President Obama meets with tech CEOs over NSA spying

SAN FRANCISCO -- Six technology executives including Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg and Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt met with President Obama on Friday to discuss National Security Agency spying in the wake of revelations that the agency may have infected millions of computers around the world with malware.

Also at the meeting were CEOs Reed Hastings of Netflix, Drew Houston of Dropbox, Alex Karap of Palantir Technologies and Aaron Levie of Box.

The CEOs of Yahoo, Microsoft, LinkedIn and Twitter could not make the meeting.

The meeting comes ahead of a March 28 deadline for recommendations on how to end the NSA’s collection of bulk phone records.

Internet companies are closely following the issue because it could affect how the government intercepts Internet data as well.

Zuckerberg recently voiced the jointly held frustration of the tech CEOs that government spying is hurting their businesses around the world.

His comments came after reports surfaced that the NSA may have infected computers with malware by posing as a Facebook server to gain access to users’ data. The allegations were in documents leaked by former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden to the online news site the Intercept.

“The U.S. government should be the champion for the Internet, not a threat,” Zuckerberg wrote in a recent post on his Facebook page. “They need to be much more transparent about what they’re doing, or otherwise people will believe the worst.”

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