Facebook has hired Timothy J. Muris, a former senior Bush administration regulator in Washington, to defend its privacy practices. The move is reaction to the increasing scrutiny on Capitol Hill and the federal-regulatory agency charged with consumer protection that Facebook is facing.

Muris is the former Republican chairman of the Federal Trade Commission currently serving as an attorney at the law firm O’Melveny & Myers. He was enlisted at a time when the FTC is taking a close look at complaints against the social-networking Internet company that have been filed by privacy advocates. As Facebook grows more influential in the lives of its 400 million users, governments around the globe are looking whether and how to regulate Facebook and other social media. Facebook began its offensive in Washington last year by hiring Tim Sparapani. He was senior counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, which has close ties to some of the same groups that are most critical of Facebook.

Muris, who was awarded a lifetime-achievement award at the FTC, is an advocate of a different kind. Earlier this year, he appeared before the Senate’s commerce committee to testify against a legislative proposal that would give the FTC far-greater authority to pass regulations, including those on privacy matters. The measure, which has the support of some FTC commissioners, has already passed in the House of Representatives, and consumer-rights advocates are pressing for the bill to be added in the financial-regulatory overhaul under debate in the Senate. Muris declined to comment on questions related to Facebook, but he emphasized that the views he expressed in his testimony were positions he held for the past 35 years.

Last week, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, an advocacy group in Washington, asked the FTC to investigate recent changes made by Facebook. They are especially concerned that more information is made public by default and that information is automatically shared with other websites. “These changes violate user expectations, diminish user privacy, and contradict Facebook’s own representations,” Epic said in its complaint. In January, the FTC told Epic in response to another complaint that it was raising “issues of particular interest for us.” Facebook has maintained that it is giving users more control over their privacy in response to the FTC complaints.

Facebook is also under fire on Capitol Hill. Last month, lawmakers called on the company to stop automatically sharing user information with third-party websites and to streamline its privacy policy. Led by Chuck Schume, a New York Democratic senator, they said that Facebook users should have to opt-in to data-sharing arrangements, rather than being forced to opt-out if they do not wish to participate.

Apple (AAPL) has provided “advice, recommendations, strategic input, and direction” to the high-tech task force that raided Gizmodo editor Jason Chen’s home last week in the course of a criminal investigation into how the gadget website obtained a prototype of Apple’s unreleased G4 iPhone, the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s office told Yahoo! News.

In a statement, the Santa Clara County DA confirmed Yahoo’s report that Apple sits on the steering committee of the Rapid Enforcement Allied Computer Team (REACT) Task Force, a coalition of 17 federal, state, and local law-enforcement agencies created in 1997 to combat high-tech crimes. The Santa Clara County DA’s office is the task force’s lead agency.

Apple, notoriously secretive, was outraged at the leak of the iPhone, which an Apple employee inadvertently left in a Northern California bar. An as-yet-unnamed patron who found the phone sold it to Gizmodo for $5,000.

The statement, issued in response to queries from Yahoo! News, says REACT is required by law to establish a steering committee to meet regularly and “review task force activities, and provide advice, recommendations, strategic input and direction for task force consideration.”

The committee, the statement says, is an ad hoc group of local technology companies that are invited to quarterly meetings to provide guidance on REACT’s activities:
“There is no defined membership as committee meetings are open to all who are interested to attend any given meeting. To the extent that high-tech companies or other entities would send representatives to the meetings, they are considered members of the committee. While our records have not shown its attendance as of late, Apple is similarly situated as other companies or entities, which have open invitations to attend committee meetings at any frequency.”

The 2008 annual report of California’s High Technology Crime Advisory Committee lists Apple as a member of the committee [pdf]. Other committee members include Google (GOOG), eBay (EBAY), and Symantec (CYMC).

The San Mateo District Attorney’s office, which is overseeing the case, will say only that the investigation involves “felony theft.” Asked why a high-technology task force that generally deals with massive counterfeiting operations and online threats is handling a case involving a phone left in a bar, a spokesman declined to comment.

David Townsend, a private investigator who formerly worked as an investigator for REACT, has an idea: “You have to look at this not as a theft of a phone, but theft of intellectual property. This is a big deal for Apple. If you were to try to put a value on it, I’d put it in the hundreds of millions of dollars. There’s a big difference between the theft of a lost phone and a prototype that gets into the hands of a gadget-blog editor.”

Stephen Wagstaffe, the chief deputy district attorney in San Mateo County, told the San Jose Business Journal that an attorney for Apple approached the DA’s office last week seeking a criminal investigation. The DA then referred the lawyer and another Apple employee to REACT.

The San Mateo County DA has said that it will not examine Chen’s computers, which were seized in the raid, until it determines whether or not the law applies. Nick Denton, the owner of Gizmodo’s publisher, Gawker Media stated that he is holding off on seeking the return of the computers until the DA makes its decision. “We’re leaving it with the DA initially. And then taking it to the judge who issued the warrant if that doesn’t work. Not necessarily looking for the most aggressive course.”