Obama Urges Tech Companies to Cooperate on Internet Security

In a speech at Stanford University, President Obama introduced an executive order that will promote more information sharing to combat cyberthreats.

PALO ALTO, Calif. — Declaring that the Internet has become the “Wild Wild West” with consumers and industries as top targets, President Obama on Friday called for a new era of cooperation between the government and the private sector to defeat a range of fast-evolving online threats.

Mr. Obama signed an executive order urging companies to join information-sharing hubs to exchange data on online threats — and, in some cases, to receive classified information from the government. But the order stopped short of exempting the companies from liability if the data they collected and shared led to legal action.

Only legislation, which Mr. Obama has tried and failed to get through Congress for three years, can exempt the companies from such liability. Many companies outside the financial industry have been reluctant to share data without such a law in place.

Not mentioned at the event was the issue that has most roiled companies in Silicon Valley. Disclosures by Mr. Snowden showed that intelligence agencies were surreptitiously siphoning off customer data from companies like Google and Yahoo as it flowed internally between their data centers.

That information created an atmosphere of distrust that executives say will make information-sharing much more difficult.

“The tricky thing with information-sharing is that it is about trust,” Eric Grosse, Google’s vice president of security, said in an interview earlier this week. “Information-sharing becomes pretty hard to do once trust is lost.”

Mr. Grosse and others conceded that in extreme situations they would provide critical data to law enforcement, such as an impending problem with an aircraft carrier. “When it’s serious, we will do the right thing.” But the government, Mr. Grosse said, “can’t cry wolf.”

The New York Times