Chip Bayers

Special to USA TODAY

Tech lobbies Obama on immigration%2C data

CEOs included some of president%27s biggest financial backers

Want to hire and move foreign nationals without border barriers

NEW YORK -- The great irony of Tuesday's meeting between President Obama and tech CEOs was that, in its focus on the National Security Agency's Internet spying, it signaled how much the Silicon Valley mind-set long ago moved beyond identifying with the nation the agency was purporting to protect.

The attendees were not, after all, from the tech world's wide-eyed libertarian crowd, whose more extreme elements indulge in dreamy talk about subjects like "seasteading" — creating new homes for themselves on floating tech islands in the ocean, beyond the borders of any state control. Tuesday's White House visitors list included the sort of socially liberal mainstream Democrats who now make up the bulk of the industry these days, with several of them among the president's biggest financial supporters in both his campaigns.

And yet for them, the borderless world isn't tomorrow's dream but today's reality — a reality which must be continually improved and expanded, as explained the open letter to Washington on government surveillance which eight of the companies released last week.

Just look at the domestic political priorities of the tech industry, nearly all of which are focused on reducing the burdens of excessive nationalism.

One of the meetings biggest headliners, for example, Apple CEO Tim Cook, runs a company famous for using global financial manipulations to declare itself independent of any corporate tax jurisdictions it finds onerous. Apple and a multitude of American corporations have been lobbying for years now to be given the ability to repatriate profits they have currently parked beyond the reach of the IRS at a tax rate lower than the current rules allow.

Meanwhile, Facebook, represented at the meeting by COO and longtime Beltway insider Sheryl Sandberg, has been one of the most aggressive advocates for immigration reforms which would remove border barriers in hiring — the thinking being that an engineer from India, should be able to take a position at Facebook's Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters as easily as she can at its facility in Bangalore.

All of the companies represented at Tuesday's meeting also want to avoid being told where and how they can store their users' data — and the NSA scandal touched off by the leaks of Edward Snowden has made that more difficult. Brazil represents one of the Internet industries biggest growth opportunities, for example — and one of its biggest NSA headaches. Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff — identified by Snowden as a target of NSA spying — has proposed requiring any company operating in Brazil be required to store its customers' personal information in country. That set off alarm bells inside every Web company.

Back in September, Sandberg's boss, CEO Mark Zuckerberg, speaking to an audience of his peers at a tech industry conference, used sarcasm to sum up the prevailing industry attitude toward the NSA revelations — and, implicitly, the industry's prevailing view. "Oh that's really going to help companies that are trying to serve people around the world," he said.

A generation ago such attitudes might have been dismissed as dystopian, and the sarcasm and satire would have been directed at Zuckerberg for expressing it — as in Paddy Chayefsky script for the 1976 film Network, in which Ned Beatty's Mr. Jensen lectures Peter Finch's "Mad Prophet of the Airwaves" the anti-corporate Howard Beale that, "There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars."

But in today's tech-driven global economy, where the Internet is the greatest border-eliminating tool ever invented, we can see it is Jensen, not Beale, who is the prophet, and one who is anything but mad.

Jensen would be unsurprised to hear, for example, that Cisco sales chief Robert Lloyd had attributed weak emerging market sales figures in a quarterly earnings report to the NSA revelations, which may have "caused a number of customers to pause and reevaluate." Or that a group of IBM shareholders had filed a lawsuit in a New York federal court declaring that the company's association with the NSA "presented a material risk to the company's sales, and in particular … sales in China that were of critical importance to investors."

Such fiduciary responsibilities also explain why the tech CEOs will, on the one hand, fight government intrusion on their customers' private data only to the point that it doesn't interfere with their companies' own ability to exploit that same data.

The technology industry's aggressive Tuesday lobbying of Obama, combined with the federal district court ruling on Monday which cast doubt on both the constitutionality and the effectiveness of the NSA spying, obviously moved the needle: late on Wednesday the White House rushed out a list of recommendations for fixing the NSA program that may satisfy at least some of their concerns. Those recommendations had been submitted only Sunday by an advisory panel appointed by Obama in August; the panel's report originally wasn't expected to be released until early 2014, when Obama is expected to decide which of the recommendations he'll follow, if any.

Protecting individual rights is one thing. Hitting revenue goals is another entirely. Silicon Valley just wants him to remember the two are now inextricably linked.