[Infowarrior] - Obama to meet again with tech CEOs about NSA

[Richard Forno]

Barack Obama to meet again with tech CEOs about NSA
By: Tony Romm
March 20, 2014 11:40 PM EDT
http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=B299CF88-2C1C-41A4-9377-2F784EF6EE64

President Barack Obama will huddle with “tech CEOs” on Friday to “continue his dialogue with them on the issues of privacy, technology, and intelligence,” according to a White House official.

The Obama administration declined to provide a full list of chief executives who will be attending the meeting, which the White House first revealed on the president’s schedule earlier Thursday night. But industry sources later indicated that Google, Facebook and Yahoo, among many others, have received invites — and Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg is slated to join the sit-down, according to one of the sources.

The meeting comes days after Zuckerberg called Obama personally to voice his displeasure with the latest round of NSA revelations. “Unfortunately, it seems like it will take a very long time for true full reform,” Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post on March 13. He stressed the U.S. government needed to be “much more transparent about what they’re doing.”

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer — who attended a meeting with Obama and other tech leaders to talk surveillance in December — was among the CEOs invited to this Friday’s session. But she ultimately couldn’t make the trip on short notice, industry sources said.

Google, Facebook and Yahoo — and many other tech giants involved in the surveillance battle in Washington — did not immediately return calls for comment.

The meeting comes at a critical juncture in the NSA reform debate. The president soon will announce the future of the phone metadata program, as he promised in a January speech, while the Hill is racing toward a series of new bills that could refine existing surveillance programs before some of those authorities expire.

Moreover, the White House recently has commenced a comprehensive look at the intersection of big data and privacy, a process that’s directly impacted top tech companies and their trade associations. And Obama’s fiscal-year 2015 budget specifically calls for the creation of an Internet-policy focused arm of the Commerce Department, though the administration has not yet provided further details on what that effort entails.


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