Edward Snowden. Speaking at Common Cause's "Blueprint for Democracy" conference, Snowden said the claim is "bullshit."
“The FBI says Apple has the 'exclusive technical means' to unlock the phone...Respectfully, that's bullshit,” Snowden said.
Snowden linked to one of many posts that have detailed the problems with the FBI's claims. Those posts range from highlighting the FBI's mistakes thus far to the existence of ways around the iPhone's security that the FBI is conveniently ignoring.
He thinks, as does the Tame Apple Press and the Apple Press office, that the FBI is only interested in setting a precedent that'll affect the tech industry as a whole.
One of our sources in the Mac security world said that the theory is plausible. The FBI should have no problem knocking over the iPhone operating system because it uses very poor crypto keys due to weak randomness and entropy sources which are stored in the software. They don’t have physical anti-tampering and use community software such as OpenSSL with its nasty bugs. Lastly it uses Lightning which gives direct memory access.
Of course it could just be lazy, or perhaps it wants to set a precedent where Apple always has to knock over phones when it is given a court order. The only issue with that is that there are shedloads of other precedents already in place where tech companies have helped hack terrorists phones. What is more likely is that the FBI does not want to set a precident of allowing tech companies to tell it to sod off when it has a court order in a terror investigation.