Andrew McLaughlin, deputy White House web chief, was reprimanded for improperly using personal e-mail to consult former colleagues at Google, The Hill reported today. He apparently consulted Vint Cerf among others on issues including network neutrality, and used his personal Gmail account in violation of a pledge he signed.

The White House requires staffers to use official e-mail for all business to ease compliance with rules requiring the maintenance of presidential record. The fun part, though, is that this was apparently first noticed because of the much-discussed privacy flaw embedded in Google Buzz at the time of its sudden release that revealed frequent contacts.

This goes to show that it’s not just activists in authoritarian countries who could get into political trouble because of privacy slips. Here’s Tony Romm on how it happened.

Concern that McLaughlin may have violated federal archiving and ethics rules first arose in April, upon the debut of Google Buzz. The new social network, which automatically adds a user’s recent contacts to his or her subscriber list, reflected that McLaughlin had communicated in the past with top Google staffers.

The link was not totally surprising, given McLaughlin’s previous position as Google’s head of global public policy.

But after seeing McLaughlin’s contacts on Google Buzz, Consumer Watchdog filed a FOIA request for his e-mails, and Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) questioned McLaughlin’s conduct in his own, separate missive.

Some time ago, the press spent some energy on a report by a U.S. military contractor on preparing for online threats from China. Wired this week has a solid contribution to the issue. It’s opinionated, but it opens with a provocative statement on the part of a White House staffer with responsibilities for cyber security. Read it.

Howard Schmidt, the new cybersecurity czar for the Obama administration, has a short answer for the drumbeat of rhetoric claiming the United States is caught up in a cyberwar that it is losing.

“There is no cyberwar,” Schmidt told Wired.com in a sit-down interview Wednesday at the RSA Security Conference in San Francisco.

“I think that is a terrible metaphor and I think that is a terrible concept,” Schmidt said. “There are no winners in that environment.”

I don’t want to overstate anything, as a cursory Google search offers no confirmation, but from the looks of this photograph from the official White House Flickr feed, sometimes having a meeting in the Oval Office means checking your tech at the door.

The official caption reads: “Cell phones are left outside the Oval Office during a meeting with President Barack Obama, May 25, 2009.” As commenter clareperretta points out it would be fun to know what the little card on the table says.

The Flickr account itself is pretty cool. Not quite Hugo Chávez’ Aló Presidente, but it’s part of some interesting things the present administration is doing with online publishing.

UPDATE: Even if you’re an important member of Congress, you leave it outside. This image from outside the cabinet room.