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 court

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. The problem for Apple, or any other tech company, is that once you say "okay" once, you can't swat away the next one by saying "Impossible" and being done with it. You have to lawyer up. That takes time and costs money. So Apple's real issue is that they don't want to spend many millions of dollars (billions?) on lawyers to get the FBI and other alphabet agencies to behave properly. That's a very legitimate business position. It's just a little more nuanced than what we were told on day one.