Bill Gates backs FBI As Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Supports Apple in battle over San Bernardino killer's phone

Apple has been at odds with the FBI lately over the tech giant’s refusal to allow law enforcement to access a suspected terrorist’s iPhone. According to Apple CEO Tim Cook, who wrote open letter on the matter, what the Department of Justice wants them to do is create a “backdoor,” which would put the security of millions of iPhones at risk. Apple says they have complied the best they could with the FBI but refuse to put the security of their users at risk.

Today, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg weighed in, extending his support to Apple in the matter. While speaking at the Mobile World Congress conference in Spain, he shared:

We’re sympathetic with Apple on this one. I expect it’s not the right thing to try to block that from the mainstream products people want to use. And I think it’s not going to be the right regulatory or economic policy to put in place.

The entire issue was brought to the forefront after a U.S. federal judge ordered that Apple assist the FBI in accessing data on an iPhone used by one of the attackers in the shooting that took place in San Bernardino, CA late last year.

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

Gates also questioned Apple chief executive Tim Cook’s characterisation of the case as a demand for a “back door”, the Financial Times reported.

“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’.”

With his intervention, Gates stands on the opposite side of the conflict to many of the prominent figures in Silicon Valley, including Google’s Sundar Pichai and WhatsApp’s Jan Koum, and the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

More recently, Mark Zuckerberg also expressed support for Apple, telling the Mobile World Congress conference in Barcelona that “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 Gates’ own Microsoft has issued support for Apple, of a sort. The Reform Government Surveillance industry lobby group, of which Microsoft is a member, released a statement on Thursday saying that “technology companies should not be required to build in backdoors to the technologies that keep their users’ information secure.” The statement was tweeted by Microsoft’s chief legal officer, Brad Smith, and then retweeted by Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella.

The FBI has demanded that Apple rewrite the software on the iPhone used by the San Bernardino shooter in order to make it possible for the agency to safely attempt to guess the passcode used to lock the phone, without accidentally triggering the destruction of data stored on the device. The agency is investigating the murderer for links to terrorist groups.

In a public letter released last week, 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”.