Thanks, Steve LeVine

The 100-page report, conducted for the U.S. Cyber-Consequences Unit, where Bumgarner is director of research, was distributed to U.S. officials and security experts. Bumgarner and I chatted by phone, and he emailed me the nine-page executive summary (thanks to Josh Foust for agreeing to post it at Registan.net. Incidentally, Foust has a good piece on the media war between Russia and Georgia at CJR).

Bumgarner says the report is the result of an examination of hundreds of public Internet forums, sharing of data with sources at home and abroad, and his own reporting on the attack from almost the instant it began. Others have reported that much of the findings were already known; but Bumgarner's findings appear to be the difference between barstool talk and authentic data. Nor is the report on the kid-stuff such as carried out last week against 45 million Twitter users along with Facebook users, apparently by a Georgian blogger calling himself Syxymu (the blogger's attempt to Latinize the name of the Abkhazian capital, Sukhumi.).

Its chief takeaway is that the Russian cyberattack -- which disabled 54 Georgian websites in banking, communications and media with the apparent aim of reducing Georgia's capability of responding to the Russian offensive -- was prepared well in advance. Bumgarner writes:

The answer is that it hasn't done so, not at least according to the rules of the Securities and Exchange Commission, which governs such matters. When you examine Exxon's annual filings for 1999-2008, the company has had a quite-normal -- for oil companies, that is -- four years of exceeding 100% replacement, and five years not. For instance, for 2008 the company issued a statement saying that it possessed 22.8 billion barrels of proven reserves; yet its 10-K filing with the SEC reported just 21.1 billion barrels in proven reserves (to get there, see page 7 of the 10-K, and tally up the developed and undeveloped reserves in the consolidated and equity categories).

So I gave Exxon a call. How do you get from 21.1 billion barrels to 22.8 billion barrels? I asked.

Add in the oil sands, was the reply.

O&G: Nabucco supporters argue that the pipeline is necessary because Russia uses or will use its dominance of the natural gas supply in Europe for political leverage. Is the argument valid?

Morningstar: That gets into why Russia does what it does. Does Russia play commercial hardball to get the best deal it can, or as a political weapon? I think that Russia does want to maximize its commercial benefit. The result is that sometimes it has political implications. The benefit of Nabucco is that it does provide diversity of gas supply to Europe. It does develop the Caucasus and Central Asia. Though Nabucco won’t cure Europe’s energy security, it will provide a natural gas source, especially for countries that were cut off during the disputes between Russia and Ukraine.

Yet none of that meant that Exxon had drunk the Kool-Aid on the Caspian. It was the only member of Big Oil present in Baku to refuse Clinton administration entreaties to help build the geopolitically minded Baku-Ceyhan pipeline.

It's a similar story with Exxon's announcement yesterday that it's investing up to $600 million in an algae-to-fuel venture with genetic biologist J. Craig Venter. I wrote about this for Business Week on-line today. Exxon waited until Shell, Chevron and others dipped their toes into algae, then dove in with Venter, the most famous private genomics scientist in the world.

The papers are filled with photos and news on the signing ceremony in Ankara for the Nabucco pipeline, which is meant to reduce Europe's reliance on Russia and its natural gas. The Financial Times yesterday went the furthest, running a photograph of the ceremony across four columns on the top of page one. The FT leads with a half-answer to the question of where the gas will come to fill the politically minded line -- the news that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki says he'll provide half the gas needed by the line, or 15 billion cubic meters a year, by 2015. Where and how he'll get that gas isn't made clear.

Nabucco, backed by the European Union and Washington, is vying against a proposed Russian natural gas pipeline called South Stream. Europe relies on Russia for some 25% of its natural gas, and there is concern that Moscow has or will use this market dominance as political leverage against members of the European Union. South Stream, it is said, will cement that hold on Europe even further, while Nabucco would add gas diversity. Russia says it's all nonsense, and that it is a reliable supplier.

But, as John Vinocur of The New York Times writes hilariously on his blog, the real news comes from Germany, where it's the Showdown at the O.K. Corral for all-German gunslingers arrayed on either side of the pipeline debate.

A jury in Manhattan rendered a split verdict yesterday in the trial of the handbag king Rick Bourke on charges arising from an investment scheme in Azerbaijan with the notorious “Pirate of Prague,” Viktor Kozeny. He was convicted of violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) and making false statements to investigators about the matter. He was acquitted on money laundering.

I followed this matter from close up. As a lawyer, I was asked to come in and direct an investigation of Kozeny’s scheme for a client, and in the course uncovered a large-scale fraud that Kozeny had worked on people who bought Azerbaijani privatization securities from his Minaret investment bank. I was involved in a series of suits against Kozeny on behalf of some of his victims and secured attachments of some of his property. I had no involvement in the matters that were the subject of the Bourke case, but I know and have met many of the witnesses who testified in the case.

The deal to bribe then-Azerbaijan President Heydar Aliyev went bad, mainly because Socar was never truly for sale; it was a scam. As for guilt, Bourke and a slew of other leading Wall Street investors certainly could be convicted of greed and stupidity – it was obvious to anyone with even passing knowledge of Azerbaijan that Aliyev would never sell even a sliver of Socar, his cash cow.

Blogger Christopher Fountain is having fun at Bourke’s expense, but the lawyers over at Cassin Law, who write the FCPA blog, say Bourke was a victim, not a culprit.

But does this reasoning hold? Will Moscow see things Washington's way on the Caspian, on Georgia, and on the balance of petro-power in Europe?

More important at the moment, could Moscow decouple from Iran, with which it has maintained an alliance of poking-fingers-in-the-U.S.-chest? Now that the chances for a game-changing U.S. opening with Iran have been all-but eliminated by the after-election crackdown in Tehran, is there anything to be done before Israel, for instance, decides it can no longer wait for Iran to become a nuclear state?

I've surveyed some old Russia and foreign policy hands from the George W. Bush and Clinton administrations, and the answer comes back that, at least on Iran, Moscow either can't or won't be able to help restrain Tehran. As for petro-power and the Caspian -- Moscow is capitalizing on the global financial crisis to re-assert power in its struggling neighborhood, and will push back on any attempt to deny it regional domination.

So how should Shell and Total -- both of them the recipients of Putin's renewed niceness -- respond? Are Putin's past revocations of deals, expulsions from fields at knock-down rates, and ho-hum attitude toward shakedowns reason not to do business with him now that Russia is trouble?

Specifically, Shell is being offered an unspecified role in the highly complex, offshore Sakhalin 3 and Sakhalin 4 natural gas projects (BP walked away from the latter last month after drilling dry holes). Total signed a smallish, $900 million deal to work with Russia's independent Novatek on the Termokarstovoye natural gas field, and Putin says it's "entirely possible" that the French company will be permitted to work on future stages of the supergiant Shtokman natural gas field.

The second victim is the already long-shot chance of a U.S.-Iran rapprochement.

Short of a remotely possible, far-reaching concession by supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, there is now no near- or medium-term chance of a new day in Middle East and European politics and economics -- both of which seemed possible before the current bloody crackdown.

At O&G, it had specifically seemed possible to foresee a change in the balance of petro-power in Europe. If Russian dominance of Europe's energy picture is to be tempered, there needs to be a fresh, new supply of natural gas from somewhere. Iran seemed to be the best candidate. But for the last couple of years, Ahmadinejad's voluble belligerence has ruled out a lowering of the temperature with the U.S.: Diplomatic traction requires domestic political consent in both countries, and that's not possible when one or both sides is provoking jingoism.

That's from a decision issued by federal Judge William Pauley in New York. The ruling was handed down June 5th, but I haven't seen it published anywhere. At the time of Giffen's 2003 arrest, it was the biggest U.S. foreign bribery case since the law was enacted in 1977.

And it did. Terry Frank, for instance, calls it a “global warming scam created for the sheer purpose of generating profit and cash for the political class and their allies.”

Yet, compared with past bouts of debate, the “hoax” side of blog debate has appeared surprisingly subdued since yesterday’s release of the 196-page report, which was posted online. Over at Bloomberg, Eric Pooley seemed to see a defining moment: “So you still think global warming is bunk? An eco-Nazi plot to jack up your taxes and control the energy supply? Get over it, my friend. Move on.”

Pooley’s point? Congress, backed by the Obama administration, appears set on cap and trade, a system in which emitters would effectively pay for the right to pollute greenhouse gases. A House bill could be up for a vote as early as next week. In the Senate, the bill may be taken up in August, faster than some predicted.

It still seems unlikely that legislation will be advanced enough to be signed by President Barack Obama before December, when nations meet in Copenhagen to try to hammer out a successor agreement to the Kyoto Protocol on global warming.

Over at Business Week’s Green Business blog, my colleague Mark Scott writes that not just a U.S. trading system, but a global carbon market, is closer than many think.

Do you think that’s right? Is cap and trade already effectively with us?

If Ahmadinejad wins re-election, the likelihood for game-changing U.S.-Iranian diplomacy -- including a break in the Moscow-Tehran diplomatic alliance that frustrates pipeline and other economic advances in the region -- will be dampened. That's because Ahmadinejad isn't likely to tone down his often-belligerent rhetoric sufficiently to allow normal diplomacy to take place.

Hence the import of the latest reporting out of Tehran. As The Washington Post's Thomas Erdbrink reported today, Gen. Yadollah Javani, head of the political office of the Revolutionary Guards, said, "Any movement for a velvet revolution in Iran will be nipped in the bud."