Yes, two "ifs" is a ton. Who knew?
And as if apple & you aren't pulling at emotional stings with your clamor of privacy above all.
Don't know why you had to bring your butt into this unless it's highly emotional for you.
But got it, your privacy above all & to hell with anyone else.
Having one's privacy invaded can and often does expose one to likely and often enough to physical harm.
Experience does improve the concern for privacy.
But then again in the instant case, of apple having been served a warrant for opening a phone with needing special tools to be constructed does in fact create a back door, kind of small but in the middle eastern vernacular it is the "camel's nose under the tent"
One can also play devil's advocate and quote or paraphrase one of our former esteemed public servant's earnest exclamation:
But what difference does it make now.
The parties of concern in this case and the one the esteemed former public public servant referred to are no longer with us.
As I noted before I am no fan of apple. Quiet the opposite. I do appreciate their efforts at making a secure communications and data storage device. Yet managed it with an inexplicably huge hole for security.
Namely, even if the user is religious about a complex security code and enabled the wipe feature after ten failed attempts the information and data of the the device still is exploitable. If as often admonished to backup faithfully, also enabled the automatic icloud backup the information is now insecure.
Here is why.
Apple has unfettered access to the iCloud and can without much trouble extract all stored info. Apple has in the past did acces and extract and turn over to three letter and other agencies the full contetns of iCloud backups. Abd will continue to do so.
Finally apple may have actually found a way to get out from the burden of doing the gummint's bidding. And I do hope they succeed. As I hope other device makers succeed as well.
This refusal to access a particular iphone does create a lot of public discussion and is a very effective smokescreen to push into the background their supremely obnoxious software OS upgrade, supposedly bricking iphones with Error 53. Of course we now know that for apple it was an easily fixed problem. As a cynic I'd say it was a thinly veiled attempt at boosting flagging sales of iphones.
BTW if any communications with any accomplices outside of US were done the FBI shopuld have no problem getting that info form the NSA or other acronymed monitoring database.
Cheers, I'll have a cold one for privacy.