Bill Gates, the billionaire philanthropist and a founder of Microsoft, has injected his voice into the fierce debate over how far Silicon Valley should go in assisting the government on criminal investigations.
There’s no easy answer, he said during aninterview with Bloomberg News, but the discussion is welcome.
In an interview published Tuesday morning with The Financial Times, the newspaper portrayed Mr. Gates as siding with the government in its attempt to force Apple to help investigators extract data from an iPhone that belonged to an attacker in the December mass shooting in San Bernardino, Calif.
“This is a specific case where the government is asking for access to information,” Mr. Gates told the newspaper. “They are not asking for some general thing, they are asking for a particular case.”
Later, speaking with Bloomberg News, he said the newspaper had gone too far in characterizing his allegiances.
“I do believe that with the right safeguards there are cases where the government, on our behalf, like stopping terrorism which could get worse in the future, that that is valuable,” he said. “But striking that balance — clearly the government’s taken information historically and used it in ways that we didn’t expect going all the way back, say, to the F.B.I. under J. Edgar Hoover.”
Since Apple challenged a court ruling on extracting data from the phone last week, most technology industry leaders have either lined up behind Apple or stayed silent. Several prominent Silicon Valley leaders — including Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive; Jack Dorsey, the co-founder and chief executive of Twitter; and Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive — have cautiously indicated support for Apple’s position that the order posed an unacceptable threat to user privacy.
Apple’s chief executive, Timothy D. Cook, has forcefully argued that the order by a federal magistrate judge to assist the government in getting data from the accused terrorist’s phone would open a so-called back door to consumer phones that could obliterate the privacy protections.
“At stake is the data security of hundreds of millions of law-abiding people, and setting a dangerous precedent that threatens everyone’s civil liberties,” Mr. Cook said in an internal email sent to Apple employees this week.
The government has portrayed its request as limited in nature, a one-time demand focused on a single device, the work phone issued to Syed Rizwan Farook, one of the San Bernardino gunmen who killed 14 people late last year.
The order was issued on Feb. 16 byMagistrate Judge Sheri Pym of Federal District Court for the District of Central California. Apple has until Friday to file a formal brief opposing the order to cooperate with the F.B.I.
The director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, James B. Comey Jr., made the case in a public statement on Sunday. “We simply want the chance, with a search warrant, to try to guess the terrorist’s passcode without the phone essentially self-destructing and without it taking a decade to guess correctly,” he said. “That’s it. We don’t want to break anyone’s encryption or set a master key loose on the land.”
In a video interview on Monday with The Associated Press, Mr. Gates said, “It’s a good debate to be having. I’m hopeful that government safeguards, and it varies country to country, will be enough that people will feel like this can work.”
He added: “The courts are going to rule, and it will be good to have that precedent. I do think people want the government to act on their behalf that they feel like the safeguards are there.”
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