Former NSA, CIA Director Michael Hayden Sides With Apple Over FBI (foxbusiness.com)

cold fjord writes: General Michael Hayden (Retired), who served as head of both the NSA and CIA, has taken a position supporting Apple in its conflict with the FBI. Apple is fighting a court order to assist the FBI in breaking into the government owned phone used by one of the two dead terrorists responsible for the recent San Bernardino massacre. General Hayden stated, "You can argue this on constitutional grounds. Does the government have the right to do this? Frankly, I think the government does have a right to do it. You can do balancing privacy and security dead men don't have a right to privacy. I don't use those lenses. My lens is the security lens, and frankly, it's a close but clear call that Apple's right on just raw security grounds. ... I get why the FBI wants to get into the phones but this may be a case where we've got to give up some things in law enforcement and even counter terrorism in order to preserve this aspect, our cybersecurity."

Comments

Re:Really?

[Coren22]

Um, have you read anything at all about this case? No one has asked Apple to insert a backdoor. The FBI has asked Apple to write a program that:

1. Remains in memory
2. Only Apple has access to
3. Allows the FBI to use unlimited guesses on the PIN
4. Allows the FBI to use a custom pin entry through the Thunderbolt port

Nowhere in there is a request for a backdoor on every phone, nor does the FBI want a generic backdoor they can use whenever they want. In fact, the first item is because the FBI doesn't want anyone to claim they can reverse engineer the backdoor from the firmware.