UPDATED 09:20 EDT / MAY 08 2013

LIVE: President Obama Wants to Wiretap Your Facebook & Twitter – What’s It Mean for You?

Updated: full recording below.

On today’s SiliconANGLE’s Live NewsDesk Show, (see embed feed below or visit youtube.com/siliconangle to watch on-demand), we learn about how President Obama has picked Nicole Wong, Twitter’s legal director, to be the White House’s first chief privacy officer. Furthermore, how the White House is on the verge of backing a Federal Bureau of Investigation plan for a sweeping overhaul of surveillance laws.

Joining us now to tell us more about the proposal for sweeping changes to surveillance laws is SiliconANGLE Contributing Editor John Casaretto. (See the live broadcast, embed below ~ if you missed today’s topic, check our YouTube channel for archived clips.)

The plan would make it easier to wiretap people who communicate using the Internet rather than by traditional phone services. In theory that means Facebook, Twitter, Google+, MySpace, AIM and everything in between. The F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, has argued time and time again that the bureau’s ability to carry out court-approved eavesdropping on suspects is nearing extinction as communications technology evolves.

Take a moment and step back and think: How much time have you spent communicating via the Internet vs. talking (not tweeting or texting) on your phone over the last 30 days? Suffice it to say, I bet the ‘talking’ portion of your phone usage has been less than 5 percent of your total communications over the past month.

Wong previously was a vice president and deputy general counsel at Google, where she managed a team of lawyers that worked with the company’s engineers to review products before they launched, giving her the nickname “The Decider” because of it.

Some of the things we’ll be discussing with Casaretto include, Wong’s background and how she got the nickname “The Decider”, the focus of Wong’s new position, if passed – what does the bill mean to Internet users, and how Wong is different from previous administration picks for department-level chief privacy officers.


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