What I don’t understand is why someone like Bill Gates “sucks up” to the NSA so much. In fact its not just on that issue he’s backing the FBI on the Apple dispute and says in an interview with the Rolling Stones that Edward Snowden broke the law. Now he’s entitled to his opinion but I’m wondering why does he seem to hold such strong to this opinion that government is doing the best for people.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/14/bill-gates-snowden_n_4964311.html
Does it have to do with it being in his best interest? If he sides with whistle blowers it could put him in hot water with the government and if he denies the government access to Microsoft’s electronic info he could be fined by the NSA like they threatened Yahoo with $250K fines per day.
But I think he’s the only one who has been vocal. I bet other CEOS of tech companies agree with him. I’m asking why the trend. Or is it just confirmation bias and most American’s agree with this spying?
It’s not that most Americans are okay with it. It’s that they are okay with it enough not to stop using the products. As long as the NSA does it unilaterally, there’s no real place for people to turn to get away from it. They hate it but accept it.
Also, Gates has since said he does not support spying in general. He supports it in this case, and doesn’t agree with Apple that there is a slippery slope involved.
And Yahoo! only cooperated after they tried not to and got fined extremely large amounts of money. They would have went under if they didn’t comply.
The surveillance capabilities the United States currently exercises are more than the Stasi, perpetrators of greatest surveillance state up in history until their time, could’ve dreamed of.
They are the greatest blackmailing tool ever invented. You can passively build up a history on a person without even having them be a person of interest. All automatically catalogued and saved for future use.
Would you want to be the person who stands up against this behemoth knowing that any skeletons you had in your closet, they’d know?
It’s not tinfoil hat territory - they did this very thing to Dr. King and who knows who else.
It doesn’t seem far fetched to think that they would use the system to expand the power of the system and silence its opposition.
Billionaires in general don’t care about people in any way, except as profit centers to be exploited for more money. Someone else’s privacy is the least of their concerns.
It is pretty much indisputable that Edward Snowden broke the law, so Bill Gates pointing that out isn’t some radical idea. Even many stalwart supporters of Snowden agree that he broke the law, but in their judgment, it was worth him doing so.
You seem to not realize that Snowden isn’t very popular at all among most Americans. There are parts of American society – this message board, for one example, as well as millenials as a group – where he is very popular. But polls generally show that twice as many Americans hold a negative opinion of him, and not very many want him excused from his actions.
And the idea that billionaires don’t care about privacy is just nonsense. There are very vocal billionaires – Tim Cook and Steve Ballmer (who is quoted in your second cite, scroll toward the bottom if you didn’t see it) for two examples – who strongly disagree with the government’s policies.
Hate to break this to you, but Edward Snowden DID break the law. That’s not opinion, it’s pretty much a fact.
Do you have examples you feel support the view that Gates et al "‘sucks up’ to the NSA’? As far as I know on this one vertical issue Gates has said he thinks Apple should provide the information. That isn’t sucking up to the NSA, though, as it’s something that people can disagree on (as well as it doesn’t hurt HIS company’s image, so it’s easy for him to say).
First you’d have to demonstrate you assertion that ‘Billionaires who run companies seem to care about the privacy of citizens?’, which you haven’t done. I’ve not even seen evidence that Gate’s does this as yet, let alone that this could somehow be extended to all billionaires or even a majority of them.
You are creating a house of cards and then claiming it’s a trend. You should start by trying to support your initial premise. I’m not convinced that Billionaires in general or even Gates in particular actually do this…certainly not based on your assertion that Gates thinks Apple should help the NSA or that he says Snowden broke the law.