Valley tech leaders

Silicon Valley tech leaders to Obama: “Aggressively” reform NSA

By Joe Garofoli From The Chronicle

Hack through the officialspeak regurgitated after a handful of tech leaders met with President Obama in the Roosevelt Room Tuesday, and you get the distinct impression that the techies wanted to talk about one thing and the President, another.

The techies — as stated in their open letter last week — want the government to limit the government’s ability to mine their users’ information as part of federal surveillance programs. On the top of everybody’s mind is that federal court judge’s ruling Monday that the program isn’t just unconstitutional, it would have made James Madison cry. Or close to it.

Sounds like the President preferred to talk about his new health care program.

In a joint statement, the group — dominated by the leaders of Bay Area companies like Facebook, Google and Apple — said:

“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.”
Remember, this group isn’t going to get TOO ticked at Obama. Many of them are into him for a LOT of coin/hosted big-dollar fundraisers for him. (This means you, Marissa Mayer.) Silicon Valley types gave more to Obama than any of his Hollywood or New York pals did, as The Chronicle reported last fall.

While the techies emphasized how they were ticked — er, urged the president to move aggressively — on surveillance, the White House’s sanitized version of the session emphasized a discussion of how Healthcare.gov is improving. Obama also threw the tech titans a bone Tuesday by hiring one of them — Microsoft’s Kurt DelBene — to lead the troubled health care website. Bill Gates said Tuesday that DelBene has “a track record of successfully managing complex large-scale technology projects.” And he has a master’s degree from Stanford.

Might have been a good guy to hire LAST December, no? But we digress.

The official blah-blah-blah on Tuesday’s rumble in the Roosevelt from the White House:

Today, the President and the Vice President met with executives from leading tech companies in the Roosevelt Room. The group discussed a number of issues of shared importance to the federal government and the tech sector, including the progress being made to improve performance and capacity issues with HeathCare.Gov. The President also announced that Kurt DelBene, who most recently served as president of the Microsoft Office Division, will succeed Jeff Zients as Senior Advisor to Secretary Sebelius who will lead our ongoing efforts to improve HealthCare.gov and the Health Insurance Marketplace starting this Wednesday. The group discussed the challenges surround federal IT procurement. The President made clear his continued focus on improving the way we deliver technology to maximize innovation, efficiency and customer service, and encouraged the CEOs to continue to share their ideas on how to do so. Finally, the group discussed the national security and economic impacts of unauthorized intelligence disclosures. This was an opportunity for the President to hear from CEOs directly as we near completion of our review of signals intelligence programs, building on the feedback we’ve received from the private sector in recent weeks and months. 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 finalize our review of signals intelligence programs.