From Julian Sanchez at Cato Institute:
In a third-act twist worthy of M. Night Shyamalan, the FBI has announced that it has just discovered a method, provided by an unnamed “third party,” of breaking into deceased San Bernardino shooting suspect Syed Farook’s iPhone without help from Apple. As a result, the hearing at which Apple and DOJ lawyers were scheduled to square off today has been postponed for at least two weeks while the Bureau tests out this “new” approach, potentially rendering the legal battle with Cupertino moot.
The scare quotes in the previous sentence are there to signal my skepticism that there is a genuinely novel in play here—which matters because the FBI has been consistently representing to the courts that Apple’s assistance, and an order to compel that assistance, was “necessary” to access the data—which is to say, that the FBI had no viable alternative methods to decrypt the contents of the phone.