Apple -- or any other tech company -- could probably prevail in court against a lot of the more outlandish FBI scenarios that you describe. Most appellate courts take privacy quite seriously. So does the Supreme Court, with both right- and left-leaning judges getting there just fine on their own. The Fourth Amendment is pretty clear on this.<p>The problem for Apple, or any other tech company, is that once you say &quot;okay&quot; once, you can&#x27;t swat away the next one by saying &quot;Impossible&quot; and being done with it. You have to lawyer up. That takes time and costs money.<p>So Apple&#x27;s real issue is that they don&#x27;t want to spend many millions of dollars (billions?) on lawyers to get the FBI and other alphabet agencies to behave properly. That&#x27;s a very legitimate business position. It&#x27;s just a little more nuanced than what we were told on day one.