Do you really think that the information in this phone is otherwise beyond the reach of all mankind? Spare a few snowflake engineers and managers at Apple? The

Do you really think that the information in this phone is otherwise beyond the reach of all mankind? Spare a few snowflake engineers and managers at Apple? There are dozens if not hundreds of viable methods to obtain this info, FBI is choosing to pursue the court order route instead of any of the other forensic tools available to them. The simple fact of the matter is that the encrypted data and the key to decrypt it both live in a piece of physical hardware on the device-- no matter how well obfuscated it is, it can still be analyzed and recovered by a sufficiently advanced technical entity. This is exactly the type of work that NSA TAO exists to accomplish, and they are widely regarded as one of the best organizations of this kind in the world.