Industry sources later indicated that Google, Facebook and Yahoo might attend. Obama to meet again with tech CEOs

Top executives from Facebook, Google and other tech giants will huddle Friday with President Barack Obama — a meeting, according to one White House official, that will focus on the “issues of privacy, technology, and intelligence.”

The Obama administration declined to provide a list of those attending the session, which the White House first revealed on the president’s schedule Thursday night. But Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is slated to join the sit-down, according to one industry source, and Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt also plans to attend, according to another source.


The meeting comes days after Zuckerberg called Obama personally to voice his displeasure with the latest round of NSA revelations. “Unfortunately, it seems like it will take a very long time for true full reform,” Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post on March 13. He stressed the U.S. government needed to be “much more transparent about what they’re doing.”

( PHOTOS: Mark Zuckerberg with pols)

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer — who attended a meeting with Obama and other tech leaders to talk surveillance in December — was among the CEOs invited to Friday’s session. But she ultimately couldn’t make the trip on short notice, industry sources said.

Google, Facebook and Yahoo — and many other tech giants involved in the surveillance battle in Washington — declined to comment.

The meeting comes at a critical juncture in the NSA reform debate. The president soon will announce the future of the phone metadata program, as he promised in a January speech, while the Hill is racing toward a series of new bills that could refine existing surveillance programs before some of those authorities expire.

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Moreover, the White House recently has commenced a comprehensive look at the intersection of big data and privacy, a process that’s directly impacted top tech companies and their trade associations. And Obama’s fiscal-year 2015 budget specifically calls for the creation of an Internet-policy focused arm of the Commerce Department, though the administration has not yet provided further details on what that effort entails.

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