Obama to meet again with tech leaders over surveillance

Last December, President Obama met at the White House with top tech execs including Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer.

(Credit:Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

President Obama plans to meet with a select group of technology CEOs on Friday to discuss "issues of privacy, technology, and intelligence," a White House official told Politico.

A full list of chief executives was not made available by the White House, but industry sources told Politico that Google, Facebook, and Yahoo had been invited to the meeting. CNET has contacted those companies for comment on their participation and will update this report when we learn more.

It's the second such meeting Obama has held with Silicon Valley executives in recent months over controversial US electronic surveillance programs. During a meeting in December with the president over ways to improve the beleaguered Healthcare.gov Web site, a collection of tech leaders that included Apple CEO Tim Cook, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, and Twitter CEO Dick Costolo urged the president to move swiftly on reforming the federal government's surveillance programs.

One of the chief executives expected to attend Friday's meeting is Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, who one week ago said he telephoned Obama to express his frustration over the National Security Agency's surveillance practices. Zuckerberg's call came after documents leaked by whistle-blower Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA uses an automated system called Turbine to hack into millions of computers.

A frequent critic of the NSA, Zuckerberg wrote in an update to his Facebook page that the company he founded was working to identify flaws in others' services to "keep the Internet strong" but said that the US government needed to be "much more transparent about what they're doing."

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"I've been so confused and frustrated by the repeated reports of the behavior of the US government. When our engineers work tirelessly to improve security, we imagine we're protecting you against criminals, not our own government," Zuckerberg said.

Google CEO Larry Page added his criticism on Wednesday during the TED conference in Vancouver, saying that it was "tremendously disappointing that the government sort of secretly did all these things and didn't tell us."

"I don't think we can have a democracy if we have to protect our users from the government

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Obama Says Intelligence Director Who Fibbed To Congress “Should Have Been More Careful”

President Obama diplomatically defended embattled Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who is accused of lying to Congress about the existence of the National Security Agency’s spying program.

“I think that Jim Clapper himself would acknowledge, and has acknowledged, that he should have been more careful about how he responded,” the president told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “His concern was that he had a classified program that he couldn’t talk about and he was in an open hearing in which he was asked, he was prompted to disclose a program, and so he felt that he was caught between a rock and a hard place.”

Clapper flat-out denied to Senator Ron Wyden, during congressional testimony, that the NSA collected “any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans.”

Clapper later apologized, but that hasn’t stopped critics like Senator Rand Paul from calling for Clapper’s resignation and potential prosecution.

“I find really that Clapper lying to Congress is probably more injurious to our intelligence capabilities than anything Snowden did, because Clapper has damaged the credibility of the entire intelligence apparatus, and I’m not sure what to believe anymore when they come to Congress,” Paul told CNN.

Support for prosecuting Clapper is mixed, which means that in the current Congressional environment any sanctions would be difficult to pass.

It certainly doesn’t send a good message to future intelligence officials, though, that they can essentially say whatever they want in public and don’t have to suffer anything harsher than a slap on the wrist.

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The Obama Administration’s Frustrating NSA Week

While Congress and the nation at large have done little except talk and embark on preliminary legal skirmishes regarding the United States’ mass surveillance practices, the forces in favor of reform and change had a decent week. The Obama administration did not.

The president’s speech one week ago on proposed changes to NSA practices was met with skepticism. A sample headline detailing the response: “Jon Stewart skewers Obama’s vague, rambling NSA speech.” The Post was sedate but firm: “Obama goal for quick revamp of NSA program may be unworkable, some U.S. officials fear.”

If the president had hoped that his reform proposals — including mild curtailment of the phone metadata program, some sort of protection for the privacy of foreign citizens and the like — would placate those opposed to the NSA, he was certainly disappointed.

Praise could be found for the president, but in the form of a backhanded compliment. Republican Rep. Peter King was content with the speech, because it didn’t seem to propose meaningful change:

“I didn’t think any changes were called for, any so-called reforms, but the fact is the ones that the President made today are really minimal.

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Weekly Roundup: Google acquires Nest, President Obama speaks out on surveillance and more!

You might say the week is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workweek, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Weekly Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past seven days -- all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.

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Tech leaders push Obama to 'move aggressively' on surveillance reform

Silicon Valley elite ask the Obama administration for swift changes in the federal government's spy programs after a meeting at the White House.

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Tech sector CEOs meet with Obama and Biden to demand NSA reform

It's not been a particularly good year for the National Security Agency, what with Edward Snowden revealing how pervasive its domestic surveillance is, and the outrage and concern those revelations engendered in US citizens. Naturally, many tech companies were also upset, upon learning that the NSA was snooping their systems too. Today, many of the tech industry's heavy hitters had a two and a half hour sit-down with President Obama and VP Biden, and used that time to demand that the White House take steps to reform the NSA's policies (Read: limit its power and provide independent oversight and greater transparency about its actions).

Among the scheduled attendees were Apple's Tim Cook, Twitter's Dick Costolo, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, and AT&T CEO and Chairman Randall Stephenson. The contents of the discussion remain a mystery, though the Guardian did acquire a statement issued by the group regarding the meeting: "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 ball's in your court, Mr.President. Lets see if you give the people and the tech center what they really want for Christmas: freedom from Uncle Sam's prying eyes.

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Source: The Guardian

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