Know Your Enemy
Guest Post
So Bill Gates recently gave an interview to Rolling Stone magazine. The vast majority of the interview focused on his philanthropic efforts, with a particular focus on poverty and climate change. However, several questions were brought up on illegal NSA surveillance in general, and Edward Snowden in particular.
His answers reveal one of the biggest problems facing America today, which is the fact that the billionaire class as a whole does not question or rock the boat whatsoever. They criticize only when it is convenient or easy to do so, never putting themselves at risk for the sake of civil liberties and the Constitution.
In mosts cases, this is due to the fact that they themselves are the characters pulling the strings of the political class in Washington D.C. So when it comes down to it, their policies ultimately become our policies.
It is also important to note that Microsoft was a particularly eager participant in NSA spying from the very beginning. For example, according to the following PRISM slide provided by Edward Snowden, we see that Gates’ company was the first to become involved. In fact, they were participating a full six months before Yahoo!, while Apple didn’t join until a year after Steve Jobs died.
What a tangled web we have weaved. Now from Rolling Stone:
Question: When people think about the cloud, it’s not only the accessibility of information and their documents that comes to mind, but also their privacy – or lack of it.
Gates: Should there be cameras everywhere in outdoor streets? My personal view is having cameras in inner cities is a very good thing. In the case of London, petty crime has gone down. They catch terrorists because of it. And if something really bad happens, most of the time you can figure out who did it. There’s a general view there that it’s not used to invade privacy in some way. Yet in an American city, in order to take advantage of that in the same way, you have to trust what this information is going to be used for.
Do they really catch terrorists because of it in London? Because in the U.S., the NSA chief already admitted that the entire spy program has stopped essentially zero terrorist attacks. It certainly didn’t stop the Boston bombings. So what are we giving up our privacy for exactly?
Question: Thanks to Edward Snowden, who has leaked tens of thousands of NSA documents, we are. Do you consider him a hero or a traitor?
Gates: I think he broke the law, so I certainly wouldn’t characterize him as a hero. If he wanted to raise the issues and stay in the country and engage in civil disobedience or something of that kind, or if he had been careful in terms of what he had released, then it would fit more of the model of “OK, I’m really trying to improve things.” You won’t find much admiration from me.
Sorry Billy boy, but we have had many whistleblowers in the past who went through the system and they ended up in jail or their lives were ruined. For example, the only person imprisoned for torture in the USA is the guy who exposed the torture program, John Kiriakou.
Question: Even so, do you think it’s better now that we know what we know about government surveillance?
Gates: The government has such ability to do these things. There has to be a debate. But the specific techniques they use become unavailable if they’re discussed in detail. So the debate needs to be about the general notion of under what circumstances should they be allowed to do things.
First of all, without the Snowden revelations, there would be no “debate.” As it stands, the intelligence complex and Obama don’t seem to have much interest in changing a single thing anyway.
Before Snowden proved us right, those who accurately claimed the NSA was doing all of these things were labeled paranoid conspiracy theorists. Moreover, how can anyone seriously defend these “techniques” in light of the recent revelations that show activities so egregious that security experts think they threaten the infrastructure of the entire internet?
Gates goes on to ponder…
Should surveillance be usable for petty crimes like jaywalking or minor drug possession? Or is there a higher threshold for certain information?Those aren’t easy questions.
How are those not easy questions? They are exceedingly easy questions for a civilized society. The answer is no. Unless you want to toss even more citizens in jail for non-violent offenses, because having 25% of the world’s prison population and only 5% of its population is not inhumane enough.
More from Gates…
The U.S. government in general is one of the better governments in the world. It’s the best in many, many respects. Lack of corruption, for instance, and a reasonable justice system.
Seriously, what country is Gates living in? I suppose when you are the richest man in the world it’s pretty easy to live in a bubble. He is so obsessed with the problems of the outside world and the fact that they are more corrupt than we are, that he is completely blind to the very dangerous trends happening in America.
What a joke.
The entire interview can be read here.
In Liberty,
Michael Krieger
WTF is a reasonable justice system that hold more prisoners than all of China by far, and China has four time the population. As for corruption, we are catching up fast.
Wow is all I can say. I had no idea Bill Gates was such a fascist.
Add him to the list of people that need to be hung from a lamppost with piano wire.
The U.S. only appears to be a country without a lot of corruption. The reality is we may not have the easily visible types of corruption that comes to mind when the subject is brought up. For instance we do not have to pay a bribe to get our drivers license renewed, or to get a building permit. But to think that we are not a corrupt country is a bit ludicrous. Our type of corruption is harder to see but it clearly exists with all the rent-seeking that goes on. Instead of corruption taking place at the local level, the entire system is corrupt and thus it makes it harder to see. All the billions spent on lobbying an easy way to look at it. That is, in effect, an easy way to measure the amount of corruption in this country.
Don’t hang him, just make him use Windows 8 with the tiles, all day 24/7. Leave a loaded gun next to him. Lock the door forever, play Justin Bieber CDs on loop too.
Give it a few hours, he’ll off himself.
“just make him use Windows 8 with the tiles. all day 24/7. Leave a loaded gun next to him. Lock the door forever, play Justin Bieber CDs on loop, too.”
I love that. Windows 8 is the worst operating system I’ve ever encountered. It’s so bad, it makes me nostalgic for Windows NT. Everything you do takes 3x as many clicks and time as anything you do on Windows 7. It is causing productivity to drop.
I like Snowden and dislike the federal snooping, but I’m not sure I see the problem with cameras in high crime areas. If all they’re doing is recording what could be seen by the naked eye on the public street, it doesn’t seem like snooping or an unreasonable search or seizure. If it would help jail a killer to have a camera on a lightpost (instead of having to hope that the 7-11 camera caught the crime), I don’t see the problem. Commence thumbs-downing…
I’m in the market for a new laptop, Chicago999444, and checked out a few the other day… couldn’t believe what Windows 8 looks like. And online, where you can ‘build your own’ laptop, they actually charge MORE to “downgrade” to Win 7.
I’m thinking I’m going to wait until Win 8 gets dumped.
I installed IE 11 for work, and had to uninstall it, it was so bad I couldn’t get my work done.
Windows has been a kludge ever since it was first released. That’s why it’s proprietary, and not open source.
If Apple donated it’s UI to the open source community, it would be bye-bye Windows. Just another example of status quo maintaining status quo.
“Know Your Enemy” indeed…
First, watch this video, where George Stephanopoulos interviews Bill Gates about Common Core. Try not to reach through the screen to throttle Gates:
http://abcnews.go.com/ThisWeek/video/week-bill-gates-education-22932237?tab=9482931§ion=2808950
Then, look at why he’s such a staunch supporter of Common Core:
http://www.artofteachingscience.org/why-bill-gates-defends-the-common-core/
Oh, and Admin, you’ll love that Google wouldn’t allow me to find the video interview with Gates; I had to use Yahoo to do the search. It came right up.