I have owned and sold AAPL a few times over the years, it has been good to me, but, me thinks you protest too much.
Like fake news a fake differentiation.
NB: AAPL refused to assist in the San Bernardino investigation. But jumped in with both feet to help Mueller.
Does not pass a basic smell test.
Completely incorrect comparison. See Swordmaker’s detailed explanation in #19. He said it better than me.
COMPLETELY FALSE!
Apple offered help and was rebuffed by the FBI. From Digital Trends: Apple vs. the FBI: A complete timeline of the war over tech encryption:
It appears the reason for the entire battle between the FBI and Apple is the fact that the Apple ID password on the iPhone in question was changed less than 24 hours after the government took possession of it. A senior Apple executive told reporters during a conference call on Friday, Feb. 19 that if that hadn’t happened, the company wouldn’t need to create a backdoor into the device, as the information would have been easily accessible via iCloud.
According to the unnamed executive, Apple was in discussions with the FBI since early January and proposed four different ways to recover the information. Apple even sent engineers to try these methods.
The next day, the FBI confirmed it did change the password: “The FBI worked with San Bernardino County to reset the iCloud password on December 6th, as the county owned the account and was able to reset the password in order to provide immediate access to the iCloud backup data.”
If they weren't such idiots, and it had not been so egregious a breech of public trust, I'd have been ROTFLMAO! Now I am at people like you Apple haters who swallow the lying propaganda that Apple is the bad guy!
Congress even held hearings about the bad behavior of the FBI. FromTechCrunch, April 19, 2016, "Apple and the FBI spar at Congressional hearing on encryption":
Lawmakers pushed Hess to discuss the FBI’s reliance on a third party to crack the iPhone at the center of the San Bernardino case. The FBI asked a court to force Apple to develop custom software to help unlock the phone, which was used by San Bernardino attacker Syed Farook, but later backed down when an unnamed party showed the FBI how to access the device.
Rep. Anna Eshoo, whose district includes Silicon Valley, engaged in a testy exchange with Hess, calling the FBI’s approach to Apple in the San Bernardino case “breathtaking” and criticizing the agency for resetting the phone’s iCloud password without first consulting Apple.
As for the Farouk's Apple iCloud data, you are absolutely WRONG there as well. From The Verge article of February 22, 2016, "Why Apple and the FBI are fighting over an iCloud account":
For the last six days, Apple has been waging the legal fight of its life over a phone used by alleged San Bernardino attacker Syed Farook. The case centers on whether the government can compel Apple to rewrite the phone’s security protections to allow the FBI access to the data inside. But while the phone itself is still the center of the legal fight, this weekend’s conversations focused on data that’s already been pulled off the phone to Farook’s iCloud account.That iCloud account contains backups of Farook’s phone up until six weeks before the attack, everything from iMessages to email drafts. Investigators already have that data, and because the phone belongs to San Bernardino County, they didn’t even need a warrant to get it. (Actually, they did need a warrant, because even though the county owned the device, the name on the account was Farouk's name, not the county's, and Apple's legal department required the account owner's name be listed on a search warrant to keep it legal, so a judge issued a valid search warrant specifying San Bernardino County Department of Health and Syad Farouk's Apple iCloud account to avoid any legal issues that could cloud the water for any evidence about any co-conspirators that might have been subsequently uncovered. More facts, DUMBGRUNT. —Swordmaker) But on October 19th, those backups stopped, and the last six weeks of activity are only found on the phone itself, which is exactly why the FBI has been so intent on getting the phone unlocked. In theory, another backup could have automatically pulled that data back to iCloud, but a forensic error reset the account, making further retrieval impossible. Now, that error has taken center stage in the fight over Farook’s phone, and Apple and the FBI have spent the weekend fighting over exactly what it means.
THE Apple Engineers' suggestion, the ones who were told to take a hike, was to force a new iCloud backup. But the idiocy of the "expert" San Bernardino IT guy, with the help of the "expert" FBI agents, who had told Apple they knew more about how to unlock the iPhone than Apple did, made that "forensic error reset" of the AppleID of the account, making it impossible to backup to an iCloud account with a different AppleID and password, and actually permanently LOCKED the Farouk's iPhone 5.
Incidentally, both Farouk and his despicable wife smashed their burner personal Android phones, as well as their personal computers and threw the remains into a local lake, but NOT this work iPhone. Why? Because those devices had data about the attack on them. . . and this work phone did not. . . which is exactly what I predicted they'd find if and when they got into it.
I was right. When that iPhone 5 was finally unlocked at the cost of over $900,000 (not counting all the legal expense of trying to force Apple to do something illegal), they found that except for a few calls from his wife of the "stop and buy formula for the baby on your way home" variety, there was nothing but work related phone calls and texts on the device. Location services showed his travels were ordinary business travel, with nothing extraordinary.