Bill Gates Weighs In on Apple’s Clash With the F.B.I.

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 an interview 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.