content: I'll admit, you're fair in pointing out that it was wrong of me to word it like that.  The request is equivalent to a court order and should be treated more like a demand. Your example is actually the one that deviates from the situation at hand; if it were accurate, I'd be on your side.  A better comparison would be the following: Imagine you live in a red house.  Someone who lives in a red house goes on a killing rampage and commits suicide before authorities get to him.  When the government begins its investigation, they find that red houses have a powerful lock that they can't seem to bypass--and the key to open it was destroyed.  So a warrant isn't going to cover it: the government instead decides to do something much more daring and go to the Red House Company telling them that they need them to create a master key that can be used to help them get through this lock.  The government will never have access to this master key if the Red House Company doesn't want them to have it, and the key can be kept under the highest level of security so that it doesn't get leaked out to the public.  There's no back-door issue at hand here because the government ends up no more powerful after the case then they were before. The only argument that can come out of this is that it can be considered forced labor on the company's side, but that argument falls apart for the case of Apple, because they've admitted that they were willing in the past to work with the FBI in instances similar such as these.  And provided that the burden of the request is not too heavy--which it doesn't seem to be--this seems like the type of order that's well-balanced and appropriate for this case.