As we reported a few weeks ago, White House Deputy CTO Andrew McLaughlin became ensnared in the Google Buzz privacy controversy when his Gmail contacts were made publicly available through his Buzz profile, which included 28 senior Google lobbyists and lawyers.

The controversy has prompted a slew of letters and FOIA requests to the White House and Department of Justice from watchdog groups.  Last week, Congressman Darrell Issa sent a letter to McLaughlin asking whether the deputy CTO may have been using Gmail to communicate with his former employer, thus circumventing the laws associated with openness and transparency.  Issa gave McLaughlin a deadline of this week to answer a series of questions on what the Deputy CTO is doing to comply with official recordkeeping rules.

Now we’ve learned that another ex-Googler working in the Administration, Katie Jacobs Stanton, has been snagged by Google’s lax privacy settings as well. Like McLaughlin, Stanton — the New Media Director at the State Department — had 17 Google employees in her Gmail account exposed in the Buzz privacy flap, as the screenshots below indicate:

Katie Jacobs Stanton was President Obama’s appointee to the newly created position of Director of Citizen Participation in March of 2009 and recently moved to the State Department as the New Media Director.  Her previous responsibilities at Google included Google Moderator, Google Finance and Google’s Open Social initiative.

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Because nobody who’s anybody reads the The New York Times these days, except the die-harders and dead-enders along West End Avenue, as well as the editors of Time and Newsweek, you may not know who “Clueless” Clark Hoyt is, but it really doesn’t matter because he doesn’t know who you are, either.  For those scoring at home in their pajamas, Mr. Hoyt is the “public editor” of the Times, i.e. the hapless fellow who has to write those tedious Sunday reports to the readers, in which he explains why whatever the Times did was right and whatever they didn’t do… well, hey, they didn’t know about it!  What do you think they are, a “newspaper of record” or something?

Some editors told me they were not immediately aware of the Acorn videos on Fox, YouTube and a new conservative Web site called BigGovernment.com.  When the Senate voted to cut off all federal funds to Acorn, there was not a word in the newspaper, although a report in the Caucus blog that day covered the action. When the New York City Council froze all its funding for Acorn and the Brooklyn district attorney opened a criminal investigation, there was still nothing.

Well Mr. Hoyt, welcome to the world of the “undernews” – Mickey Kaus’s apt word for the news that everyone in the blogosphere knows about but, apparently, no one who gets his news strictly from the Times, other major newspapers, the newsweeklies, and most of the networks has the slightest inkling of.

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