And if they had had some patience, they could have initiated an automatic WiFi backup from the iPhone to iCloud and probably accessed the information on iCloud

And if they had had some patience, they could have initiated an automatic WiFi backup from the iPhone to iCloud and probably accessed the information on iCloud through a court order that Apple would've complied with. Quoting from this Buzzfeed article from February 2016. [1] > "The Apple ID password linked to the iPhone belonging to one of the San Bernardino terrorists was changed soon after the government took possession of the device, Apple, San Bernardino County, and federal officials have acknowledged over the past 48 hours. If that password change hadn’t happened, senior Apple executives said on Friday afternoon, a backup of the information the government was seeking may have been accessible." > "The Apple executives said the company had been in regular discussions with the government since early January, and that it proposed four different ways to recover the information the government is interested in without building a backdoor. One of those methods would have involved connecting the iPhone to a known Wi-Fi network and triggering an iCloud backup that might provide the FBI with information stored to the device between the October 19th and the date of the incident." > "Apple sent trusted engineers to attempt that method, the executives said, but they were unable to do it. It was then that they discovered that the Apple ID password associated with the iPhone had been changed sometime after the terrorist's death -- within 24 hours of the government taking possession of the phone. By changing the password, the government foreclosed its ability to obtain a fresh copy of the most recent device data via this back-up-to-known-wifi method." [1]: https://www.buzzfeed.com/johnpaczkowski/apple-terrorists-appleid-passcode-changed-in-government-cust https://www.buzzfeed.com/johnpaczkowski/apple-terrorists-app...