I am not a lawyer (and not even an American), but from my perspective, I don&#x27;t see how they can loose.  They have a warrant.  I used to work on telephone switches and we added code that would allow someone with a warrant to record conversations all the time.  We even had a generic facility for it.<p>The main difference, of course, is that adding an ability to allow someone to intrude on privacy for a service is different than adding functionality to a product that allows someone to intrude on privacy.  The service provider can act as a gatekeeper to ensure that a warrant is provided.  If you make a special build that anyone can load onto a device, then, of course, there is no gatekeeper for the warrant.<p>The key is that I am aware of no law that <i>requires</i> a gatekeeper.  Services ask for warrants out of respect for their customers.  Often they don&#x27;t respect their customers and provide access without a warrant.  It&#x27;s not like the software we added to the telephone switches requires some kind of special key or anything.  There is no oversight and there has never been any oversight.<p>The thing is that (as an American in US) you are under no obligation to hand over your cell phone, unless the police have a warrant.  Once they have a warrant, then I don&#x27;t think you have any recourse.  As we have seen, you can be found in contempt of court if you do not reveal your password anyway.<p>So from the perspective of the law, I think it is relatively straight forward.  It&#x27;s going to have to go all the way up to the supreme court.  I imagine that the supreme court would choose to hear this case.  Essentially you will have to argue that compelling a company to create an exploit to satisfy a warrant constitutes an unreasonable search if that exploit can also be used to perform illegal searches.  I think the case would be heard, but I doubt very much that the argument will succeed.  If the exploit is constructed on the condition that it is only used to satisfy the warrant in question, I&#x27;m pretty sure that it will be acceptable.  We all know that such a condition need not be followed since the FBI et al don&#x27;t care if the evidence they gather is admissible in court.  However, I doubt it will matter legally.