Bill Gates: I assume my phone's not being tapped | Hacker News Reader

Bill Gates: I assume my phone's not being tapped

news.cnet.com

57 pointsprateekj48 comments

I refuse to believe he could be that naive, especially considering the amount of wealth and power he has.

In a recent interview with Wired, when asked about NSA activities and data privacy in general:

Gates: " ... There are legitimate reasons for the government to watch what’s going on, particularly with nuclear and biological weapons. So it’d be nice if there was a way that some part of the government that we really trusted was looking at that information. Right now, people are going, “Oh my gosh!” and you wonder—did they not think anything was going on? But it’s probably good there is now an explicit conversation." [1]

He also has, or at the very least had, a Top Secret security clearance. [2]

While the purpose is debatable, one of the most likely reasons was so he could receive State Department briefings prior to meeting with foreign leaders and businessmen. A lot of that information would likely have come from NSA intercepts.

Another purpose could have been to facilitate Microsoft's cooperation with the NSA on software backdoors, cryptographic or otherwise.

[1] http://www.wired.com/business/2013/11/bill-gates-bill-clinto...

[2] http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/bill_gates_has_top_secret_c...

> He also has, or at the very least had, a Top Secret security clearance.

Top Secret clearance is reviewed every five years and in theory is revoked once the person no longer has a Need to Know. Since Bill is no longer active at Microsoft, I would guess that he does not have a Need to Know.

He's still the chairman of the Microsoft board. I read bloomberg for most of my business news and lots of op-ed contributors there stipulate that this is making it harder for Microsoft to find a replacement CEO.

This reminded me about quote from "Player of Games" a Culture novel by Ian Banks.

Said by a character with diplomatic immunity after a particularly interesting anti government statement: "We pretend they do not listen to us and they pretend they do not hear anything."

Except in this case, the pretense is getting less convincing with each passing day.

It doesn't matter how convincing it is or isn't as long as you are just choosing to pretend you believe it.

I think that's a healthy approach in the world dominated by invincible technology and pervasive politics.

The key point being diplomatic immunity. If you don't have it, they will not pretend they don't hear anything, and therefore you can't pretend they aren't listening to you.

The possibility of unauthorized leaks of government intercepts attaches a cost to surveillance that cannot be ignored in any case.

Plus, if your communications have ramifications beyond those who are a party to the communications, then, even if you cannot be charged with crimes based on intercepts of your communications, the knowledge from the intercepts can be used by the government to change the world in ways that you consider harmful.

I can't tell whether to believe him or not. As someone with pretty deep technological experience, his naivety to such matters is a bit off putting to say the least.

Well Microsoft has blundered into trouble before by not paying attention to the real world. The whole antitrust thing and the amusing cock up over contractor/permanent employees.

I bet China and Russia might be interested in Billg's phone both from an industrial espionage and other more political point of view.

That's what monopoly does to a corporation in the long run! When Microsoft was completely dominating in the '90s, raking in billions of dollars in profit, they became lethargic. When they realized what was going on, it was too late.

No both of the examples are 1 showing the political naivety of Microsofts senior managers and 2 MS's HR being incompetent

He doesn't want to draw too much attention on these issues, because he knows all Skype conversations are being tapped. If he starts to say that "he's worried about being tapped", people might actually pressure him to do something about Skype wiretapping (he's still chairman at MS and has great influence there).

I would rather have Eric Schmidt's answer. It's not always something to take at face value but it almost always is more revealing.

Nobody seems to be talking about SMTP...

SMTP is the protocol that is used for basically all email, and it does not provide encryption. There are versions of the protocol that DO, however they cannot be used in isolation. Emails hop from source to destination via a bunch of SMTP relay servers, and since nearly all SMTP servers support the legacy protocol and do not support key exchange, encrypted SMTP traffic will bounce.

When you use gmail, your connection to Google is secure. But if the recipient of your message is not @gmail.com, the message leaves Google's servers in plain text over SMTP. If the recipient is @gmail.com, the message stays inside the Google network.

The point is, all of our emails traverse the internet in plain text unless we use custom solutions (eg. PGP at both endpoints) or send emails within a network (eg. Gmail to Gmail).

You can always add encryption on top of SMTP, as with GPG.

Google's (outgoing) servers will use STARTTLS if it is advertised by the destination mail server.

Never knew, do you a have a source on this? Not that I don't believe you, I just want to read more about it. A Chrome extension that shows you if STARTTLS is being used would be really neat.

How does Chrome have anything to do with this?

This is a server thing. Your mail client, web-based or otherwise, wouldn't know.

Source: Me, who runs (among other things) mail servers for an ISP.

ETA:

    Received: from mail-pd0-f169.google.com (mail-pd0-f169.google.com [209.85.192.169])
    	(using TLSv1 with cipher RC4-SHA (128/128 bits))
    	(No client certificate requested)
    	by MAIL.MYDOMAIN.COM (Postfix) with ESMTPS id 1BBFA2909
    	for <ME@MYDOMAIN.COM>; Thu, 23 Jan 2014 23:00:32 -0500 (EST)

You still have to assume that an ordinary email is a clear-text communication, no matter who you are sending it to, unless you are using PGP or S/MIME.

  Bill Gates: I assume my phone's not being tapped

              ...but choose to modify my behavior anyway, of course! Oh, and buy more Microsoft stock, please!

Meanwhile...

Microsoft Offers Secure Windows … But Only to the Government

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/04/air-force-windows/

http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2009/04/balmer...

That's what Merkel said as well in a public TV interview.

Interesting, do you happen to have a link?

Tapping Merkel's phone would have a very different meaning as compared to tapping Gates' phone.

Indeed, it is quite likely that Merkel was less interesting at the time they started tapping her phone than Bill Gates is now (or has been since Win95). Her phone was already being tapped in 2002, when she had freshly become opposition leader in Parliament.

If push comes to shove, I wonder if waving around that "US citizen" badge actually protects you from _any_ snooping.

Tapping a politician's phone is always more "interesting", especially if the politician is from another country. I don't think the "US citizen" badge means anything anymore. If you are a prominent subject who is even slightly important, you come under the radar.

He is working with billions - so it is very precious information where he is going to invest or withdraw.

And even his charity work could be considered an expression of American soft power.

Isn't that a bit pessimistic?

That's just reality. Pessimism would be saying that means no good can come of it, which GP did not say.

He is relating Bill Gates' charity to US consolidating its power. Be that as it may, it is not an aid given by one country to another country. It is like putting a pessimistic spin on something good. Don't you think so?

No there was an interesting item on the world service last night about how China is supporting Chinese artists music as a form of soft power.

Oh, I didn't know that. Can you share the link?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/documentaries/2010/04/1004...

"Pessimism" about, say, a vaccination program is realistic these days.

Only by nutters or reactionarys

Pakistanis?

Well depending on your definition it probably is not tapped - merely the metadata collected. And that is I suspect Gates' point - we have entered a world where the genie will not go back in the bottle, and there is only one solution - carriers to offer protection. And that's an expensive solution.

If Bill Gates really thinks his phone is not being tapped I have a bridge to sell him.

Since he has a vested interest in the public maintaining faith in high tech companies, his response is neither surprising nor objective.

Even the gods can be self serving.

He's probably just covering his ass. I guess he learned some operational security since his mails were used as evidence in the anti-trust trial.

The main owner of the american company creator of the most used operated system in desktops around the world (in all countries, enemies and allies of the USA government) may not be the most trustable source in this matter. Call it "ad hominem" but let's not pretend it hasn't been this way when money and government are involved.

First he is the authority on speaking about poverty and now he is the authority on speaking about privacy. Oh the irony...

And here is how he discredited the biggest charity of the world with a single sentende.

I figured he was just talking figuratively, speaking for the Everyman.

Am I the only one who interpreted him as saying he ought to be able to assume that his phone calls/emails are private? He clarifies:

"So there is a basic sense that whoever is providing that technology has to make sure it's secure."

I think he's just saying it's the job of the mail service to provide security, not something the end user should need to worry about.

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