Mike Isaac

Recent Posts by Mike Isaac

White House Taps Twitter Legal Vet for Tech Advisor Post

(Correction: With more details on Wong’s correct position below, who will be working as “senior advisor” to United States CTO Todd Park and not as Chief Privacy Officer.)

Nicole Wong, Twitter’s legal director of products and longtime veteran of Internet litigation issues, has been picked by the Obama administration to be the nation’s top privacy officer assisting U.S. Chief Technology Officer Todd Park, according to sources familiar with the matter.

The exact details of her new position are unclear, but it’s likely that she’ll be working closely with Park, who assumed office after replacing Aneesh Chopra, the nation’s first CTO (a position also created by the Obama administration).

Wong’s appointment, first reported by CNET, is a new position in the White House.

Wong joined Twitter approximately five months ago to head up its legal team, which has long dealt with First Amendment issues for the microblogging service. Previous to her time at Twitter, Wong spearheaded decisions at Google on whether certain user-generated content would remain up on YouTube and other Google-owned applications. She also dealt much in litigation with China and its government’s decisions to censor Google search content in 2010.

Sources said Twitter has not yet picked a replacement for Wong.

Neither Twitter nor the White House immediately responded to requests for comment.

Full correction: A previous version of this post stated Wong’s new position was as Chief Privacy Officer. As was amended this morning, sources said Wong will act as “senior advisor” to Park. We will update what that role means when we get more information.

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I think the NSA has a job to do and we need the NSA. But as (physicist) Robert Oppenheimer said, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and argue about what to do about it only after you’ve had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”

— Phil Zimmerman, PGP inventor and Silent Circle co-founder, in an interview with Om Malik