Re: This is despicable.
"the government has both a constitutionally allowed search warrant and the phone owner's permission to search the phone." --- tom dial
Surely, even if we disagree about who is in the right we can agree that this is more complex than a search warrant issue. Apple are not preventing the government from searching the phone. The phone and its contents are in the possession of the FBI; it's just likely that it will be rather (if not prohibitively) expensive to make sense of those contents without Apple's assistance. That assistance, whether you think it should be forthcoming or not, is not, as far as I can tell, covered by any outstanding "search warrant"
Presumably, if a search warrant was issued against Apple (maybe on the basis they were a co-conspirator) they would have to hand over their firmware signing key. Then this would be a search warrant issue. As it stands, the direction of the court is 'make this thing then hand it over to (or use it under the supervision of) the FBI." The court has used the All Writs Act because such a direction is not a "search warrant".
Biting the hand that feeds IT
