Last week, the General Accounting Office (GAO) released a report culminating a contentious struggle to identify who helped craft the administration’s energy policy. While no startling revelations come from the document, GAO's report repeatedly rebukes the administration for withholding critical information.

The Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) August 2003 Budget and Economic Update shows a baseline projection of a $401 billion deficit for 2003, and a $480 billion deficit for 2004. The 10-year baseline projections show a $1.4 trillion deficit over the next ten years; however, as the report notes, the baseline is not intended to be a good predictor of actual budgetary outcomes. A better predictor of budget deficits under current policy would put the deficit for 2004 at $496 billion and the 10-year deficit at nearly $6 trillion. Download full report (.pdf)

After serving a 16-month sentence for exposing an email vulnerability to his company’s customers, Bret McDanel is appealing his conviction in an effort to clear his name and send a message that discussing flaws and vulnerabilities is acceptable. While working for Tornado Development, McDanel discovered the email flaw and reported it to the company. Six months after severing his employment with Tornado, McDanel discovered that the company had never fixed the vulnerability. McDanel then informed each email user of the Tornado system of the vulnerability in an email from “Secret Squirrel.”