Twitter Lawyer Selected For Office By President Obama

President Obama has selected a Twitter lawyer for office.

Nicole Wong has more than a decade of experience as an attorney for Silicon Valley covering copyright and privacy, and all this behind the scenes of a site you might use all the time. Nicole Wong has worked for Google and Twitter, making her a formidable proponent for internet privacy law.

Nicole Wong previously was a vice president and deputy general counsel at Google at its Mountain View, California headquarters. Nicole Wong helped review privacy, copyright, and removal requests, and ultimately gave the thumbs up or down on things that could make or break the company. She was nicknamed “The Decider” for her work with a team of lawyers who reviewed Google’s products, according to the New York Times.

After eight years with Google as part of the Perkins Coie law firm, Nicole Wong moved on to Twitter. With Wong at the helm, Twitter won several accolades for privacy practices. The Electronic Frontier Foundation gave Twitter the full 6 stars in a recent survey of tech companies, titled “Who Has Your Back?” Twitter has also backed a coalition lobbying for three years to have Federal privacy laws rewritten to require search warrants for remote server data.

President Obama selected Nicole Wong as a senior adviser to the chief technology officer, focusing on internet privacy. The current chief technology officer Todd Park took over for Aneesh Chopra, who was the first one appointed to the job and left the company at the beginning of 2012.

Some may find President Obama‘s selection an odd choice after recent hacking from the Syrian Electronic Army had taken over several news site Twitter accounts, an obvious violation of privacy and security. It is also a reversal of previous picks for senior privacy officers, as in the past they have usually been selected from the Library of Congress.

Nicole Wong of Twitter being selected as privacy officer was a controversial move on the part of President Obama, but nowhere near his first.

Do you think President Obama’s selection of a Twitter privacy officer was a good choice?