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The disagreement is: having made a phone that works this way, it is now technically infeasible to search it. It was not technically infeasible to build the phone another way, but Apple also never claimed that. After all, they did this deliberately, as a sales pitch.
That is a claim, but it's in a different debate. One is, "The government wants Apple to get into this existing phone right here, right now." The other is, "The government is considering passing a law that would require Apple to build future devices which would allow them to perform searches." I don't think anything that anyone has said so far in this thread is really relevant for the first debate; I certainly haven't said anything about that. It's the latter debate that is the context for so many of the poor applications of, "...but that's technologically infeasible!"
The only thing I ever saw Apple commenting on is the first one. Did they say it's technically unfeasible to build a surveilable phone anywhere? Cause that's dumb.
I doubt Apple ever officially used those words, because it is dumb. But all sorts of tech industry/press folks say variations on the theme. The link I gave to the CKV/"AKV" debate was a back-and-forth with people who are still very prominent, who were absolutely actually claiming that it was technologically infeasible (to get there, you need to add certain qualifiers as to what "it" is). Reading that whole back and forth is probably the most useful for understanding where people try to draw the battle lines.
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