alan butler: that's right. there is an inherent conflict in securing the infrastructure we use everyday to make it -- to communicate privately and securely in the interest of some in the intelligence community to be able to gather data on what people are doing and saying. cory: we look at the notion of how big this is. what the documents from snowden reveal is the budget for this thing was $35 million. but they had over 200 people working on this thing. the goal of it was to defeat the strong commercial data and security systems not just on the iphone, but with a focus on the iphone. that is a big budget. imagine a room of 200 people working full-time on hacking this thing. do we think that it worked? do we think they were able to get into these devices? matthew green: i think that any government or foreign service spends this kind of money, given enough time, they are going to succeed. yes, i think they probably did. cory: interesting stuff. thank you both for your time. "bloomberg west" will be right back. ♪

joining me the us cap, matthew green from johns hopkins school of applied cryptography, and alan butler. let me start in washington with you, alan. when you look at this program, is this beyond targeting bad guys? is this that consider approach to getting everything? allen: i certainly think this program is a huge invasion of privacy and security. we spent the companies spend on the users spend billions of dollars to buy secure communications technology in these phones that we use everyday. i don't think the government should be in the business of trying to crack the protections of those phones. cory: matthew, let me ask you for your take on this story. it's no surprise there going after every piece of data that they can find, but what is different about this? matthew: one of the things to keep in mind is what is being targeted at the in of the day, our software developers who write the apps for the iphone. at least in the time that these documents were first produced most of those developers were u.s. citizens. the end may be to target's terrace, but the means are to target americans.