I&#x27;ve been trying to stir conversation on this point, to little success unfortunately.  The whole affair is pretty damning for the tech industry. The people who should know better are parroting Apple&#x27;s deceptive claims, and many more are just hopping on the anti-surveillance anti-FBI&#x2F;NSA bandwagon because it fits their political narrative.<p>Just to be clear, I&#x27;m against mandated backdoors in products. I should be allowed to make my product as secure as I want to, even against myself. Yes, that might hinder government search and seizure, but that&#x27;s the government&#x27;s problem, not mine. I agree with Apple and most other tech companies on this.<p>But Apple isn&#x27;t being asked to <i>create</i> a backdoor. The door already exists, and was voluntarily created by Apple.  Apple has all of the tools and knowledge in its possession to walk through it. Whether that&#x27;s the PIN itself (it&#x27;s not), or the code-signing key and source code needed to disable attack mitigations (without which a 4-digit PIN is worthless), doesn&#x27;t make a difference. As you observe, they could design the phone such that this attack is not possible. They did not, even though they&#x27;ve been claiming otherwise for years now.<p>All of the arguments in favor of Apple boil down to a general opposition to government search and seizure, worries about damage to Apple&#x27;s reputation, a claim that code-signing occupies a privileged legal position (akin to attorney-client privilege), or a slippery-slope argument that the government will ask for mandated backdoors on all iPhones next. None of these has a chance in court. I&#x27;m more and more convinced that Apple is well aware of how legally wrong it is, and is just doing this to save face over erroneously advertising that their phones were secure even against Apple itself (and therefore any government coercion of Apple).<p>If someone is going to challenge me on this, please answer this two-part question: If Apple had the phone&#x27;s PIN stored in their database, do you think the government should be able to compel them to hand it over?  And why is that any different?