Tech executives press Obama to reform surveillance practices

Technology company executives pressed 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 President Obama and top White House aides.

The session came as President Obama and his national security team decide what recommendations to adopt from an outside panel's review on constraining the activities of the National Security Agency without compromising U.S. 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 and we urge him to move aggressively on reform," the technology companies said. The NSA's practices essentially made the companies partners in sweeping government surveillance efforts against private citizens.