Late last week the L.A. Times reported that the California Highway Patrol had cleared the failed Angelides campaign of wrong-doing in accessing some derogatory sound bites from one of our governator's websites. 

You can access the original article here.

Seems that Angelides aides found a way to troll the website and find some files that didn't have public links. Not a crime, just not very good website security.  

But I'm not writing this to regurgitate political news.  

I'm writing to draw attention to the fact that we now have the California Highway Patrol investigating software security and political issues. They seem to have received this mandate as a result of being somehow responsible for investigating California property issues; and this has somehow been extended to cover intellectual property.

This might make sense if you consider that unlike many states, we Californians do not have a so-called 'state police'. There is a big black void between local law enforcement and federal investigators.  The CHP are the closest thing we have to a statewide police agency.

I'm not saying this is wrong, just saying that this event exposed some little known workings and otherwise invisible chains of authority in our state government.