 Welcome to Newsdesk on SiliconANGLE TV for Wednesday, May 8, 2013. I'm Kristen Folletti. The White House has named its first chief privacy officer, and they may be preparing an overhaul to surveillance laws. Join us now to explain more on what's happening in Washington is SiliconANGLE-contributing editor John Casaretto. Hi, John. Good morning. Thanks for joining us. President Obama has selected Twitter's legal director, Nicole Wong, to be the White House's first chief privacy officer. So John, to begin, what can you tell us about Wong's background and the nickname that she's earned as the decider? It's a cool nickname. That came about from a Times article, a New York Times article, about five years ago, and it featured her role as the vice president, as a vice president, deputy general counsel at Google. So it also went on to describe how it came about, because she managed a team of lawyers that was working with the company's engineers, they reviewed products before they launched, and it also included those reviews, included privacy issues, copyright or removal requests. So that's how that came about, all the decisions that go about in looking at those things. Most recently, she was a Twitter's legal director. So it's an interesting candidate for this position, that it will be coming up into this and a lot of questions are going to be asked and a lot will be answered. What will the focus of her new position be? Well, this new position will be as a senior advisor to the chief technology officer, and its focus will be on the internet and privacy policy. Now, how is Wong different from previous administration picks for department-level chief privacy officers? Yeah, well, definitely previous picks have been from department-level chief privacy officers, so very internal. The difference here is that she's very immersed in technology issues. She comes from Silicon Valley, functioning as a lawyer. So a lot of hands-on in the industry, real issues, not so much from the bureaucracy. So it's an interesting take and a lot of people are paying attention to what this could mean. In the year that Wong worked at Twitter, what sort of notable accomplishments has she made that may prepare her for her new position with the White House? Yeah, Twitter has been noted they've been praised for efforts to protect users in a number of cases where the reach of these requests for information, we're seeing this too broad, that includes police requests, and so on. So the Electronic Frontier Foundation has a survey of tech companies called Who's Has Your Back? And they were one of the companies that got six out of six stars, so they get some notable accolades from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Twitter's also part of a coalition that's been lobbying for a number of years to rewrite federal privacy laws in order to require search warrants for email messages and other data that's stored on remote servers. So it appears that in functioning within that, her background is very much towards the privacy side of things and that's a good thing. Also out of Washington, the Obama administration is on the verge of backing an FBI plan for an overhaul of surveillance laws that would make it easier to wiretap individuals who communicate using the Internet. FBI Director Robert Mueller has argued that with the evolution of technology, the Bureau's ability to carry out court-approved eavesdropping on suspects is going dark. John, can you explain what he means by this going dark and what mandate he's pushing for? Well, there's a number of things going on here. The Bureau, by the day, is having less abilities in terms of the ability to actually carry out eavesdropping and things like that. Technologies evolve quickly, so he's looking towards expanding those powers, being able to get some type of regulations in the pocket of the Bureau in order to execute some of these things. The FBI's original proposal has since been revised. Can you explain what the revised proposal could mean for startups? Right, so this revision, the plan, it focuses on finding companies that don't comply with the wiretap order, so it's slightly different. What happens is startups that have a smaller number of users, they wouldn't have to worry as much about the wiretapping issues until that point at which they become popular enough that the Justice Department has a reason to look at them and to make these requests, and then they would have to step into that realm where they would need to comply with the regulations that are emerging here. Several top lawmakers have expressed skepticism, raising fears about innovation and security. Can you elaborate on their fears, John? Yeah, so there's a debate brewing over the future of the Internet, and there's some that feel that this type of regulation may hurt innovation, particularly in high tech. They feel that innovations will be moving abroad, be developed there, where they don't have to deal with all these same rules, these same mandates. I'll give you an example of a scenario. Providers in the one scenario could be ordered to comply, and judges can then impose fines if they don't comply, and those fines start at about $25,000 a day, and that's what's being proposed. So there's a notice period, a 30-day technical consultation period with the government, just everything you would imagine that would be in a highly structured government relationship, a small company is real hard to deal with. So not only that, these rules are expanded to cover VoIP calls. These are usually hard to intercept because of their nature. On the security concerns, there's concerns that there's backdoors for hackers that could emerge from this. Despite the newly allowed message encryption in these revisions, encryption in the right hands is pretty fallible, so there's no guarantees there, and you unleash a mechanism like that. There's a lot of concerns there, so it's a long list, and there's a lot really to be determined. Gregory Nozheim of the Center for Democracy and Technology said this of the proposal, I think the FBI's proposal would render internet communications less secure and more vulnerable to hackers and identity thieves. It would also mean that innovators who want to avoid new and expensive mandates will take their innovations abroad and develop them there, where there aren't the same mandates. So John, what are your thoughts on his statement? Do you agree with his concerns? Well, we know that we see it. There's anecdotes about people leaving high tax states, high regulation states, and it's been going on for years, and I think that could easily extend to this notion of countries and leaving for somewhere else. I think that we may not even see some things come out at all. The nature of the internet and the way it's come about, it's been pretty free in a lot of regards. So I mean, I could see that. And I think that the security concerns are genuine. So there's definitely that potential for people that want to exploit for cyber criminals and people that are in the nation states that are behind some of these these larger events that happen. So, you know, it's it's a it's a genuine concern. And I think I agree with them on the whole. What's your opinion on the proposal overall? Would you support it or reject it? Well, I'm personally on the side of liberty. I'm a liberty guy. Again, the internet was created and got to where it is good and bad by being, you know, open. So, you know, it's clear that that some powers are required to intercept communications between criminals and criminal groups and things like that. But there's some grave privacy concerns here. And there's nothing mentioned in here about abuses of the system. And that's really a real big issue for me. You know, who monitors the monitors, you know, what is built in there? And I think that that's a big concern and one that, you know, hopefully comes to light pretty quickly if this thing moves along much further. Well, John, thank you so much for joining us this morning. We really appreciate your comments. Thank you. And coming up on Newsdesk, Google Maps gets a makeover and what Yahoo wants with Hulu. But first, founder and managing consultant of the 1610 group, Scott Low, checks in to report from the Interop Expo out of Las Vegas.