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26/02/2016

FBI Backed by Bill Gates in its Battle with Apple over San Bernardino Killer's Phone


Claiming that the FBI is right to demand co-operation from Silicon Valley when it comes to terrorism investigations, the Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has waded into the row between Apple and the US government investigating agency.



The Financial Times reported that Apple chief executive Tim Cook’s characterization of the case as a demand for a “back door” was also questioned by Gates.
  
“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,” Gates said.

“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’,” he added.
 
However most of the Silicon Valley which includes Google’s Sundar Pichai and WhatsApp’s Jan Koum, and the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden are on an opposite plank to the stand take by Gates after his intervention in the conflict that is taking the shape of a standoff between Apple and the FBI.  
 
A day ago, Apple found support from Mark Zuckerberg who also expressed support for Apple and said at the Mobile World Congress conference in Barcelona: “we’re sympathetic with Apple. We believe in encryption; we think that that’s an important tool”.
 
“I don’t think requiring backdoors with encryption is either going to be an effective way to increase security or is really the right thing to do for just the direction that the world is going to,” Zuckerberg added.
 
Even Gate’s own Microsoft has issued support for Apple, of a sort. A statement was released o Thursday by the Reform Government Surveillance industry lobby group that said that “technology companies should not be required to build in backdoors to the technologies that keep their users’ information secure.” Microsoft is a part member of that group.
 
Brad Smith, the chief legal officer of Microsoft had tweeted the statement which was again retweeted by Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella.
  
The FBI intends to safely attempt to guess the passcode used to lock the phone, that belongs to and was used by the San Bernardino shooter, without accidentally triggering the destruction of data stored on the device and the federal agency has demanded that Apple rewrite the software on the iPhone in order to enable FBI to do so.
 
Cook suggested that such modifications would amount to inserting a “back door” in iPhones, and would “undermine the very freedoms and liberty our government is meant to protect” in a public letter that was released last week.
 
(Source:www.theguardian.com) 

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