Hayden's argument is that end to end encryption is the right decision for the bigger set of users (the "main body") which are you and me, he also says they got around the lack of back doors with bulk surveillance.
The implied argument (and one that would work well in this specific case) is that if the phone company where the terrorists got phone service kept bulk metadata records then the FBI could get their "contact lists" by asking the phone company, while nobody could steal their personal health information of banking secrets from their phone.
It is a pretty reasonable argument when you think about it.
The "broad health", security-wise, of the U.S. is best served by allowing end-to-end encryption...in other words, protection from external threats for the vast majority of civilian users--the "main body"...
But, there's most likely a trade-off...listening to him explain how meta surveillance began I can only come to the conclusion that if end-to-end encryption survives the current "Apple" test, and is deemed "allowable", meta data collection will intensify...
I think it's important to note that Hayden "empathizes" with Jim Comey, even going so far as to say he would share Comey's position if he were in his shoes...we all want better tools to do our jobs...
When I think about the difficulty of protecting the "broad health" of the U.S. in a digital age I shudder...I have no doubt that things will become more complex as time rolls on...
Which is what makes me wonder why the hell they're trying to force Apple to write software to break into the phone. They already know the guy's contacts.
They're leaning on an ideal case example to try to set precedent. Nothing would work better than one of the extremely rare terrorist cases. They don't have many such cases to leverage, so they're trying to abuse the American public's fear of terrorism with what they have. It's equivalent to the 'think of the children' approach in politics. If you want to try to do something wildly unconstitutional, play to terrorism fears. If Apple refuses to cooperate, then they try to make it look like Apple is making the American public less safe and bolstering terrorists.
All of the terrorism laws they've passed for example, have ended up being used for everything else. It has happened that way by design, they desperately want more power and reach. The FBI is attempting to do in their own area what the NSA did with mass-surveillance. They saw how successful the NSA was and how little push-back there ended up being to the vast privacy invasion.
If they're given a foot in the door on this specific example, they'll use it for almost everything else imaginable.
> It's equivalent to the 'think of the children' approach in politics.
When waterboarding was in the news, one near-wishful scenario was "If it was the only way to find the nuclear bomb before it exploded in a major city."
Of course, extreme and utterly-unprecedented situations are exactly what we already have presidential-pardons for, and it was really just bullshit to try to defend humdrum day-to-day abuse of prisoners/kidnap-ees.
> If they're given a foot in the door on this specific example, they'll use it for almost everything else imaginable.
Yeah like hand over the keys to foreign governments or corporations that they wish to curry favor with the better to land a sweet sweet gig once they leave government service.
Apple has admin privileges on your device so it is trivial for them to record encryption keys... They probably encrypt the PIN/key on the local drive for easy decryption later without owner's consent (they are probably forced to do it by some secret government order and can't acknowledge it)...
If you have something useful to contribute to this conversation, then it would behoove you to put your cards on the table rather than just tossing around generic claims. For example, are you claiming that the secure enclave in A7-based devices is nothing but a sham? If so, what is this based on?
Even if you assume that the enclave is truly secure, you still have to believe that Apple or the manufacturer doesn't log the encryption keys stored inside it when it is being manufactured, no?
