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Comment by Shivetya | Hacker News Reader

Well the spin game is guaranteed to ramp up. Sycophants are already laying the ground that Apple and Cook would have to accept some of the blame in any upcoming terrorist attacks. I am amazed they haven't tried the kiddie porn route yet.

Still another issue is, if they were compelled to create it they could be compelled to surrender it too. With that its a matter of weeks or months before it gets leaked to a criminal organization or country.

My long term concern is, would we ever know if they got compelled to change iOS to insert a backdoor that gets pushed to our phones. Even if we do how long before carriers are required to lock users out for not updating?

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This is pure hypothetical, but I've wondered what would happen if apple were to lose in court, then make this custom iOS signed to work only on the specific phone in question, and provide the installer to the FBI with a bill for $5 million in development time. Then destroy all source on this special version, stating that they don't feel comfortable having that in their source tree since a rogue employee might leak it. Then the next time there is a phone to crack, they build the custom version again, an provide it to the FBI with another $5 million bill for services rendered since all development would have to be done from scratch. That would at least provide a bar that law enforcement would have to pay, rather than simply thinking once the cost is born once, future versions are cheap like $10k.

Well. "Hello, Mr. X and Mr. Y, we hear that you're the ones who built the previous version. We'll taking you on a vacation to Gitmo, so you can build us another one. You're welcome."

Too bad they can't - the code is probably trivial to write, but they wouldn't have access to Apple's signing keys in order to install their update.

I've already seen the child porn angle playing out in posts on Facebook. This just a little while ago:

"Every child porn videographer in America is trading in his camera for an iPhone"

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