I guess I have a hard time believeing that they didn’t know what Apple would do, that doesn’t make sense to me. Just call them up and ask. If the whole point is to have a cover story to explain in court having the stuff they actually got illegally or whatever, why didn’t they then just say, ‘OK, we’ll use this other company to explain how we got it.’ It might not even make the news cycle that way. Of course I could absolutely be wrong.
The whole thing being drawn out in public is weird. If it was supposedly this darn easy to do without Apple, what could have been the reason not to just do that first? I mean how long was the court case going to draw out?
Freegards
Apple had already been working with the FBI since about the second week of December, when the FBI got smart and called them for help. Before that, Apple did not even know an iPhone was even been found. They HAD received a search warrant for iCloud files, but apparently, like everyone else, they assumed the iPhone associated with the iCloud account was one of those the terrorists had destroyed and thrown into the lake as had been reported on the news.
Apple had told them they did not have a means of getting past the passcode.