Now, this is a little change we can believe in! (H/T to Marcy Wheeler for bringing this to our attention.)
FTC hires new CTO with deep links to Snowden documents
By Dan Verton
FedScoop
Wednesday, October 22, 2014 · 4:11 pm
The Federal Trade Commission has hired privacy and technology expert Ashkan Soltani to serve as the commission’s chief technology officer. But security experts and former senior U.S. intelligence officials are questioning the FTC’s decision, given Soltani’s very public role as a consultant for The Washington Post, where he co-authored multiple articles based on classified documents stolen from the National Security Agency by former contractor Edward Snowden.
The FTC said in a press release that Soltani will join FTC in November and will replace Latanya Sweeney, who is returning to Harvard University, where she founded and directs the school’s Data Privacy Lab. His job will be to advise the commission on evolving technology and policy issues, a role similar to one he held previously at the FTC before leaving government to become an independent consultant.
But some experts are raising serious questions about the FTC’s hiring process and how somebody with such high-profile involvement in media stories that deliberately exposed classified government information could be appointed to a senior federal technology position. Soltani served as an in-house technology consultant to The Washington Post since 2013, working on the series of Pulitzer Prize-winning stories on the leaked NSA documents. He’s also been an outspoken proponent of privacy who, at times, has taken an adversarial approach to the government’s role in cyberspace…
Marcy, over the past few hours, on this “awesome news”…
Maybe the Spooks Don’t Want FTC to Know NSA’s Tricks?
Marcy Wheeler
By emptywheel
Published October 24, 2014
In awesome news, the Federal Trade Commission has hired Ashkan Soltani — the tech expert who helped Bart Gellman on many of his most important Snowden scoops — as its new Chief Technology Officer.
The news has elicited wails from NSA’s mail mouthpieces, Stewart Baker and Michael Hayden.
“I’m not trying to demonize this fella, but he’s been working through criminally exposed documents and making decisions about making those documents public,” said Michael Hayden, a former NSA director who also served as CIA director from 2006 to 2009. In a telephone interview with FedScoop, Hayden said he wasn’t surprised by the lack of concern about Soltani’s participation in the Post’s Snowden stories. “I have no good answer for that.”
[snip]
Stewart Baker, a former NSA general counsel, said, while he’s not familiar with the role Soltani would play at the FTC, there are still problems with his appointment. “I don’t think anyone who justified or exploited Snowden’s breach of confidentiality obligations should be trusted to serve in government,” Baker said.
I find Hayden’s wails especially disgusting, given the way — it is now clear — the government spent so much effort covering up how he extended the illegal wiretap program in March 2004. I mean, I’m not trying to demonize the fella, but he’s a criminal, and yet he’s complaining about the press reporting on abuses?
That said, I’m curious whether this isn’t the real reason there seems to be organized pushback against Soltani’s hire.
Soltani is scheduled to give a presentation Nov. 19 at the Strata+Hadoop World conference in Barcelona, Spain, on “how commercial tracking enables government surveillance.” According to the conference website, Soltani’s presentation will explore how “the dropping costs of bulk surveillance is aiding government eavesdropping, with a primary driver being how the NSA leverages data collected by commercial providers to collect information about innocent users worldwide.”
Readers should click on the links to both of these excerpts for much more about this slowly-breaking story.
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FedScoop provided a sampling of Soltani’s tweets to give readers some flavor from whereof the former WaPo reporter, tech guru and new FTC CTO speaks....
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