But even if, more plausibly, it’s just a rhetorical device, and he “understands” it perfectly well, why choose to characterize it this way? It’s the kind of tone-deafness that helps push a lot of people (myself included) into Apple’s corner on this. Many people – including me – pointed out, in the wake of the Snowden revelations and related news over the past couple of years, that the one absolutely certain result of all of the attention being paid to government snooping was going to be the development and widespread deployment of more powerful encryption mechanisms for ordinary folks like you and me to use. It would be nice to think that the FBI Director had some awareness of the general sense of unease that has accompanied these revelations, that he might say something more along the lines of: