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takyon writes:

Representatives from Google, Apple, and Vodafone have attended a high-level and closed-door meeting at a mansion in Oxfordshire. On the agenda: the state of government surveillance and what to do about it:

The attendee list is impressive. Key speakers included former acting CIA boss John McLaughlin; former White House deputy chief of staff Mona Sutphen, the current and former heads of the UK's GCHQ; the current or former heads of intelligence agencies in Britain, France, Canada, Australia, and Germany; and the EU's counter terrorism coordinator Gilles de Kerchove.

The tech industry also sent representatives, including Google's legal director Richard Salgado; Jane Horvath, Apple's senior director of global privacy; and Apple's product security and privacy manager Erik Neuenschwander, as well as Vodafone's external affairs director Matthew Kirk. Some members of the press were also included on the roster. Duncan Campbell, who publishes hard-hitting exposés of government spying (including for The Register), David Ignatius from the Washington Post, the BBC's security correspondent Gordon Corera, and the historian Professor Timothy Garton Ash.

All participants were bound by Chatham House rules; an agreement not to publicly attribute comments to particular participants. The three-day meeting was held in an English country house, and no public minutes of the conversations will ever be published.

[...] Duncan Campbell told Snowden newsletter The Intercept that the meeting is a very positive sign and, while not going into too much detail, said that the conversations were very encouraging – perhaps the revelations from whistleblower Edward Snowden are having a positive effect. "Away from the fetid heat of political posturing and populist headlines, I heard some unexpected and surprising comments from senior intelligence voices, including that 'cold winds of transparency' had arrived and were here to stay," he said. "Perhaps to many participants' surprise, there was general agreement across broad divides of opinion that Snowden – love him or hate him – had changed the landscape; and that change towards transparency, or at least 'translucency' and providing more information about intelligence activities affecting privacy, was both overdue and necessary."