Bill Gates has joined Donald Trump in condemning Apple for refusing to backdoor its products at the behest of the FBI, promising that the company that he founded, a waning firm called Microsoft, would happily compromise its security on demand for the US government.
Even if Microsoft‘s Bitlocker full-disk encryption was considered very secure at its launch, questions have since been raised about its integrity. The company was an early participant in the NSA’s Prism program.
Update: Gates has issued a non-denial nonpology insisting that he stands behind his words, but he’s still a good guy, so cut him some slack.
In an interview with the Financial Times published late Monday night, Gates dismissed the idea that granting the FBI access would set a meaningful legal precedent, arguing that the FBI is “not asking for some general thing, [it is] 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. 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.’”
Bill Gates Is Backing the FBI in Its Case Against Apple
In less than an hour, Wikileaks will publish a set of TOP-SECRET/COMINT-GAMMA documents — “the most highly classified documents ever published by a media organization” — that document NSA spying on UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, former French leader Nicolas.
NH bill would explicitly allow libraries to run Tor exit nodes
Inspired by the Library Freedom Project’s uncompromising bravery in the face of a DHS threat against a town library in Kilton, NH, that was running a Tor exit node to facilitate private, anonymous communication, the New Hampshire legislature is now considering a bill that would explicitly permit public libraries to “allow the installation and use […]
Eleven years and counting: EFF scores a major victory in its NSA mass surveillance suit
In 2005, a former AT&T engineer named Mark Klein walked into the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s offices and revealed that he had helped the phone company build a secret NSA surveillance outpost at the Folsom Street switching station, through which AT&T was helping the US government conduct mass, warrantless, domestic surveillance.
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