> You said that complying would open the door to doing it for other phones. In that regard, complying with an icloud request also opens the door to complying wi

> You said that complying would open the door to doing it for other phones. In that regard, complying with an icloud request also opens the door to complying with future icloud requests. There is one crucial difference. In the iCloud case, the government must ask Apple any time they want to get iCloud user data. Each time, Apple can verify that they have a court order before doing the work. So it's "stateless" in that the first request doesn't "open the door" for later requests. In the iPhone case, the government is asking for an OS (signed by Apple) that can be flashed onto any device. This new OS would have a giant backdoor that disables all the protections of an iPhone. We all know there is no way to prevent this OS from being used elsewhere, for other uses. This is not stateless -- once Apple creates this OS, there is no going back, all phones are now insecure.