The nightmare scenario is as follows. Sure, unlocking this one phone sounds pretty reasonable. Apple will maintain control of the unlock mechanism, the FBI get

The nightmare scenario is as follows. Sure, unlocking this one phone sounds pretty reasonable. Apple will maintain control of the unlock mechanism, the FBI gets it warrant obliged, end of story. This is what the government side is spinning (see the nytimes op-ed today from William Bratton, NYC police commissioner). The reality is that is not the end of the story. New York City has already said they have 200 phones waiting to be unlocked. Given an FBI win in the case, and Apple building the unlock mechanism, there's no reasonable defense against these unlocks. And this is just one city. I wonder how many full time Apple employees would be required to service the steady flow of requests from law enforcement across the world to unlock phones. Hundreds? Thousands? I'm sure they already have law enforcement liaisons, but we're talking a whole other level of commitment in order to essentially create a worldwide law enforcement IT help desk. Somewhere during the process of industrializing the unlocking of phones, a lot of people are going to start saying it would make sense if Apple would just provide the ability to unlock directly to law enforcement agencies. That would solve the problem of law enforcement heavily burdening Apple with all these requests. Assuming Apple capitulated to that (presumably forced to capitulate because I doubt Tim Cook would do it willingly), we finally reach the nightmare scenario where access to the unlocker is no longer strictly enforceable and it's only a matter of time to where criminals have it. This is a true Pandora's Box, because there's no patch that will plug this hole. This is a true slippery slope, in that its progression is all but assured. The only thing capable of stopping it is to have hardware that is incapable of having an unlocker created for it. Hopefully that's where we're at with newer phones, although that seems to not be fully confirmed. It's one thing for law enforcement to make Apple open a lock it has the capability to open. It's another to require that Apple make their product less secure than they otherwise would make it. I don't see that happening through the courts. At the very least, it would require an act of congress, probably followed with a lengthy court battle over the constitionality of such a requirement.