Bill Gates has backtracked from earlier comments featured in a recent Financial Times article, carving out a happy middle ground for himself between the two sides of the Apple vs. FBI debate that has rapidly become a fierce public relations battle.
Early Tuesday morning, the Financial Times ran an article on Gates’s stance on the issue, titled, “Bill Gates backs FBI iPhone hack request.” In the article, Gates is quoted as saying, “This is a specific case where the government is asking for access to information. They are not asking for some general thing, they are asking for a particular case.”
“It is no different than [the question of] should anybody ever have been able to tell the phone company to get information, should anybody be able to get at bank records,” Gates told the Financial Times. “Let’s say the bank had tied a ribbon round the disk drive and said, ‘Don’t make me cut this ribbon because you’ll make me cut it many times.’”
Gates then went on to say, “I hope that we have that debate so that the safeguards are built and so people do not opt — and this will be country by country — [to say] it is better that the government does not have access to any information.”
However, only hours after the Financial Times article was published, Gates appeared on Bloomberg TV to say that the article “disappointed” him, adding that his featured comments did not “state my view on this.”
“I do believe with the right safeguards there are cases where the government — on our behalf, like stopping terrorism, which could get worse in the future — [accessing encrypted data] is valuable,” Gates said on Bloomberg TV. “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 to the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover. I’m hoping now we can have the discussion — I do believe there are sets of safeguards where the government shouldn’t have to be completely blind.”
Gates’s comments coincide with a The Wall Street Journal report that “people familiar with the matter” have disclosed that the Department of Justice is “pursuing court orders to force Apple Inc. to help investigators extract data from iPhones in about a dozen undisclosed cases around the country.”
According to The Wall Street Journal , these cases differ from the current battle over unlocking an iPhone connected to the December 2015 San Bernardino shooting, since they involve older versions of iOS and a lack of terrorism charges. Apple only started fully encrypting iOS with iOS 8. These court cases are not yet public.
FBI Director James Comey recently published a blog post where he wrote, “The particular legal issue is actually quite narrow. The relief we seek is limited and its value increasingly obsolete because the technology continues to evolve.”
For more on the FBI’s response to Apple’s protests at being forced to build a backdoor to iOS, which the Department of Justice has called a “ marketing strategy,” read here.
