[ghshephard]

If the iPhone actually does become very popular, particularly with terrorists, it will be hard to imagine that the NSA doesn't just go develop this capability internally.

"enough cash and bricked test phones" - the great thing about this, is you can just buy the $650 phones - you can get a thousand of them for less than a million dollars, which probably is under your typical line managers budget in the NSA techOps group.

And, lets be realistic, Apple isn't trying to defend against the NSA or Nation States, just your average hacker without access to $100mm+ in hardware.