a) authorising any member of the Garda Siochana to enter (if necessary by the use of reasonable force) at all reasonable times any premises (including a dwelling) at which he or she has reasonable grounds for believing that copies of the statement to which the offence related are to be found, and to search those premises and seize and remove all copies of the statement found therein, (b) directing the seizure and removal by any member of the Garda Siochana of all copies of the statement to which the offence related that are in the possession of any person, © specifying the manner in which copies so seized and removed shall be detained and stored by the Garda Siochana.

(2) A member of the Garda Siochana may (a) enter and search any premises, (b) seize, remove and detain any copy of a statement to which an offence under section 36 relates found therein or in the possession of any person, in accordance with a warrant under subsection (1).

From the violent border cities where drugs are brought into the United States to the remote highland regions where poppies and marijuana are harvested, residents and human rights groups describe an increasingly brutal war in which the government, led by the army, is using harsh measures to battle the cartels that continue to terrorize much of the country.

In Puerto Las Ollas, a mountain village of 50 people in the southern state of Guerrero, residents recounted how soldiers seeking information last month stuck needles under the fingernails of a disabled 37-year-old farmer, jabbed a knife into the back of his 13-year-old nephew, fired on a pastor, and stole food, milk, clothing and medication.

In Tijuana, across the border from San Diego, two dozen policemen who were arrested on drug charges in March alleged that, to extract confessions, soldiers beat them, held plastic bags over their heads until some lost consciousness, strapped their feet to a ceiling while dunking their heads in water and applied electric shocks, according to court documents, letters and interviews with their relatives and defense lawyers.

The officers were detained at a military base for more than a month.

Mexican officials acknowledged that abuses have occurred in the fight against traffickers but described the cases as isolated. In some instances, drug traffickers may be accusing the army of torture and other human rights violations as propaganda and to deflect attention from the government’s efforts to dismantle their operations, the officials said.

“I know that the armed forces are not acting inappropriately, although there have been some cases,” said Interior Minister Fernando Gómez Mont, who is responsible for coordinating security operations across Mexico. “The government honestly believes that. There is no incentive for abuse.”

The payments secured secrecy over out-of-court settlements in three cases that threatened to expose evidence of Murdoch journalists using private investigators who illegally hacked into the mobile phone messages of numerous public ­figures to gain unlawful access to confidential personal data, including tax records, social security files, bank statements and itemised phone bills. Cabinet ministers, MPs, actors and sports stars were all targets of the private investigators.

Today, the Guardian reveals details of the suppressed evidence, which may open the door to hundreds more legal actions by victims of News Group, the Murdoch company that publishes the News of the World and the Sun, as well as provoking police inquiries into reporters who were involved and the senior executives responsible for them. The evidence also poses difficult questions for:

* Conservative leader David Cameron’s director of communications, Andy Coulson, who was deputy editor and then editor of the News of the World when, the suppressed evidence shows, journalists for whom he was responsible were engaging in hundreds of apparently illegal acts.

* Murdoch executives who, albeit in good faith, misled a parliamentary select committee, the Press Complaints Commission and the public.

* The Metropolitan police, which did not alert all those whose phones were targeted, and the Crown Prosecution Service, which did not pursue all possible charges against News Group personnel.

* The Press Complaints Commission, which claimed to have conducted an investigation, but failed to uncover any evidence of illegal activity.

The suppressed legal cases are linked to the jailing in January 2007 of a News of the World reporter, Clive Goodman, for hacking into the mobile phones of three royal staff, an offence under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act. At the time, News International said it knew of no other journalist who was involved in hacking phones and that Goodman had acted without their knowledge.