Michael Hayden, who headed the CIA and the NSA during the Bush administration, is refreshingly blunt about the limits of government efforts to rein in encryption. At TechCrunch Disrupt today, he said that he tells his friends still working in intelligence:

“Your ability to recover content in legitimate intelligent activities is going to get smaller and smaller. So my advice is: Get over it!” There are still a lot of things you can legitimately do to keep America safe through electronic surveillance.”

And he strongly suggested the futility of the government’s recent efforts to force Apple to unlock the iPhone, warning that such moves will only push encryption overseas where it will be more difficult to handle: “Don’t spin your wheels trying to create laws or court decisions that will get in the way of something that is going to happen anyhow.”