<blockquote>It is amazing to even try to conceive that the ham-handed FBI, with politically appointed leaders (aka morons who have no idea about building hardware/software and who are trained and incentivized to kick doors down, not pick locks) would be remotely qualified to even understand the ramifications of creating/modifying source code, signing it, and pushing it to carefully designed hardware. Much less qualified to execute on that task with a few government programmers, when it took an organization of 100s of people years to develop what is now the iPhone hardware+software encryption infrastructure.

Just for your reference, the reason the encryption keys are so important / secret is that:
-- All recent (&gt;4 year) Apple hardware has built-in encryption-dedicated processing hardware
-- This hardware has firmware burned-in with Apple public encryption keys that validate that any code has come directly from Apple without modification, on startup
-- This key validation structure is designed to ensure that only code signed by Apple's private key can run on the phone
-- Every iPhone has the same public keys burned on it, because that's how public keys work.

So if Apple is forced to give its private keys to the FBI (assuming the remote likelihood they even knew what to do with it), the FBI would have the ability to encrypt and sign software for <b>any</b> of these iPhones. The idea (legal argument-wise or technically) that "this is about one phone" is laughable.

Forcing someone to disclose encryption keys would be a huge violation of the First Amendment. If there is anything that qualifies as speech and knowledge, it is an encryption key / secret. Then on top of this, there is the question of whether the people at Apple who are in charge of the encryption keys (yes, individuals) would even voluntarily turn it over if given such a blatantly unconstitutional order.

I'm sure that even people within the FBI laugh at the notion that they could develop such code without fucking it up, deploy it, and maintain the secrecy of the keys and source code from outsiders.

And final note by the way, this legal filing was written so poorly as to be a joke. It reads like a summer intern wrote the brief after being dictated it by the paralegal to the Assistant US Attorney dashing out of a meeting</blockquote>
via <a href="https://apple.slashdot.org/story/16/03/15/213216/doj-threatens-to-seize-ios-source-code#comments">DOJ Threatens To Seize iOS Source Code - Slashdot</a>.