President huddles with NSA reform panel

President Obama is meeting Wednesday morning with members of the panel he created to examine the government’s controversial surveillance programs.

{mosads}The president will meet with the group in the Situation Room, less than a week after the White House said it had received a report that included “more than 40” surveillance reform recommendations.

The administration is now conducting its own review of the report to decide which suggestions to implement. The president is expected to announce those reforms in January, and the administration has promised to release the review group’s full report.

“The president is grateful to the group — Richard Clarke, Michael Morell, Geoffrey Stone, Cass Sunstein and Peter Swire — for devoting themselves to this effort over the past several months and providing thoughtful input for the administration to consider as we conclude the ongoing interagency review of signals intelligence collection, being led by the White House,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said Tuesday.

“The review group’s report draws on the group members’ considerable expertise in intelligence, counterterrorism, civil liberties, law and privacy matters, and on their consultations with the U.S. government privacy and civil liberties advocates in the private sector.”

The meeting comes just a day after top tech executives visiting the White House pressed the president to curb the surveillance programs at the National Security Agency. They said the fallout from the spying is threatening their businesses and the broader economy.

Senior White House adviser Valerie Jarrett said Wednesday that “99 percent” of that meeting was dedicated to the surveillance programs, which include the collection of Internet “metadata” from people overseas.

Following the meeting, technology companies issued a one-sentence statement calling on Obama to “move aggressively” to implement reforms limiting the surveillance programs.

“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 companies said.

Companies have complained that the data mining programs have hurt consumer trust in their services and led users to flee their networks.

Separately, a federal court judge on Monday that the administration’s phone surveillance program appeared to be unconstitutional. The judge’s order has been stayed pending appeals.

The Justice Department has said that it believes the program will ultimately be upheld as constitutional, and that it was undertaking a legal review of the ruling.