Ex-NSA and CIA Chief Hayden Sides with Apple
theweek.com
theweek.com
Did find a transcript elsewhere and he's sorta on Apple side mostly about the end to end encrypting like others mentioned.
But you are right - it's hard to really read into what he's really thinking about FBI's actions in this situation.
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...
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.
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.
Equivalent to designing your entire life and all choices around the notion that your house is going to be on fire and burning down every day.
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.