Bill Gates said he felt “blindsided” by an article that suggested that he is siding with the FBI in its dispute with Apple over the locked iPhone. But he leaves his position unclear by saying “that with the right safeguards, there are cases where the government, on our behalf — like stopping terrorism, which could get worse in the future — …that is valuable.” Maybe we need backdoor access into Bill Gates to figure out his actual opinion?

+ The clash between the FBI and Apple is positioned as a battle between privacy and fighting terrorism. But what if we take terrorism out of the mix? After all, there are 12 other iPhones from which the FBI has wanted data extracted.

+ Why did the FBI choose to make this fight public? And why is Apple’s reality distortion field losing to the FBI’s distortion field. (This is a difficult issue. I haven’t even been able to access my own iPhone since my kids changed the password.)