In the San Bernardino case, it turned out that the FBI didn’t actually need Apple’s help to access the data in shooter Syed Rizwan Farook’s iPhone 5c. But if Apple had helped, it certainly would have been cheaper.
Speaking at a security conference in London, FBI Director James Comey was asked how much the bureau paid the third-party gray-hat hackers for the tool that broke into the iPhone. “A lot, more than I will make in the remainder of this job, which is seven years and four months, for sure. But it was in my view worth it.”
