Nicole Wong, former top lawyer for Google and Twitter, is the new deputy US CTO
qz.com
qz.com
It is clearly targeted at the tech community. This is in hen originally announced on June 20th very similar articles appeared in CNET, All Things Digital, SF Chronicle and the Register. After SOPA they are paying special attention.
By itself this appointment does nothing but give the impression of reform for a news cycle or two. The basic strategy is lie and delay the delay and lie until the public moves on to something else.
If they really want to have a debate about the balance between security and privacy lets have it. The first step is to state your position by revealing exactly what you are doing today instead of continued lies, stalling and doubletalk.
- Hacker News 2013
For non UK people MS Finny was involved in a dodgy cover up of mum and baby deaths in the NHS.
FFS I would make a better C level exec for nominet I have worked for a registry before.
Some context the article overlooks. Number of CIOs in the federal government: over 250. Number of agencies keeping private or sensitive data on citizens: well over 200. Procedure to change policy on privacy or anonymity: byzantine at best, impossible for most mortals. Who is actually in charge of privacy policy: that's a good one. I'd go with Congress instead of some executive-branch person, but you'd probably need participation of both in each agency to make a difference.
Wong is probably a great person, and I congratulate her willingness to sacrifice her time for the public good, but the problems we face are not due to the lack of some special position or magic person coming into office. At best, this is a fluff piece on Wong, which is fine. At worst, it's propaganda. It eliminates important context and supports a narrative that's terribly unrealistic. Farcical even.
So here's someone who is appointed to a non-classified position in the government and paid with taxpayer dollars, and the government isn't even going to tell us what she'll be doing? As a taxpayer, I find that to be disturbing and insulting. Let's have some of that much-touted transparency here.