Except that all the evidence points to this speculative snippet being correct, and is the point of the article. So, your tl;dr is missing the crucial point of the article, that the FBI is making a power gambit through deception.
By the same measure, Apple is deceiving everyone too.
Apparently, they can't enable the phone's "icloud backup" because someone changed the icloud password. Doesn't Apple have old passwords -i.e can't they restore the old password from backup? And presuming they can't (why?).... can't they simply modify the server-side to not check for password for a given account, and accept just accept any password for backing up?
