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.”

Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) recently released statistics showing the government’s failure to act on a growing backlog of whistleblower cases. The Office of Special Counsel (OSC) is the small federal office charged with reviewing whistleblower claims backlog of cases.

Jesselyn Radack, a lawyer who worked in the Justice Department’s Professional Responsibility Advisory Office, is without a job and at the center of a debate over legal ethics in a high profile terrorist case. Radack provided legal advice to the FBI on the possible interrogation of John Walker Lindh, the American who was captured in Afghanistan after joining with the Taliban.

OMB Watch and others sign on to letter to White House urging the President to veto the Intelligence Authorization Act because it, for the first time in American history, creates an "official secrets" act. October 30, 2000 John Podesta Chief of Staff The White House Washington, D.C. 20500 Dear Mr. Podesta: We are writing to encourage the President to take the strongest possible action to prevent -- or at the very minimum delay - the implementation of Section 303 of H.R. 4392 "Prohibition on Unauthorized Disclosure of Classified Information." As you know,