American whistleblower Edward Snowden has a word for the FBI's claims that it can't unlock the iPhone 5C of a dead terrorist and therefore must force Apple to help.  And that word is "bullsh_t".

Speaking via videolink from his self-imposed exile in Moscow to the US progressive policy organization Common Cause, Snowden said: "The FBI says Apple has the 'exclusive technical means' to unlock the phone.  Respectfully, that's bullsh_t."  Shortly afterwards, he tweeted his agreement with an American Civil Liberties Union report saying that the FBI’s claims in the case are fraudulent.

Apple is refusing the FBI's request to override security in the iPhone 5C used by Syed Farook, who with his wife killed 14 people in San Bernardino, California in December before police fatally shot them.  Most of the biggest tech companies are supporting Apple, which says the FBI isn't just demanding to get into one phone, it wants the tools to break into every mobile phone regardless of operating system.  The two sides are to argue their cases in a US Federal Court this month, but the government's case was weakened by a recent ruling against it in a separate but very similar case.

Apple's co-founder Steve Wozniak also criticizes the FBI's case as "lame", noting that mobile phone carrier "Verizon turned over all the phone records and SMS messages. So they want to take this other phone that the two didn’t destroy, which was a work phone. It’s so lame and worthless to expect there’s something on it and to get Apple to expose it."