Edward Snowden, a former NSA employee who became famous for leaking documents that revealed how much of our online content was being monitored is no hero in the eyes of Bill Gates.
In an interview, Gates had this to say about the whistleblower, “I think he broke the law, so certainly I 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, of id 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.”
When asked about government surveillance Gates said, “There’s always been a lot of information about your activities. Every phone number you dial, every credit-card charge you make. It’s long since passed that a typical person doesn’t leave footprints. But we need explicit rules. If you were in a divorce lawsuit 20 years ago, is that a public document on the Web that a nosy neighbor should be able to pull up with a Bing or Google search?”
Since Snowden leaked the documents, all of the tech giants including Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, Facebook and Google banned together to make more transparency over what was accessible to the NSA so users would know exactly what information was being shared.
While we may never really know what information is being passed on to the NSA, it seems that nothing is sacred- once information goes up online, it is there for life.