Politics and Law

FiveThirtyEight.com blogger Nate Silver (right) was the keynote speaker at SXSWi on Sunday. He was interviewed onstage by Business Week writer Stephen Baker. Silver's blog was home to some of the most accurate statistics about the 2008 election.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)

AUSTIN, Texas--If there was one name that stood out on the agenda of speakers at the South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) festival here this week, it was famed FiveThirtyEight.com blogger Nate Silver.

Known as a statistical wunderkind, his models predicted the final outcome of the 2008 presidential election to within .4 percent of the final popular vote. But more important to many Democrats who had their hopes for electoral victory dashed by George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004, FiveThirtyEight.com--which got its name from the total number of electoral votes available--was able to provide daily affirmation that Barack Obama was really winning, even when many were tempted to believe he would be overcome by Sen. John McCain.

Silver was SXSWi's keynote speaker on Sunday, and he and interviewer Stephen Baker of Business Week went onstage in front of an audience of about 2,000 fans, most of whom were there to hear Silver talk about the secret sauce behind his hugely popular blog.

What many might not know is that Silver first came to prominence not in the political realm, but in baseball, where he authored Baseball Prospectus, a well-regarded baseball statistics site. Many might see the connection between baseball and politics as far-fetched, but to people like Silver, it's a very direct path.

Still, before starting FiveThirtyEight.com, he wasn't entirely a political neophyte. Silver had already begun to make a name for himself in the liberal political blogosphere with a series of data-rich posts on DailyKos. When he began to recognize some significant holes in the national polling establishment, he decided to step in to fill the void.

After his keynote interview, Silver sat down with CNET News and talked about the election, how his site got started, and more about the philosophical similarities between baseball and politics.

Q: Many Democrats were emotionally tied to what you were doing, in the sense that your data kept them calm during the election. Did your own numbers keep you calm?
Nate Silver: Yeah, I think so. I'm just one of those people that likes to try and dissect a problem and once you started to dissect, some days you feel better about it. If I ever get cancer, the first thing I'll probably do is go on the Web and collect a bunch of data about different survival rates. I just feel better about things when I do them that way. It's a nerdy kind of thing to do.

Q: We were able to get up every day and look at the data and see what was going on. And this is not something you could do because it was your own data. How your own data affect how you felt about what was going on?
Silver: I wouldn't be frustrated by it if McCain or Obama picked up points on a particular day. Sometimes you get frustrated if you know that something you did reveals something about your model. When something doesn't feel right, and you go and make changes. And we made a lot of changes over the course of the campaign where, even as recently as two weeks before the election, we were tweaking little parameters, and what started out as a pretty simple system--taking weighted averages of polls--became much more complex over time. But, yeah, we were never saying we had the perfect answer. We were always trying to improve things as we went along.

Q: The blog had an overt liberal position, but you always said the statistics were objective. What kind of feedback, if any, did you get from conservatives?
Silver: We had a pretty good balance. We had probably about a 2-1 ratio in terms of liberal versus conservative readers, based on the comment threads. Now that we're not in an election, I think it's swung more toward the liberal side, both in terms of my writing and what people are reading about.

We try and be fair. That's the main thing, we try and be forthright. There's so much commentary from conservatives, also from liberals, that is just entirely disingenuous about certain things. It's a lot of cheerleading and cherry-picking of data. We're trying to present a case that by and large is a liberal's case, because it's my case. It's how I see the world. But we're trying to use data to do it where a lot of people just make bad arguments.

As part of his efforts to advocate for the passage of the so-called "stimulus" bill, President Obama met with a number of chief executives from the technology sector and other industries on Wednesday to discuss the economy.

Tech company leaders present at the meeting included IBM's Sam Palmisano, Google's Eric Schmidt, Applied Materials' Mike Splinter, Motorola's Greg Brown, and Micron's Steve Appleton.

Obama called it a "sober" meeting but said the economic package moving its way through Congress will create more jobs and lay a foundation for long-term growth.

"It will invest in broadband and emerging technologies, like the ones imagined and introduced to the world by people like... so many of the CEOs here today," he said, "because that's how America will retain and regain its competitive edge in the 21st century."

The House of Representatives approved the $819 billion economic package on Wednesday, with no Republicans voting for the bill.

The CEOs at Wednesday's meeting came out in support of the legislation.

"At the heart of this debate over the economy is the question (of) whether America will be the preferred destination for businesses to operate, entrepreneurs to start ventures, investors to make their financial bets, and high-skilled workers to continue their careers," Motorola's Brown said in a statement. "President Obama understands that our economic policy must be geared toward strengthening U.S. competitiveness for the long term."

After Barack Obama is sworn in next week, he'll be able to enjoy one of the lesser-known benefits of the presidency: phone calls that always go through.

That means no more "all circuits are busy" messages. And no waiting for calls to be completed as millions of people crowd into Washington during the inauguration and jam overburdened cell phone towers, despite what have been practically heroic efforts on the part of carriers to add capacity.

It may sound a bit like a storyline from the West Wing, but there actually is a branch of the government called the National Communications System tasked with ensuring that telecommunications related to "national security" remain intact and ready to use. President Kennedy created NCS in 1963, and its mandate has expanded to include high-priority Internet and mobile phone calls too.

"We found that this program was very helpful during September 11," said Robert Kenny, director of media relations for the Federal Communications Commission's Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau. "We think it's necessary across the board at all levels of government."

Kenny said in an interview this week that NCS' priority-call system, which has been moved from the Defense Department to Homeland Security, is "for emergencies and other times there's a need to get calls out."

That's in addition to private Defense Department networks, some of which are satellite-based. Homeland Security did not respond to queries about NCS on Thursday.

One of the NCS's offerings is called Government Emergency Telecommunications Service, or GETS, which gives federally approved users special calling cards with instructions to call a certain number in the 710 area code for a guaranteed priority connection. At the prompt, the user enters a 12-digit ID number and the destination phone number. (The 710 area code is reserved for the federal government's exclusive use. It is, of course, a free call from a pay phone.)

"A huge advantage for public safety"
NCS says that the GETS system is designed to support tasks including "presidential communication," continuity of government, and access to the emergency broadcast system. Once the ID number is verified, the telephone network marks the call as a high-priority one, meaning it's specially routed and exempt from being blocked because of congestion or network overload.

A 1984 executive order signed by President Reagan lists NCS's duties as: "National security and emergency preparedness communications for the federal government under all circumstances, including crisis or emergency, attack, recovery and reconstitution."

In 2001, the government added an additional high-priority system for mobile phone users. It's called Wireless Priority Service, and gives authorized users including what NCS calls "senior members of the presidential administration" a higher-priority connection to the cell tower. WPS is accessed by dialing *272 before the destination phone number--but, alas, will only work if your mobile provider has authorized your phone. And the federal government needs to approve.

"In times of an emergency that's a huge advantage for public safety," said John Taylor, a Sprint spokesman.

Taylor said that WPS will come in handy next week during the inauguration. "For the inauguration, we are planning for 2 million people," he said. "We've said up front, if there are more than 2 million people, our customers will have problems. But we're confident public safety will not have problems because of this service."

FCC documents (PDF) from 2000 provide a glimpse at the deliberations during the wireless system's creation. The agency concluded that a uniform *272 number was useful because otherwise "communications service users would have to change systems under conditions when compatibility is most important, i.e., during the exercise of the president's war powers."

(As a side note, those war powers are breathtakingly expansive: Federal law allows the commander-in-chief to seize all TV and radio stations and cell phone towers, and control all telephone companies, Internet broadband providers and peering points. This can happen if the president believes there's a "threat of war" and such action is "necessary.")

Authorization to use WPS is ranked by five different levels. The highest priority is reserved for, according to NCS, "National Command Authority support for military command and control critical to national survival" and "support for the conduct of diplomatic negotiations critical to arresting or limiting hostilities." Law enforcement and public utility companies receive a lower-priority WPS status.

If Obama does end up ditching his BlackBerry for General Dynamics' Sectera Edge, a combination phone-PDA that's been certified by the National Security Agency, he won't be the first government employee to use it for priority calls.

"Priority services as well as other security elements were considerations in the design of the device," according to a spokesperson for General Dynamics.

The NCS has also taken some steps to find similarly-bulletproof ways to prioritize Internet communications. It's a far harder problem, of course, because the protocols underlying the Internet lack a reliable way to mark communications as White-House-high-priority, and the network is packet-switched and far less centralized.

A 2004 report lists responses from the Internet industry to the NCS's request for suggestions about prioritizing governmental data communications including video chats and voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP. It admits that "NCS cannot cause a paradigm shift within the Internet to meet these goals," one of which is "national leadership must receive end-to-end priority treatment over other users."

It concluded, sensibly, that more research was required.

CNET's Stephanie Condon contributed to this report.

As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama won applause from legal adversaries of the recording industry. Stanford law professor Larry Lessig, the doyen of the "free culture" movement, endorsed the Illinois senator, as did Google CEO Eric Schmidt and even the Pirate Party.

That was then. As president-elect, one of Obama's first tech-related decisions has been to select the Recording Industry Association of America's favorite lawyer to be the third in command at the Justice Department. And Obama's pick as deputy attorney general, the second most senior position, is the lawyer who oversaw the defense of the Copyright Term Extension Act--the same law that Lessig and his allies unsuccessfully sued to overturn.

Obama made both announcements on Monday, saying that his picks "bring the integrity, depth of experience and tenacity that the Department of Justice demands in these uncertain times." The soon-to-be-appointees: Tom Perrelli for associate attorney general and David Ogden for deputy attorney general.

Tom Perrelli

(Credit: Jenner and Block)

Campaign rhetoric aside, this should be no surprise. Obama's selection of Joe Biden as vice president showed that the presidential hopeful was comfortable with someone with firmly pro-RIAA views. Biden urged the criminal prosecutions of copyright-infringing peer-to-peer users and tried to create a new federal felony involving playing unauthorized music.

Perrelli is currently a partner in the Washington offices of Jenner and Block, where he represented the RIAA in a a slew of cases, including a high-profile bid to unmask file sharers without the requirement of a judge reviewing the evidence first. Verizon initially lost to the RIAA, but eventually prevailed in 2003 when a federal appeals court ruled the record labels' strategy under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act was unlawful.

Perrelli has represented the RIAA in other lawsuits against individual file sharers. One filed in Michigan accuses a university student of distributing "hundreds of sound recordings over his system without the authorization of the copyright owners." A lawsuit against a Princeton University student makes similar arguments; Perrelli and his colleagues also tried to force Charter Communications to give up the names of 93 file-trading subscribers.

David Ogden

(Credit: WilmerHale)

A 2004 summary of a Boston lawsuit written by Harvard's Berkman Center--which opposed the RIAA in this and a current case--quotes Perrelli as telling a federal judge that it would be easy to determine who was using a wireless network to share music. "It is correct that the actual downloader may be someone else in the household," he said, but any errors can be determined easily after a "modest amount of discovery."

An article on his law firm's Web site says that Perrelli represented SoundExchange before the Copyright Royalty Board--and obtained a 250 percent increase in the royalty rate for music played over the Internet by companies like AOL and Yahoo. Perrelli previously worked in the Clinton Justice Department.

An article in Legal Times titled "Building an Entertainment Beast in D.C." says that in 2002, Perrelli used Jenner's reputation as an appellate law firm to "get a meeting with officials at the RIAA, at a time when Internet file-sharing entities like Napster were threatening the music business." A year later, in 2003, the law firm recruited Steven Fabrizio, previously the RIAA's senior vice president for business and legal affairs, and business began booming (the RIAA also used the Jenner law firm to write a friend-of-the-court brief in the copyright extension lawsuit).

If confirmed by the Senate, which is unlikely to pose much of a hurdle, Perrelli would oversee the department's civil division, the antitrust division, and the civil rights division.

Obama's choice for deputy attorney general--the second-in-command at Justice--is David Ogden, who's currently a partner at the WilmerHale law firm.

As assistant attorney general for the civil division, Ogden was responsible for organizing the defense of the Child Online Protection Act, or COPA, an antiporn law that has been challenged by the ACLU in court for more than a decade with no resolution. His department also successfully defended the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Ogden's biography at Wilmer Hale says only that he represents the "media and Internet industries, as well as major trade and professional associations," without listing details. The Justice Department, barring exceptional cases, has a duty to defend laws enacted by Congress.

Perrelli, on the other hand, went out of his way to recruit the RIAA as a very lucrative client: his law firm bills some partners' time at a princely $1,000 an hour.

During his confirmation hearing, it will be instructive to see if senators ask whether his zealous anti-file sharing advocacy can make him an objective civil servant--especially when these same politicians want the Justice Department to sue peer-to-peer pirates at taxpayer's expense. (Then again, if that proposal becomes law, Perrelli's surely the right man for the job.)

It will also be instructive to see if this week's news prompts some of the RIAA's longtime adversaries to moderate their enthusiasm for Obama's technology policies.

If you want a job in an Obama administration, be prepared to disclose every blog post or comment you've ever written.

A nine-page questionnaire requires applicants to list--and if possible, provide copies of--all "posts or comments on blogs or other Web sites" they have ever made. Also required are "aliases" or nicknames used on those sites.

Translated into English, this means that President-elect Obama wants to know far more about you than his predecessors did. That requirement would force applicants to disclose information about Facebook and MySpace pages, profiles posted on dating Web sites, and even what was posted on Web sites like CNET and YouTube that allow readers to append comments.

Note that question doesn't only ask for potentially embarrassing or incendiary posts. It wants a list of "each" one.

It also asks for the URLs of "any Web sites that feature you in either a personal or professional capacity," and suggests MySpace and Facebook by name as examples. Dating sites like Match.com would be included, too.

Perhaps this won't be a problem for older Democrats vying for senior positions like treasury secretary or attorney general. But for today's Facebook-and-YouTube generation, requesting a list (and, "if readily available," a copy) of all Web site posts and comments the applicant ever made is not a trivial task to complete--and means that the Obama administration may not be quite as tech-savvy as its reputation would indicate.

These and other questions seem to represent Obama's plan to avoid the the Lani Guinier Effect. President Clinton appointed Guinier as assistant attorney general, and then was forced to withdraw her nomination in the face of severe criticism. Clinton claimed at the time that he had not read her writings favoring racial quotas.

Clinton also was forced to withdraw the nominations of Zoe Baird and Judge Kimba Wood for attorney general because of questions about whether they paid employment taxes for their nannies. President George W. Bush had the same problem with former New York Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik, appointed to be Homeland Security secretary.

Obama's questionnaire seeks to remedy that problem. It asks four questions about domestic help, including housekeepers, babysitters, nannies, and gardeners. It asks about child support payments, information about enemies that may "criticize" your nomination, tax returns, loans, jobs held abroad, and so on.

One question asks: "Do you or any members of your immediate family own a gun? If so, provide complete ownership and registration information."

That's raised eyebrows among gun owners--and drawn fire from the National Rifle Association's Institute for Legislative Action--because there is no general federal requirement that guns be registered. Under federal law, it's possible to be given a firearm by a family member or purchase one from a private party without your name being included in a federal database. (Laws in a handful of states, including California, are more restrictive.)

In a 1996 survey sent to state politicians, Obama said he supports a law banning the "possession" of handguns. He also indicated he supported Washington, D.C.'s gun ban, which was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court. His campaign Web site said the Second Amendment protects an individual right and noted that "millions of hunters and shooters own and use guns every year," but did not mention firearms used for self-defense.

Caption: An excerpt from President-Elect Barack Obama's now-deleted technology agenda on Change.gov.

Last week, President-elect Barack Obama launched a Web site with detailed information about his plans for technology, Iraq, and health care policies.

Now they're gone.

The "agenda" Web pages on Change.gov seem to have mysteriously disappeared on Sunday. By Monday morning, they were replaced with a vague statement saying that Obama and running mate Joe Biden have a "comprehensive and detailed agenda" that will "bring about the kind of change America needs," with the individual pages deleted entirely.

A version of the now-deleted homeland security agenda recovered from the cache feature of Microsoft's Live Search is far more detailed, promising to convene a nuclear terrorism summit, declare the Internet "a strategic asset," and establish a $2 billion fund to "counter al-Qaeda propaganda." Those happen to be identical to the promises that candidate Obama made earlier this year; they have not been deleted from the campaign Web site.

I've posted mirror images of the vanished homeland security section, the technology section, and the newsroom section listing the different topics on the right side of the page.

Dan Pfeiffer, Obama's transition communications director, would not say what was going on or whether the deletion meant that some of the campaign promises would be dropped. He sent CNET News a one-line e-mail message saying: "That section of the Web site is being retooled."

This isn't the first time that vanishing or altered documents on a presidential Web site have been noticed: President Bush got some unwelcome attention for this last year. The White House's Web team also rewrote the May 2003 caption showing Bush on the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier after the Iraq occupation proved more problematic than expected (see before and after).

The ephemeral nature of Web publishing does raise some serious issues: if a president-elect circulates a physical press release promising to do something, and then changes his mind, there's a paper trail. That doesn't exist when files are added to a Web site and then quietly removed over a weekend.

The Library of Congress and other institutions, including the California Digital Library and the Government Printing Office, are trying to remedy this by doing an "end of term" crawl. That means they're regularly crawling and archiving all .gov domains that are considered "government sites," including Change.gov. The crawl started in September and will continue through February 2009.

The project has a varying crawl schedule, so it may not have collected the agenda pages on Change.gov, Abbie Grotke, a digital media project coordinator on the Web capture team in the Library of Congress' office of strategic initiatives, said on Monday.

The Change.gov site has been added to the list of sites to be crawled as part of the Library's Election Archives project--a separate effort. Gina Jones, also part of the Library's office of strategic initiatives, said that since it's a new site, it hasn't been collected yet.

CNET News' Stephanie Condon contributed to this report.

During a whirlwind visit to Sydney, Australia, Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer this week said he has confidence in President-elect Barack Obama's leadership.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer talks to developers in Sydney.

(Credit: Microsoft)

Obama's decisive victory this week over Republican rival John McCain in the U.S. presidential elections has been broadly hailed by technology leaders as potentially beneficial to the country's technology and communications industries.

"I have a lot of faith in our system and our electoral process, and I think President-elect Obama understands that there's a deep set of economic issues, and I have confidence in his leadership," Ballmer said on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Lateline program, in response to a question on how he thought Obama's win would help Corporate America.

The full text of the Lateline interview, along with a video of the broadcast, can be found here.

Ballmer said the global economic crisis "definitely affected" the IT industry, with IT spending being 50 percent of overall capital spending, and PCs being one of the more expensive things that most people buy for their homes.

"The No. 1 thing we actually need now is to sort of restore a positive sense of optimism," he said.

"I actually think to some degree...negativity feeds on negativity. And I trust at least in my home country, the U.S., with the presidential election behind us, maybe we can get into a positive psychology loop," Ballmer added.

In the rest of the interview, Ballmer mainly appeared to reiterate comments he made in Sydney earlier this week regarding the need for Australia to adopt fast broadband, as well as about the future of computing and pending new Microsoft products such as Windows 7 and Azure.

The full video of Ballmer's speech to developers in Sydney yesterday is also online.

Renai LeMay of ZDNet Autralia reported from Sydney.

By naming some technology executives to his transition team--especially former IAC executive Julius Genachowski--President-elect Barack Obama is signaling that he's likely to follow through with his proposal to appoint a chief technology officer to the White House.

The person in this new position--and possibly a new White House technology office staff--could be given the directive to create new levels of transparency and access to government agencies, or to guide policies that spur innovation and growth. Technology experts within the Beltway warn, however, that a CTO would have to avoid potential pitfalls such as creating new spending for ineffectual projects, running into conflict with other agencies, or simply becoming nothing more than a symbolic office.

Still, creating the position would generally be seen as a positive step.

"The fact that this is difficult is, in some ways, an example of why we might need a CTO," said Alan Davidson, head of Google's Washington office. "There is no one place for unified technology leadership in our executive branch right now."

A tech-friendly transition team
The overall composition of Obama's transition team indicates he may be serious about implementing new uses of technology in the executive branch and directing more cohesive policy making. Genachowski was an adviser to two Federal Communications Commission chairmen during the Clinton administration--Reed Hundt and Bill Kennard--and is the founder of start-up incubator LaunchBox Digital. Genachowski chaired the group that helped shape Obama's Tech and Innovation Plan, in which Obama calls for a CTO.

Genachowski is considered to be a strong contender for the CTO position.

Former IAC executive Julius Genachowski is part of Barack Obama's transition team and may be under consideration to fill the role of CTO.

(Credit: LaunchBoxDigital)

"Julius is an example of the kind of person who has both real-world technology and business experience and would be effective in Washington," Davidson said. "He's a good model of the type of person one might look for as a CTO or as another technology leader within the administration."

The transition team also includes Sonal Shah of Google.org and Donald Gips, vice president of corporate strategy and development for Level 3 Communications. Many Obama advisers come out of the Clinton administration, and Gips, among others, specifically served Vice President Al Gore. Given Gore's emphasis on the development of information technology, those advisers are well poised to integrate technology into the way the government functions and creates policy, some have said.

Gips served as Gore's chief domestic policy adviser in the late 1990s. William Daley, another member of the Obama transition team, served as secretary of commerce from 1997 to 2000 and was chairman of Gore's 2000 presidential campaign.

Obama's transition team is headed by John Podesta, the former Clinton White House chief of staff, considered in Washington to be a competent figure who is comfortable with technology issues in his own right.

The team has already shown its commitment to embracing technology by launching the site Change.gov.

"Because of the impact the Internet had in the election, we're expecting to see the incoming administration embrace a lot of those tools, and that will be important for laying the groundwork once the administration takes office," Davidson said.

Beyond this transition team, Obama may look for advice on technology policy--or for a CTO--from the cadre of technology advisers he maintained during his campaign. Obama's technology advisers, both formal and informal, included government types, academics, and people from the high tech industry.

Former FCC chairs Hundt and Kennard serve as advisers, as do Michael Nelson, the former director of Internet technology and strategy at IBM; Daniel Weitzner, an MIT computer scientist and a policy director for the World Wide Web Consortium; Craigslist Founder Craig Newmark; Google CEO Eric Schmidt; and a number of others.

Will a new cabinet position change anything?
Some inside Washington have said the Obama administration will be a vast improvement from the Bush administration, which has been criticized for neglecting technology as an issue and a tool. President Bush has not completely ignored the issue, however. As part of its cybersecurity efforts encouraged by the administration, the Homeland Security Department is conducting a complete overhaul of government networks to make them more secure. The Office of Management and Budget has also emphasized funding to keep information technology secure and up to date.

The OMB, through the Presidential E-Government Initiatives, has also served the public through sites like Grants.gov, which allows people to more easily find and apply for federal grants, and USAJobs.gov, the federal online recruitment service.

Moreover, the appointment of a CTO in an Obama administration does not ensure any improvements.

"The idea of a chief technology officer is a fine one, but I think it's more complex than that," said Ed Black, president and CEO of the Computer and Communications Industry Association. "It's not enough to make an office--the use and understanding of technology needs to permeate every agency."

Yet someone with the right credentials and reputation could make that happen, Black said.

"It's going to take a person with a liberal background, with skills across the field," he said. "Somebody close to Obama certainly helps."

Looking to industry for help
Speculation has circulated that Obama could consider a well-known executive like Amazon CEO Jeffrey Bezos or Google's Schmidt for the role of CTO; however, at least one Washington insider said it is highly unlikely Schmidt would leave his position at Google for the job.

Some have speculated Google CEO Eric Schmidt may be up for the job of CTO, but others--including Schmidt himself--say that's unlikely.

Davidson noted that Schmidt has said he has no interest in the role. Davidson did not rule out the possibility of another Washington outsider taking the job, though.

"There's a balance that will need to be struck in looking for people who have real world technology experience and can be effective in Washington," he said. "There are people in Washington who fit that role and people outside of Washington who fit that role."

Others such as James Lewis, director and senior fellow in the technology and public policy program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, cautioned against the idea.

"We've seen lots of times where people have brought in gurus from the high-tech community, and they give up after a year because they're frustrated," Lewis said. "Knowing how the government works is important."

Even so, Lewis said, implementing technology policy cannot be left to policy wonks from Washington without industry advice, Lewis said.

"Innovation's the secret sauce of the year, but we need to figure out what exactly that means," he said. "Giving the Commerce Department more money will not do anything for innovation, yet that's one of the things we hear."

Defining the CTO's mission
The executive branch will likely have an onslaught of technology policy proposals to consider, Lewis said, which could range from a national broadband commitment to the establishment of a central office for research and development funds. Some may be good, but others could be a waste of time and money.

"The transition team needs to take a really hard look at the ideas that are going to be put forward because most of them aren't going to work," Lewis said.

Those familiar with the transition process have said it will work "quickly, but not hastily." Before a CTO is chosen, Obama and his team will have to decide how to structure the White House.

The jurisdiction of a CTO could overlap with other agencies or executive positions in areas such as innovation policy, cybersecurity, or intellectual property enforcement. To avoid those overlaps, the Obama team will have to decide, for instance, whether the CTO would focus on goals like making agencies more efficient or take on a broader agenda such as dictating policy.

Innovation policy could intrude on turf covered by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, many noted, and policy covering digital copyright law might conflict with another cabinet position Obama will have to fill--the position of intellectual property enforcement coordinator, which was established by the recently-signed Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act

Foreseeing a battle in the copyright world between Hollywood and the tech industry, Black said it would be ideal for the Obama administration to include "somebody who can recognize there is significant collateral damage to other legitimate interests and industries" by some copyright positions taken by the entertainment industry.

"They don't have to be anti-Hollywood, they just have to be not blinded by an extreme position," he said. "I'd actually be very happy if we just had somebody who was very balanced and open."

President-elect Obama may also consider appointing a completely separate cybersecurity chief, as is likely to be recommended by the CSIS Commission on Cybersecurity for the 44th Presidency.

"The commission said (cybersecurity) was a national security issue, and that's kind of out of the orbit of the CTO," said Lewis, who chairs the commission. "There's some overlap, but I think the CTO's role is kind of orthogonal to the cyber mission."

President-elect Barack Obama has named tech executives from Google.org and InterActiveCorp to his transition team, according to reports.

Google.org's Sonal Shah, and Julius Genachowski, a former IAC executive who also served as chief counsel to former Democratic FCC Chairman Reed Hundt, have both been named to the team, according to news reports.

Genachowski is a co-founder and managing director of Rock Creek Ventures, and is a founding partner of LaunchBox Digital, an early-stage investment firm based in Washington, D.C.

He attended law school with Obama, and helped stress the importance of high-tech issues in the campaign, The Washington Post reported.

Shah, who works for Google's philanthropy division Google.org, formerly served as a vice president at Goldman Sachs.

Obama's team is also reported to be readying a new Web site for the transition, www.change.gov, which, according to news reports will launch today.

See also:
• Obama presidency: Good, bad news for tech
• What Obama presidency means for clean tech