This week, news broke that President Obama has picked Nicole Wong, Twitter's legal director, to be the White House's first chief privacy officer: White House picks Twitter lawyer as Internet privacy officer.Wong is a respected Silicon Valley attorney with more than a decade of experience in copyright and privacy law, dealing with technology issues at both Twitter and Google. According to CNET, she will take on a new position as senior adviser to White House Chief Technology Officer Todd Park.
They call her "The Decider," and it looks like she's got her work cut out for her:
Wong already has a truckload of issues to sort through, and she hasn't even started yet. Last month, the administration threatened to veto the controversial Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, better known as CISPA, on privacy grounds. Reforms to the way government is allowed to access your emails for forensic purposes are also headed to a full Senate vote.Damn. Nicole Wong will basically be responsible for helping the White House make up the rules of the internet. More here: Meet Nicole Wong, Obama's New Internet Privacy Czar.
Wong earned her nickname during a touchy encounter with the government of Turkey. It was her responsibility to decide what to do with a set of YouTube clips that violated Turkey's ban on insulting Kemal Ataturk, the country's first president. Ankara wanted the videos taken down, Wong told Jeffrey Rosen in 2008. Wong chose to keep the videos up, but to block access to them from inside Turkey. In response, the government censored all Google products for the next two years.