President Obama Meets With Tim Cook and Other Tech Execs to Discuss Government Surveillance

Politco reports that President Barack Obama and technology executives, including Apple CEO Tim Cook, met this week to discuss the subject of government surveillance.

MacRumors:

In June, reports surfaced of a top secret surveillance program named PRISM, which according to leaked presentation slides was claimed to allow the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) direct access to user data on servers across a wide spectrum of Internet companies, including Apple.

Atendees included Apple CEO Tim Cook, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson, Google computer scientist Vint Cerf and other representatives form the tech industry and civil liberties organizations.

The meeting was reported to be confidential, and was the second such meeting this week that government representatives met with technology industry representatives to take a look at mainstream privacy issues.

The earlier, off-the-record talks concentrated on the NSA PRISM controversy, and commercial privacy issues such as online tracking of consumers.

The U.S. government, Apple, and other companies were sued earlier this year over alleged privacy violations resulting from their alleged involvement in the NSA’s PRISM intelligence program.

Chris Hauk

Chris is a Senior Editor at Mactrast. He lives somewhere in the deep Southern part of America, and yes, he has to pump in both sunshine and the Internet.