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Notes -
There are tiers of government access. The NSA and CIA guard their tech closely and certainly don’t hand it out to every law enforcement agency that wants to catch petty drug dealers and degenerates with stuff saved on a switched off iPhone. The fact that the FBI had to physically grab Ulbricht’s unlocked laptop, that they still try to grab unlocked phones and that intelligence sources regularly discuss ways of working around Apple’s encryption suggest that, if useable hardware back doors into this kind of hardware exist, they’re limited in usage to the absolute most pinnacle of intelligence or criminal investigation operations against political enemies of the state, foreign governments and alleged terrorists. All of those should know that they’re under constant surveillance and every thought they utter is being recorded somewhere in Langley. High level backdoors are hoarded by the relevant agencies and - if you’re an enemy of the state to the extent you need to be worried about them - you’re probably already fucked and the powers that be can likely already manufacture the relevant pretext to ruin/arrest/kill you.
Well, parallel construction is a thing.
Of course, a spook will not crack phones of random suspects in police custody (because this would confirm to the police that they have this ability), nor will they risk their precious 0-days to infect phones of suspects in ordinary criminal cases, but if drug dealers who have incriminating messages on the Apple cloud had an above-baseline rate of being 'randomly' checked when crossing the border, I would not be surprised.
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