Tech Leaders and Obama Find Shared Problem: Fading Public Trust

WASHINGTON - President Obama met with top technology industry executives on Tuesday to discuss two seemingly distinct controversies: a faulty health care website, and the digital surveillance practices of the National Security Agency.

The meeting started with an announcement by Mr. Obama that he was reaching into the ranks of Microsoft, the software giant, to select Kurt DelBene as the next person to run HealthCare.gov. But the focus quickly turned from the health care site to the concerns of Apple, Microsoft, Google and other technology companies about the spying efforts, the latest illustration of the strained relationship between an industry and a White House that had long been close.

For months, leading technology companies have been buffeted by revelations about government spying on their customers' data, which they believe are undermining confidence in their services. The Obama administration has been blasted for the botched rollout of the health site, which prevented many people from signing up for health insurance in the first weeks of the site's introduction, but seem to have been largely repaired since then.

The meeting on Tuesday brought those two issues together into a common forum, and at least partly in the public eye.

'Both sides are saying, 'My biggest issue right now is trust,' ' said Matthew Prince, co-founder and chief executive of CloudFlare, an Internet start-up. 'If you're on the White House side, the issue is they're getting beaten up because they're seen as technically incompetent. On the other side, the tech industry needs the White House right now to give a stern rebuke to the N.S.A. and put in real procedures to rein in a program that feels like it's out of control.'

The meeting of Mr. Obama, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and 15 executives from the likes of Apple, Google, Facebook and Yahoo came a week after those companies and other giants, usually archrivals, united in a public campaign calling for reform in government surveillance practices.

On Monday, a federal district judge ruled that the N.S.A. sweep of data from all Americans' phone calls was unconstitutional, a ruling that added import to the discussions.

'We appreciated the opportunity to share directly with the president our principles on government surveillance that we released last week and we urge him to move aggressively on reform,' the executives said in a statement afterward.

The chief executives invited to the White House included Timothy D. Cook of Apple, Dick Costolo of Twitter, Marissa Mayer of Yahoo, Eric E. Schmidt of Google, Brian L. Roberts of Comcast, Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook, Randall Stephenson of AT&T and Reed Hastings of Netflix. Also there were Bradford L. Smith, executive vice president and general counsel of Microsoft, and Erika Rottenberg, vice president and general counsel of LinkedIn.

The exchange, which both the White House and attendees from the technology industry said was cordial, lasted about two hours, more than twice as long as scheduled.

But even before the meeting, there were some differences about where the discussion would be headed, especially as the White House indicated that the top item on the agenda for discussion be improvements to HealthCare.gov.

'From our perspective, this was all about the N.S.A.,' said one person from the tech industry briefed on the meeting who wasn't authorized to speak publicly about it. 'We all want Healthcare.gov to succeed, but it is not key to our business.'

But Mr. Obama was also there to name Mr. DelBene, a longtime Microsoft executive, as the new fix-it manager of Healthcare.gov. Mr. DelBene, who joined Microsoft in 1992, was president of the company's lucrative Office division for nearly three years.

Mr. DelBene announced his retirement from Microsoft earlier this year, and his last day at the company was Monday. He starts his new job Wednesday, succeeding the initial manager, Jeffrey D. Zients. In February, a month later than initially planned, Mr. Zients will shift to his previously announced job as Mr. Obama's chief White House economic adviser, the director of the National Economic Council.

Mr. DelBene will stay at least through the first half of 2014; his wife, Suzan DelBene, also was a Microsoft executive but was elected in 2012 to Congress as a Democrat representing the Washington State district where Microsoft has its headquarters.

The discussion on Tuesday quickly turned to the controversy over the N.S.A.'s intelligence-gathering, which has mounted since leaks by the former agency contractor Edward J. Snowden began emerging last summer. More recent revelations that the N.S.A. is accessing data from Google and Yahoo services without their knowledge was also discussed, according to technology executives briefed on the meeting who asked not to be named.

The technology companies raised some specific concerns about that the government's spying efforts. Several executives, including Ms. Mayer, the chief executive of Yahoo, expressed concerned that foreign countries may now decide to prevent all the user data generated by users in a foreign country from flowing to the United States, the people said. One such law has been proposed in Brazil. The executives said these laws would significantly hurt their businesses and America's start-up economy.

The administration listened to executives' concerns, but made no commitments, these people said. The one topic the administration seemed most sympathetic to was the companies' call for greater transparency around government surveillance requests, according to these people. It was the one issue everyone in the room seemed most aligned on.

The administration told executives that government action related to N.S.A. surveillance would happen in the new year, but there was no indication of what that meant and more precisely when it would occur.

'This was an opportunity for the president to hear from C.E.O.'s directly,' the White House said in a statement about the meeting, adding, 'The president made clear his belief in an open, free and innovative Internet and listened to the group's concerns and recommendations, and made clear that we will consider their input as well as the input of other outside stakeholders as we finalize our review of signals intelligence programs.'

The meeting reflected a shift in the tech sector's once-close relationship with Mr. Obama, whose 2008 election many industry executives generously supported. After the troubled start of the health care site, the Obama administration tapped a small group of engineers, who took leave from various technology companies to help with the effort. That group included Michael Dickerson, a site reliability engineer at Google who had also worked on Mr. Obama's campaign.

'The government really needs the tech industry to achieve its policy goals,' said Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School. 'They tried on their own with the Washington version of tech and we saw what happened.'

Jackie Calmes reported from Washington and Nick Wingfield from Seattle. Claire Cain Miller and Nicole Perlroth contributed reporting from San Francisco.