White House mum on tech snooping ahead of Cameron meeting

If President Obama has an opinion on whether technology companies like Facebook, Google and Apple should be allowed to encrypt communications to prevent government snooping, the White House isn’t saying.

British Prime Minister David Cameron is expected to pressure the president to ask technology companies to more closely monitor their content and share potential terror threats with government intelligence agencies when the pair meet Thursday and Friday at the White House.

{mosads}Press secretary Josh Earnest acknowledged that Obama was expecting Cameron to raise the issue, but said the White House wouldn’t be explaining where he came down on the request ahead of their meeting.

“Setting aside our close partnership and cooperation with the Brits on this issue, we have our own vested interest here in striking the right balance between … protecting our national security, but also protecting the privacy of our citizens,” Earnest said. “And this is complicated work, but it’s something that this government and this president are focused on.”

Earnest went on to suggest that it was a policy question that was “rapidly evolving,” and “something that we’re going to have to work through.”

“It means that there are going to be lots of conversations about this between the United States and our allies and partners around the globe,” Earnest said. “There also are going to be a lot of conversations between senior administration officials and technology companies here in the United States as we try to strike this right balance.”

Cameron’s government has said they want companies to include a back door to encryption technologies so government agencies can go in and read messages.

“Are we going to allow a means of communications which it simply isn’t possible to read?” Cameron said in a speech Monday, according to The Wall Street Journal. “No. We must not.”

Technology companies have moved aggressively to build new privacy protections into their products in the aftermath of revelations of the National Security Agency’s massive surveillance program in documents leaked by former contractor Edward Snowden.

Apple’s latest version of the iPhone blocs law enforcement from data without a user’s password, and Facebook’s WhatsApp messaging service uses encryption that cannot be unscrambled.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly criticized Obama on the issue, arguing the government’s use of social network data alienated users and stifled innovation.