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Siebel Loses Top Lobbyist
by Bara Vaida
After four months at Siebel Systems, Mike Maibach has resigned as the senior vice president of government affairs. Maibach said the position was not the right fit for him, and he has decided to pursue other interests.
Maibach, who has 25 years of governmental affairs experience, is looking for a part-time teaching position at a local university and has no plans to return to full-time lobbying. "It just wasn't the right fit for me culturally," Maibach said of the reason for his departure.
Siebel officials did not return calls seeking comment. Maibach had said when he took the job that Siebel planned to make a major commitment to Washington, including a $2 million political action committee that would be used to support candidates who supported company issues.
The State Department's High-Tech Pitchman
David Gross has been named the deputy assistant secretary of State for international communications and information technology. In that position, Gross will coordinate the United States' communications and information policy abroad.
"This is the dream job for anyone who wants to be at the epicenter of the global information technology revolution," Gross said in a statement.
He will head the State Department's Office of International Communications and Information Policy. The office works on world telecom and Internet markets and negotiates agreements designed to help U.S. high-tech businesses. Gross previously worked for AirTouch, which was purchased by Vodafone in 1999 and then merged with Bell Atlantic and GTE to form Verizon.
Farewell To The Feds
Glenn Reynolds has been named vice president of federal regulatory affairs in BellSouth's governmental affairs office. Reynolds most recently was at the FCC, where he was the acting deputy chief of the Common Carrier Bureau, with primary responsibility for issues within the policy and competitive-pricing divisions. He also served as chief of the market disputes-resolution division in the FCC's Enforcement Bureau.
Meanwhile, Jodie Bernstein, the 75-year-old former director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, is taking on two new jobs. She will spend most of her time as an "of counsel" in the Washington office of the international law firm Bryan Cave and also will work at the Hawthorn Group, a public affairs shop, as a senior adviser on special projects.
Bernstein joined the FTC in 1970, becoming an attorney adviser to then-Consumer Bureau Director Robert Pitofsky. More than two decades later, when Pitofsky became FTC chairman under former President Clinton, he recruited Bernstein to his old post at the FTC. She led the bureau for six years, working to protect consumers from identity theft and Internet fraud.
A New Cause For Everett-Church
Ray Everett-Church, cofounder of the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail (CAUCE), has joined ePrivacy Group as a senior strategist. EPrivacy Group is a consulting firm that focuses entirely on providing privacy and security consulting services.
"Privacy and security are now an even more important part of business," Everett-Church said in reference to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Before then, he said, "companies were looking at privacy and security from a consumer concern, but now a lot of companies are rebalancing their approach to include the impact of law-enforcement need for information."
Everett-Church said he would continue to advise CAUCE, which promotes anti-spam policies.
Two other new consultants with the ePrivacy Group include former Internet Alliance executive Director Jeff Richards and TRUSTe board member Terry Pittman.
He's A Jolly Good Fellow
Jason Catlett, the president and founder of Junkbusters, has begun a one-year fellowship with the Harvard Information Infrastructure Project. Catlett is a computer scientist with a doctorate in data mining, and has become an expert on the interplay between technology, marketing and privacy.
Catlett taught computer science, including courses on technology and privacy, for several years at the University of Sydney in Australia. In 1992, he moved to AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J., where he continued work on data mining of large databases.
He has served as an external examiner of doctoral candidates at Rutgers University, on the editorial board of the journal Machine Learning, and as a visiting scholar at the computer science department of Columbia University in New York. He has contributed articles to both academic and trade publications, such as Privacy Journal, and he still gets annoyed by the occasional telemarketing call, according to Harvard's Web site listing this year's fellows.
The Policy Roads Ahead
Kent Lassman has been named a research fellow at the Progress and Freedom Foundation (PFF), where he will direct PFF's new Digital Policy Network. PFF is launching the network to coordinate its activities at the state level, providing technology policy information for state legislatures, public utilities and executive branch agencies.
Before joining PFF, Lassman was the director of technology and communications policy for Citizens For a Sound Economy, where for more than four years he led technology and telecommunications education and advocacy campaigns.
Elsewhere in the technology community, Katie Harrison has left TechNet to open the Silicon Valley office for the nonprofit, nonpartisan Business Executives for National Security. The group aims to help business executives impact U.S. national security policy, including developing new tools to protect the nation's infrastructure from cyber attack. Harrison worked on Republican issues for TechNet, a bipartisan lobbying group that focuses on high-tech issues.
Consulting ... And Creating
AOL Time Warner recently hired Ronald Klain, who served as chief of staff to former Vice President Al Gore, to lobby on Internet issues. Klain is a lobbyist for O'Melveny & Myers and declined to specify which Internet issues AOL hired him to cover. Jeremy Bash is part of Klain's lobbying team. He is Klain's assistant. Klain said AOL Time Warner is his only Internet-related client and that most of his practice is focused on "litigation."
In other private-sector developments, Michael Specht has joined Wallman Strategic Consulting as vice president of a new unit, Emerging Communications Technology Group. He will advise companies on the verge of releasing new technologies of potential regulatory and legislative hurdles. Specht met his current boss, Kathleen Wallman, in the mid-1990s, when he was an FCC senior engineer.
And Mindshare Internet Campaigns named Tim Flynn as creative director. He will oversee all aspects of the public affairs firm's creative process, including Web-site design, user interfaces, banner ads and collateral print materials. Previously, Flynn was the art director for new media at Supon/Gibson Design.
Bringing High-Tech to Air Safety
Several high-tech and business executives met with Rep. Mike Honda, D-Calif., and FBI, Federal Aviation Administration and local airport officials last Thursday to discuss technology solutions for increasing airport security.
The list of more than two dozen participants included: Leslee Coleman, Solectron's director of worldwide government relations; Cylink CEO William Crowell; Silicon Valley Manufacturing President and CEO Carl Guardino; Carol Henton, vice president of the Information Technology Association of America; and Jason Rodriguez, a government affairs representative for Hewlett-Packard.
"By working together harnessing the energy and innovation of Silicon Valley's technology portfolio, we can chart a future course that makes our airways safer and our economy stronger," Honda said in a statement.
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