Technology company executives have pressed US President Barack Obama to rein in the US government’s electronic spying after a court dealt a blow to the administration’s surveillance practices.
Top executives from Apple, Google, Yahoo! , Netflix, Comcast, AT&T, Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook and other companies met privately for more than two hours with Obama and top White House aides.
The session came as Obama and his national security team decide what recommendations to adopt from an outside panel’s review on constraining the activities of the US National Security Agency (NSA) without compromising national security.
The White House had trumpeted the meeting as a chance to talk up progress made in repairing the government’s healthcare website after its botched rollout generated a political firestorm and sent Obama’s job approval rating tumbling.
But in a brief statement released after the session, the tech companies focused solely on government surveillance, not healthcare.
“We appreciated the opportunity to share directly with the President our principles on government surveillance that we released last week and we urge him to move aggressively on reform,” the technology companies said in their statement.
The NSA’s practices essentially made the companies partners in sweeping government surveillance efforts against private citizens.
Eight tech companies launched a campaign a week ago asking for governments to reform surveillance practices to protect privacy, writing an open letter to Obama and Congress on the issue.
They said revelations by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden had highlighted an urgent need to reform government surveillance practices worldwide.
A representative from one of the companies, who asked not to be identified, said the White House had wanted to meet to discuss the HealthCare.gov website. The invitations were sent before the White House received the tech companies’ letter.
The main draw for the tech companies was the opportunity to press the case on the need for more transparency on the bulk data collected.
A senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, described the meeting as constructive and “not at all contentious”. Obama and a clutch of his top advisers – including national security adviser Susan Rice and counter-terrorism aide Lisa Monaco – listened closely to the company executives’ ideas and concerns, the official added.
Documents provided by Snowden showed a US surveillance court had secretly approved the collection of raw daily phone records in the US. Other revelations have included reports that US monitoring extended to some foreign leaders including German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Obama is due to announce next month what steps he will take to roll back the sweeping surveillance practices.
The White House said after the tech meeting the President and the executives discussed the national security and economic impacts of unauthorised intelligence disclosures as Obama nears completion on his intelligence review.
“The President made clear his belief in an open, free and innovative internet and listened to the group’s concerns and recommendations, and made clear that we will consider their input as well as the input of other outside stakeholders as we finalise our review of signals-intelligence programs,” the White House said in a statement.
Adding to the pressure on Obama was a federal judge’s ruling on Monday that the US government’s gathering of US phone records is likely unlawful.
“I cannot imagine a more ‘indiscriminate’ and ‘arbitrary invasion’ than this systematic and high-tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every single citizen,” US District Judge Richard Leon wrote in his ruling.
Source: Reuters
