The Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Senate Homeland & Governmental Affairs Committee is holding a hearing on May 15 at 9:30 am ET entitled “Online Advertising and Hidden Hazards to Consumer Security and Data Privacy“.

Not only should the Subcommittee be focused on consumer security–they should also be concerned with advertiser fraud.

The Subcommittee will no doubt be regaled with excuses from the online advertising business trying to explain away how it is that sites selling all manner of illegal stuff are publishing ads by Fortune 500 companies–but none of the biggest advertising exchanges have anything to do with it.  And those exchanges just happen to be owned and operated by the two biggest search engines:  Google and Yahoo.

The witnesses include Alex Stamos, Chief Information Security Officer, Yahoo! Inc. and George F. Salem, Senior Product Manager, Google, Inc.  Perhaps they can explain how it is…