Felten's role there is not an operational one, he said. "I'm not the person whose phone buzzes when the network goes down." Instead, he serves as a senior policy adviser to FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz "on all matters related to technology" and acts as a "technology ambassador to the world," he said.

Felten's talk was short on anecdotes or specific incidents from his tenure so far at the FTC. But he's set to leave the post later this year to return to Princeton, and hinted Tuesday that he'd be more forthcoming once that happens.

Instead, Felten offered a series of general guidelines on how technologists can successfully interact with government officials, who tend to fall somewhere along a "cluelessness scale," as he put it.

At level zero are people who are not experts, "but know how to find and work with experts," he said. "It's really kind of the desired state for someone who's a general-purpose decision maker. The art of being a good decision maker is not to be an expert at every level, it's the ability to function well."

Those on level one "can recognize experts, but can't work with them," he added. Those on level two "can't tell real experts from pseudo-experts," and those on level three fail to "even recognize there's expertise in a given field," Felten said.