“The idea, of course, was to make it appear that Apple was fighting for their customers...but they simply ‘lost’.”
I don’t know about that ... I think the Feds wanted an “easy” way to do this overall and used this case as leverage. They failed.
I think what they have now is a “difficult” way to hack the phone (probably something involving the hardware itself). They’ll still get what they want, but they won’t have that “easy” backdoor way that they desire.
Anything can be hacked. Literally anything. It’s merely a function of time-to-unlock and bypassing the iPhone’s data-self-destruct sequence :-). Unless you have that hardware in hand, you aren’t going to defeat any security on any of the big two’s smartphones “easily” w/o a backdoor. I hate Apple, but it’d be a tragedy if their shares lost value when this really isn’t a weakness on their end (assuming my assumptions are correct).
“I don’t know about that ... I think the Feds wanted an “easy” way to do this overall and used this case as leverage. They failed.”
Yes, and I suspect that the FBI had a heads up that the court was going to find in Apple’s favor, so they folded rather than take the hit publically.