WASHINGTON — President Obama invited Silicon Valley to the White House to discuss his health-care plan — but the 15 leading high-tech executives took the opportunity to complain about NSA spying.
Obama kicked off Tuesday’s Roosevelt Room summit by focusing on efforts to repair the troubled Healthcare.Gov Web site.
But most of the two-hour-plus meeting that followed was devoted to the executives — many of them big political supporters of Obama and donors to his campaigns — asking him to rein in the NSA.
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer warned Obama that the spy scandal could force countries around the world to adopt different anti-snooping standards and divide the Internet.
Obama didn’t make a commitment in response, according to an industry official.
Afterwards, the two sides made it sound like they were attending different meetings.
On Monday, when a federal judge declared the massive NSA program unconstitutional, the White House announced that the subject of the summit was ObamaCare.
Secondarily, the White House statement added: “The meeting will also address national security and the economic impacts of unauthorized intelligence disclosures.”
But after the meeting, hosted by Obama and Vice President Biden, the executives issued their own terse statement, which didn’t even mention the new health plan.
“We appreciated the opportunity to share directly with the president our principles on government surveillance and we urge him to move aggressively on reform,” it said.
One executive told The Guardian, “There’s only one subject that people really want to discuss right now.”
Obama began the summit by joking that he envied the Machiavellian House Majority Whip played by Kevin Spacey on Netflix’s “House of Cards.”
He was heard asking Netflix CEO Reed Hastings if he’d brought any “advance copies” of the show. Hastings laughed and invited Obama to appear in a cameo role on the show.
“I wish things were that ruthlessly efficient,” Obama joked. Of Spacey’s character he added, “This guy’s getting a lot of stuff done.”
With Bloomberg News