In a move reeking of Orwellian irony, the Department of Homeland Security is appointing D. Reed Freeman to its Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee. For the uninitiated, Mr. Freeman was the Chief Privacy Officer for Gator (recently renamed to Claria), a company that brought sleazy spyware to the forefront of Internet lore. Gator software has been notorious for surreptitiously inserting itself onto end-user computers. Its installation was frequently misrepresented to the user, and requires painfully-elaborate means to properly remove. The parent company uses Gator software to spam you with pop-up ads and collect — and resale — information about your computer use habits to various marketing groups. Now his job will be to assist the DHS surreptitiously gather information about folks with an eye towards not unduly intruding upon the privacy of the citizenry.

A ten-month stint working for Gator shouldn’t disqualify him outright from such a position, and his selection in 2004 was certainly intended to add credibility to Gator’s consumer privacy efforts. That said, Gator’s parent company is still rightly considered one of the sleaziest, over-litigious spyware-peddlers in the industry, which calls into question Mr. Freeman’s ability to affect substantive policy change in that environment.