It&#x27;s still a muddle, and the tendentious Bloomberg headline does not help. Microsoft&#x27;s position is extremely cautious, but they had to side with Apple because opening the &quot;all writs&quot; can of worms to compel software creation and signing binaries is going to jack up law enforcement compliance costs to unlimited levels. Gates, in the quote in the article, is also, still, trying to have it both ways: <i>“The extreme view that government always gets everything, nobody supports that. Having the government be blind, people don’t support that.”</i> Evidently he thinks conditional privacy is sufficient and that the issue can be separated from encryption bans and an &quot;all writs&quot; model that compels new things to be created at the whim of FBI agents.