US tech executives meet Obama on NSA spying

Executives of a number of large US Internet companies were invited to the White House on Friday to discuss over the issues of privacy and the US government’s spying activities.

The meeting was scheduled to take place in the Oval Office and US President Barack Obama was expected to host tech giant executives including Google chairman Eric Schmidt and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

The meeting comes a few days after Zuckerberg called Obama to express his displeasure with the recent revelations about the National Security Agency’s spying programs.

“The US government should be the champion for the internet, not a threat,” Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post last week, disclosing he had called Obama personally. “They need to be much more transparent about what they’re doing, or otherwise people will believe the worst.”

According to Reuters, other attendees of the White House meeting were Reed Hastings, chief executive officer of Netflix Inc, an online video streaming service, Aaron Levie and Drew Houston, chief executive officers of two online storage and file-sharing companies Box and Dropbox, and Alex Karp, chief executive officer of Palantir Technologies, a data-mining company which is partly supported by the CIA.

Revelations by American whistleblower Edward Snowden that exposed the scope and scale of Washington’s spying activities across the globe altered the US government’s relationship with its own citizens and the rest of the world.

Snowden’s leaks showed, among other things, how the NSA collects phone records of all American citizens and tracks the online activities of all people around the world.

On January 17, Obama delivered a much-anticipated speech at the Department of Justice, introducing some changes to US intelligence-gathering practices. As part of his proposed reforms, Obama suggested that the NSA’s database of phone records should be moved out of government hands and be kept by private phone companies.

However, privacy rights advocates, like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, and tech firms immediately criticized Obama’s proposed reforms, saying they are just half-measures that would leave the spying programs virtually untouched.

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