Wow, what a freak. He cannot fathom that some information should be beyond the reaches of public servants? This is an extremely dangerous philosophy for the head of the FBI to have in a representative democracy.
The goal is not a world without crime. The goal is to strike a balance between reducing crime, and what we are willing to do to reduce it.
Bad guys. Pathetic.
Wow. I'm not a huge everything needs to be guarded by encryption guy. I like my encryption, but I don't need it for every message, nor do I even feel the need to have it for every device. But just out of principal, I might start now. What's really funny, is that the FBI can't control encryption, any more than the NSA can break it. As long as the user controls the private keys (assuming a key model is being used) and the user is using a modern cipher, there is nothing they can force google or apple to do. Legally of course, there is much murkier water, but from a technical perspective the FBI is showing their technologically illiterate hand.
You want to be really scared? You don't even need hardware. You simply have to have some code in either the compiler/linker for the software you are using. At some point we have to give up some trust mechanisms, because there really is no such thing as perfect security in software. Ken Thompson's Reflections on Trust is a good read on this if you are interested: http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html
Somebody needs to hack the FBI and cryptolock everything of there's leaving a snarky message. That'll show em.
I don't buy any of this. NSA required a public announcement of their capabilities via their very own 'whistle blower'. My guess is they are computationally constrained and needed a little kick to float hidden networks to view (and I am certain it worked.) The only glitch was the hit to US economic interests e.g. Google, Apple. So this theatre is to address that. Don't be afraid to admit to yourselves what you already know. :)
Going after the bad guys is the excuse. The real goal is to control dissent and economic espionage for the military industrial complex and friends - these are the bad guys we should really be concerned about. The ones that profit from wars, and the ones that rape the economy and get bailed out afterwards.
Dissent, not descent. If they wanted to control the descent, they'd've deployed parachutes.