Hemanshu Nigam: Mr. Safety for MySpace

Can CSO Hemanshu Nigam make MySpace a safe neighborhood, without also making it an empty one?

Not long after the media conglomerate News Corp. bought MySpace for $580 million in October 2005 and wrapped it up into Fox Interactive Media, the suits started looking for someone to help improve security at the once-scrappy upstart. Social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook and Xanga had been flying under the corporate radar despite concerns about child safety, malicious code and copyright infringement. But now things were different. Not only did the largest of those sites' new parent company, News Corp., have deep pockets (2006 revenue: $25.3 billion) but Murdoch also was counting on MySpace to be a big part of his company's strategy going forward. In fact, the News Corp. chairman and CEO told investors it was a $6 billion property. (A Chinese company owned by IDG, parent of CSO's publisher, is in talks with MySpace to invest in a Chinese version of the site.)

Ernie Allen, longtime president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, soon got a phone call from someone at Fox Interactive Media, who wanted his recommendation on CSO job candidates with credibility on child safety issues as well as a solid understanding of technology. Nigam immediately came to mind.

The two men had known one another for more than a decade, since Nigam's days as a federal prosecutor for the U.S. Department of Justice, where he specialized in Internet-related child pornography, child predator, women and child trafficking, and computer crime cases. Later, they worked together when Nigam was director of consumer security outreach and child safe computing at Microsoft. (In between the two jobs, Nigam was a vice president for the Motion Picture Association of America, where he worked on antipiracy initiatives.) Allen had high regard for Nigam's integrity and ability to get things done. "I thought his background was exactly what they needed," he recalls, and said as much to the person on the other end of the line.

At Microsoft, Nigam got a call too. "Somebody said, can you call a friend of mine at MySpace and talk to them because you know child safety? And that turned into, would you like to work here? Then I called Ernie and said, what do you think of this? I don't want to go somewhere just because they're looking for a name from Microsoft. I want to go there because I'm really going to make a difference," Nigam says.

Allen was convinced that in offering Nigam the job, Fox Interactive Media had shown that it was looking for more than a figurehead to appease shareholders and talk to The Wall Street Journal. "I said to them, you should not hire somebody like Hemu if the purpose of this is pure PR, because his whole history is, he's a doer," Allen recalls. "He makes things happen. He tackles challenges and tries to solve them."