Bill Gates (like Mister Newt before him) committed what I call the Future Fallacy in "The Road Ahead." Page 106.
"Soon any child old enough to use a computer will be able to transmit coded messages that no government on earth will find easy to decipher."
Billg is an optimist.
I found nothing wrong or incorrect with the quote Duncan attributed to Bill Gates (I haven't read Gates' book).
I think Duncan was mad at the 'soon.' Why not today?
I think I can answer this question because I was an obnoxious little hacker with an Atari 800 when I was a kid. The only thing I did not have was a modem and an Internet connection (thus ability to read sci.crypt.research etc ...) I did have arbitrary precision math libraries (although I did not have any engineering concept of "libraries"), and I had written some non-trivial scrambling code (it's not RSA, of course). I am, by no means, a super-smart person. Therefore, it is not a stretch to believe that kids today can perform powerful encryption in the privacy of their own homes. Therefore, to Bill G and his "prophecy": "been there, done that" ... (Apologies to those who hate that phrase; I hate it too, but it is so obnoxious that it gets the point across.) Ern