President Barack Obama is in Silicon Valley today for a summit on cybersecurity.
He’s trying to get more cooperation from tech companies in responding to massive data breaches. But some key players aren’t showing up.
The CEOs of Google, Yahoo and Facebook are skipping the summit.
They’re sending their information security executives to the summit instead. Only Apple’s Tim Cook will be there.
Some analysts say the big tech dogs are staying away because of tensions between the White House and Silicon Valley.
“Most of it comes from the fact that the government wants to have their hands into everything,” says tech analyst Jeff Kagan. “They want to control everything.”
He says specifically, the feds wants backdoor keys to software. The government says it needs the keys to, say, prevent a terrorist attack.
Opinion: Waging war on hackers actually hurts US cybersecurity efforts
But some Silicon Valley giants have protested. Kagan says more government control would hamper innovation.
“I think the government wants to have a hands on approach, and that’s something that would be a death knell to the growth curve that we’ve seen over the last few decades. And that’s the struggle,” he says.
Kagan says it’s a matter of balance. President Obama is proposing a framework companies could use to share information during a major data breach, like we just saw at the insurer, Anthem. He thinks that could help.
The CEOs of American Express, Master Card, Visa and Walgreens are expected at Friday’s summit.
WhiteHouse.gov screwed-up security on same day as the cybersecurity summit
Russell Brandom
While President Obama is at Stanford’s cybersecurity summit, he’s letting his own cybersecurity lapse. Anyone attempting to visit WhiteHouse.gov over HTTPS is currently seeing the error message above, thanks to a kitchen-sink web security error on the part of the White House digital team.
You can see for yourself if you head to WhiteHouse.gov Website.
The error seems to be coming from a Common Name mismatch, essentially a misconfiguration that made the White House’s certificate just suspicious enough to set off Chrome’s, IE’s, and Firefox’s alarms.
As a result, Chrome, IE, and Firefox spent the day blasting out a warning not to trust the White House - Is Snowden right? Awkward!
Source: The Verge
Photo Credit: Kristoffer Tripplaar-Pool/Getty Images
Source: American Public Media’s Marketplace
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Related: Edward Snowden: Cyber War More Damaging To US than Any Other Nation