CEOs air to Obama gripes on snooping

WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama met Tuesday with a group of technology executives including Apple Inc.’s Tim Cook and Yahoo Inc.’s Marissa Mayer as the administration continued to face pressure to curb broad government spying on communications.

Heading into the White House meeting, the executives intended to press Obama to act on the changes to surveillance policies proposed in a letter sent to the president and U.S. lawmakers last week, said a representative of one of the companies who asked not to be identified because he wasn’t authorized to talk about the meeting plans.

None of the company officials made statements afterward. Cook described the meeting as “great” as he left the White House grounds, without making further comment.

The White House said in a statement that the meeting “was an opportunity for the president to hear from CEOs directly as we near completion of our review of signals intelligence programs.”

Apple and Yahoo were among the companies that signed the letter last week, which said the U.S. should take the lead in changing government surveillance practices after revelations that the National Security Agency gained access to phone and Internet data networks to conduct spying.

The companies asked in the letter that the U.S. “ensure that government surveillance efforts are clearly restricted by law, proportionate to the risks, transparent and subject to independent oversight.”

The meeting was convened as the National Security Agency’s sweep of Internet and telephone data is coming under increased scrutiny from Congress and the courts and as Obama is weighing new limits on such surveillance. Technology companies are dealing with the loss of billions of dollars in overseas business, stricter regulations and erosion of consumer trust as a result of revelations about the surveillance.

A federal judge ruled Monday that the agency’s collection of telephone metadata is probably illegal, allowing a lawsuit claiming that it violates the U.S. Constitution to proceed. It marked the first time a district court ruled on the program.

In the White House statement on Tuesday’s meeting, the administration sought to emphasize a part of Tuesday’s discussion that focused on improvements to the healthcare.gov website and how the federal government deals with information technology.

But the top concern of the company leaders was the surveillance, and they didn’t agree to the meeting until the White House included that on the agenda, said a person familiar with the invitation who asked for anonymity to discuss private communications.

“For our part, we are focused on keeping users’ data secure - deploying the latest encryption technology to prevent unauthorized surveillance on our networks, and by pushing back on government requests to ensure that they are legal and reasonable in scope,” the companies said in their Dec. 9 letter.

Documents leaked by fugitive former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the agency collects bulk phone records, such as numbers dialed and call durations, on billions of people worldwide, as well as data moving across the Internet.

The documents also show that the agency gained access to the customer accounts of technology companies, circumvented encryption, and tapped fiber-optic cables as part of its surveillance programs, according to reports in The Washington Post, The New York Times and British newspaper The Guardian.

The president on Friday received a classified report from an advisory committee that recommended the government continue collecting bulk records on every U.S. phone call with new restrictions to protect privacy, an administration official familiar with the report said.

The panel also suggested the imposition of stricter standards before allowing the government to search the data, which it said should be retained by telecommunications companies or a third-party organization instead of the National Security Agency.

Also at the meeting, according to the White House, were Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google Inc.; Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook Inc.; Dick Costolo, chief executive officer of Twitter Inc.; Brad Smith, general counsel at Microsoft Corp.; and Erika Rottenberg, vice president and general counsel of LinkedIn Corp.

Those companies also signed the statement on curbing government surveillance.

“This summer’s revelations highlighted the urgent need to reform government surveillance practices worldwide,” the companies wrote in their statement.

“Recent revelations about government surveillance activities have shaken the trust of our users,” Mayer said in the joint statement. “And it is time for the U.S. government to act to restore the confidence of citizens around the world.”

She said the backlash over U.S. spying threatens to balkanize the Internet as countries adopt different standards to thwart surveillance, according to an industry official who was briefed on the meeting and asked to remain anonymous because the discussion was private.

Schmidt began the meeting by going over five principles supported by the companies in changing government surveillance programs, including limiting collection of user information and transparency about government demands, the industry official said.

Google declined to comment because the meeting was private, spokesman Niki Fenwick said in an email.

Obama didn’t commit to a course of action to address the companies’ concerns, the official said. The White House said in a statement that Obama “made clear that we will consider their input as well as the input of other outside stakeholders as we finalize our review of signals intelligence programs.”

Obama previously has defended the National Security Agency’s work as necessary to prevent another terrorist attack, while also saying he will propose some limits to guard against unwarranted snooping in Americans’ private affairs.

Others who met with Obama include Chad Dickerson, CEO of Etsy Inc.; Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix Inc.; Drew Houston, CEO of Dropbox Inc.; Burke Norton, chief legal officer of Salesforce.com Inc.; Mark Pincus, chairman of Zynga Inc.; Shervin Pishevar, co-CEO of Sherpa Global; Brian Roberts, CEO of Comcast Corp. and Randall Stephenson, CEO of AT&T Inc., according to a list provided by the White House.

The White House said the president also had on his agenda a discussion about how the government can work with technology companies to bolster economic growth.

Meanwhile, the Department of Health and Human Services announced Tuesday that a former executive at Microsoft is assuming oversight of the Obama administration’s efforts to repair the healthcare.gov website.

Kurt DelBene, who most recently served as president of the Microsoft Office Division, will take over from Jeffrey Zeints, a management expert whom the president asked to rescue the site after its disastrous rollout Oct. 1.

Zeints is widely credited with helping to make the site more functional, allowing tens of thousands of Americans to select health insurance plans on marketplaces created by the president’s 2010 health law.

Over the past 2½ months, federal officials and private contractors have dramatically cut errors and improved performance on the site, but insurance companies and others say there are lingering problems with the enrollment system.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in a blog post Tuesday that DelBene will begin work today and has agreed to serve at least through the first half of next year.

“First, Kurt will provide management expertise, operations oversight, and critical advice on additional enrollment channels, field operations, marketing and communications,” Sebelius wrote.

“Second, Kurt will execute the plan in place so that we can ensure the site’s performance is strong through the close of open enrollment on March 31, 2014. This will include a focus on increasing system stability, redundancy and capacity, and building on improvements to the user interface, while continuing to prioritize security and privacy issues in line with industry best practices.”

The department would not say how much DelBene will be paid, but an administration official said he would effectively do the work without pay as he intends to return his salary to the government.

DelBene is married to Rep. Suzan DelBene, a first-term Democrat from Washington state.

Information for this article was contributed by Margaret Talev, Todd Shields, Chris Strohm, Michael C. Bender, Michael Callahan, Brian Womack, Pui- Wing Tam and Sarah Frier of Bloomberg News; and by Noam N. Levy of Tribune Washington Bureau.