I don&#x27;t believe the government should be able to conscript a company to create something that doesn&#x27;t exist.<p>That said, I do think that people on the Apple side are being insanely hyperbolic. The x-tries feature is at best security through obscurity. In my mind, this really isn&#x27;t different from having a feature on your desktop&#x27;s operating system that deletes data after x-tries. It is not a &quot;backdoor&quot; or &quot;breaking encryption&quot; to remove the drive and plug it into a powerful computer that attempts to crack the password.<p>They aren&#x27;t asking for encryption to be weakened or a master key to be created. If the key is bruteforcable and the only thing that prevents it an arbitrary limit from the OS, I don&#x27;t really consider removing that arbitrary limit to be weakening the encryption.<p>The entire point of encryption is that you are protected by math and nothing else. The only time that protection can be undermined is BEFORE encryption happens. In my opinion, any changes to the algorithm or environment AFTER encryption are completely fair game.<p>If the government goes further and attempts to undermine that protection, I think that&#x27;s cheating. If all the government is asking is for a change to the environment, I don&#x27;t see how that qualifies for any of the words Apple is using (&quot;backdoor&quot;, &quot;master key&quot;, ...) - their security depends on obscurity and I guess the question becomes whether the government can compel them to shed light onto that obscurity.<p>Apple can&#x27;t do anything about the fundamentals of math, it&#x27;s still on the government to crack the password and for users to have strong passwords. A key principle of crypto is open algorithms, the only secret should be the key. As long as no effort is made to undermine those keys or the access to encryption, I think anything is fair game if you have physical, court ordered access.