Capitol Confidential
BigGovernment.com
Last week, we reported that Obama administration Deputy CTO Andrew McLaughlin –who headed up Google’s lobbying shop before joining the administration – had been ensnared in the Google Buzz privacy imbroglio when his Gmail contacts were made publicly available through his Google Buzz profile…and they revealed that McLaughlin’s most emailed Gmail contacts included more than two-dozen Google employees, including many of the company’s most senior lobbyists and lawyers.
Now, Consumer Watchdog has filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the White House to obtain all e-mails and Buzz correspondence between Deputy CTO Andrew McLaughlin and his former employer, Google.
McLaughlin’s Google Buzz account also included correspondence directly to the Google Buzz development team soon after the launch of the service inquiring about how he could communicate privately with his Gmail contacts on Buzz. In one enlightening post, McLaughlin inquired:
“How do I delete or block followers? There are a bunch of random people showing up whom I don’t know, and who I don’t want to read my Buzz items.”
As we pointed out, none of this suggests impropriety on the part of McLaughlin per se. It’s not necessarily unreasonable for McLaughlin to be communicating with his former friends and colleagues at Google, although it does seem odd that McLaughlin (a senior White House official) made repeated inquiries of the Google Buzz development team about how he could communicate with his Gmail contacts, many of whom are Google lobbyists and lawyers, privately over Buzz.
But now, we have discovered something that is now certain to raise additional questions. Apparently, McLaughlin’s entire Buzz account has now been deleted, as the screen shots here indicate.
Read the rest of the article at BigGovernment.com
