> No, David. If I were in the job now, I would have simply told the FBI to call Fort Meade, the headquarters of the National Security Agency, and NSA would have solved this problem for them. They're not as interested in solving the problem as they are in getting a legal precedent.

That's quite the quote, especially given his history of employment.

The weirdest thing about this whole cell-phone saga to me is that the perps are dead, did not appear to be part of some organized group and that very little could be done to them that hasn't been done already based on evidence found on the phone.

Then there is the bit that a lot of the information that is on the phone is also already in the log files of the carriers. It's as if that phone somehow magically is going to yield an entirely new class of information that may not even exist in the first place.

To me it has been evident from day one that this is not about this phone or the data that's on it but just about the legal precedent, getting it in black-and-white from the former head of counter terrorism is quite an indictment of his successors.