There wasn't as much IT news as there was post-war news coming out of our nation's capitol this past week--but it was close.

With both identity theft and spam heating up as constituency issues, the last thing the Administration needed was a set of "Fs" for Homeland Security's handling of some of the digital aspects of its work. But that's just what the president got, as the Democrat-affiliated Progressive Policy Institute gave a failing grade the new department's effort at merging terrorism watch-lists with ID systems at the nation's borders.

The low marks came out the same week the Department of Homeland Security issued a statement about a serious Windows security flaw. Although Microsoft posted a patch on its Web site, the Department of Homeland Security's advisory was intended to get the word out that the vulnerability is both extremely serious, and that there's the potential for attack.

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