Update at end: Mnuchin joins the chorus.

Apple is reportedly preparing for a bizarre legal battle with the FBI over its demands for the Cupertino company to help it break into two iPhones used by the Pensacola Naval Air Station shooter.

The company was previously prepared to fight the FBI in court over the same demand with the San Bernardino iPhones before the agency backed down…

The New York Times reports that Cook is leading the company’s contingency plans.

President Trump threw fuel on the fire yesterday when he tweeted that ‘they refuse to unlock phones used by killers, drug dealers and other violent criminal elements.’

Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, has marshaled a handful of top advisers, while Attorney General William P. Barr has taken aim at the company and asked it to help penetrate two phones used by a gunman in a deadly shooting last month at a naval air station in Pensacola, Fla.

Executives at Apple have been surprised by the case’s quick escalation, said people familiar with the company who were not authorized to speak publicly.

This was the latest in the war of words between the government and Apple on the matter. US Attorney General William Barr earlier claimed that it asked Apple for help and the company provided no ‘substantive assistance.’ Apple disputed this.

The fact that Apple handed over ‘many gigabytes’ of information has to mean that it provided copies of iCloud backups of the phones, as that’s the only way Apple would hold so much data. Those backups would contain copies of almost everything stored on the phones themselves.

As we noted earlier, it appears to be the ‘almost’ part of that with which the FBI is unhappy.

If the case does go to court, however, it would be a bizarre legal battle. These are older iPhones which third-party companies are already able to access. If the FBI wants to unlock them, all it has to do is send the phones to one of these companies.

As we pointed out in that piece, it’s not about the cost, either.

So it’s now pretty trivial to access iPhones of this age.

In addition to other techniques, a bootrom vulnerability was found last year that affects iPhone 4s through iPhone X. The bootrom exploit is essentially unpatchable by Apple through software as the issue persists in the read-only memory of the hardware.

We could understand the FBI going to war over a newer iPhone model for which third-party exploits don’t exist, even though Apple would still be right to resist. As we’ve observed on numerous occasions, both before and after the San Bernardino case, there is no safe way for Apple to do what the government is demanding.

But two older iPhones which can be trivially cracked at low cost is a very odd basis for a legal battle.

You cannot have an encryption system which is only a little bit insecure any more than you can be a little bit pregnant. Encryption systems are either secure or they’re not – and if they’re not then it’s a question of when, rather than if, others are able to exploit the vulnerability.

Reuters reports that Mnuchin has also weighed in.

Image: Shutterstock

“I understand the president’s view, and it is absolutely critical for our technology companies to cooperate with law enforcement,” Mnuchin told CNBC in an interview.

Mnuchin later told reporters at the White House that he had not discussed the issue with Apple and did not know the specifics at hand. “I know Apple has cooperated in the past on law enforcement issues, and I expect they would continue … to cooperate.”