US Commerce Department is advising the president on NSA spying reform

American tech companies whose customers and networks have been compromised by the National Security Agency's sweeping surveillance efforts may have a new sympathetic ear inside Washington: the Commerce Department.

"We've been talking to various constituencies within the business community, we understand their issues [with NSA spying]," said US Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker, speaking at CES 2014 in Las Vegas, the first Commerce Secretary to do an open Q&A at the gadget conference. Sec Pritzker also said that her division is "part of the conversation" going on now inside the White House about reviewing the NSA's surveillance powers. "We very much have a voice at the table," Sec Pritzker added, saying that President Obama "would make something public shortly." Sec Pritzker didn't elaborate on what specific reforms to NSA spying the president was leaning towards, but the one major reform recommended by the review panel – ending bulk collection of Americans' mobile phone records, which includes numbers called, dates, and times — isn't likely to happen anytime soon. That's because the NSA just won court approval to keep collecting all that metadata for the next 90 days. But Sec Prtizker did say that there needed to be balance between security and privacy, and that the White House was even considering quantifying the economic losses surveillance might have on businesses. Sec Pritzker didn't address concerns that the National Institute for the Standards of Technology (NIST), a Commerce Department agency that sets the country's cryptography standards, may have deliberately left standards weak to allow for NSA spying. But during her wide-ranging talk, Sec Pritzker also addressed a number of tech community hot button issues.