> * There's no likelihood at all that other users will be impacted by the backdoor
That could not be further from the truth. They are trying to set a precedent that endangers the future of consumer end-to-end encryption.
They are trying to repurpose an 18th-century law (the All Writs law) to force Apple to help them break iPhone encryption.
If this case creates precedent, what is to stop them from, say, forcing Signal and Google to work together to deliver a backdoored app update to a specific user?
The DOJ can make this demand because Apple phones of this vintage are already breakable, and the DOJ is merely asking Apple to exercise a capability it already has.
Apple knows this, better than most, and has for many years. They have done security design work with governments as an explicit adversary. The 5C was insecure. The 5S is not: it has an entire additional processor, running an incredibly secure OS, whose entire job is to make sure that the phone keeps promises like these even if the DOJ orders Apple to sign bogus updates.
Apple is so committed to this that they've extended the "ten tries and you're out" promise all the way through their server infrastructure, so that if you escrow data into iCloud it will be nuked if someone tries to brute force it. Not only that, but after rigging their HSM cluster to operate that way, they burned the update keys, so that an attempt to change that rule will break all of iCloud.
> There's no likelihood at all that other users will be impacted by the backdoor
The backdoor, a "master key" as Tim Cook put it, that opens all pre-5S iPhones affects millions of other users.
And that's not even the main issue. The issue is the precedent it sets, which endangers a lot more than just a few million users or a few specific models of iPhone.
That could not be further from the truth. They are trying to set a precedent that endangers the future of consumer end-to-end encryption.
They are trying to repurpose an 18th-century law (the All Writs law) to force Apple to help them break iPhone encryption.
If this case creates precedent, what is to stop them from, say, forcing Signal and Google to work together to deliver a backdoored app update to a specific user?
You are not a lawyer. Nate Cardozo, staff attorney at the EFF, had this to say: https://twitter.com/ncardozo/status/699964225737748481