Matthew Garrett

We should not forget that the government isn't asking Apple for anything that they couldn't do themselves. I believe there is nothing that prevents the government from taking out the storage hardware, extracting the encrypted data, and brute-forcing the key on the copy. Asking Apple for modified firmware is a convience because they can then use firmware's password interface and don't have to reverse engineer how exactly the encryption is implemented, but it doesn't give the government any capabilities that it doesn't already have.