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 Obama will make the case that the private sector and government need
to do more to share data about cyber threats in a speech before a
crowd of more than 1,000 people from corporations as well as privacy
and civil liberties advocates.
"By getting this right, businesses and people around the world will
continue to want to store data with American companies, do business
with American retailers, bank with American firms and carry around
American smartphones and other devices," Jeff Zients, director of
the White House National Economic Council, told reporters.
Obama will give a speech at 11:20 a.m. PST (1820 GMT).
He will also meet privately with a small group of business leaders,
part of an effort to mend fences with tech companies still angry
over damage to their businesses when government surveillance
practices were exposed by former National Security Agency contractor
Edward Snowden.
Upset about the lack of reforms to those practices, the CEOS of
Google Inc, Facebook Inc and Yahoo Inc are not attending the
Stanford conference. But Apple Inc's chief executive, Tim Cook, will
give an address.
A long roster of other CEOs will attend, including those from Bank
of America, American International Group and Visa.
Obama is set to sign an executive order aimed at encouraging
companies to share more cyber threat data with the government and
each other.
And he will urge Congress to pass legislation that would offer
liability protection to companies sharing cyber threat data.
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"I think a lot of companies are still uneasy about jumping into the
debate now," said Michael Gottlieb, a former associate White House
counsel for Obama.
"Unless more work is done to give a lot of these companies greater
comfort, they may not be as enthusiastic about supporting those
bills, so you may not get the level of Republican support that you
need as a result," said Gottlieb, who now specializes in data
privacy and cyber security law at Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP in
Washington, D.C.
On the flip side, privacy and consumer rights advocates want to make
sure companies are held accountable for data breaches that could
have been averted, Gottlieb noted.
(Additional reporting by Joseph Menn, Jim Finkle and Warren Strobel;
Writing by Roberta Rampton; Editing by Leslie Adler)
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