Something about me loves there is a Mac brute force passwd cracker called DaveGrohl.

I'm not endorsing this. I was just searching around today because encryption is really hard to hack. But computing power is really cheap these days.  So there is that. I mean, there is a 90% chance they have a soft passwd and they could brute force it in a day. The Feds have been trying to unlock encryption forever. Forever! If it was so easy... what's the problem?

This is what HP says about encryption.

Encryption is Very, Very Hard to Crack.

Cracking encryption is absolutely never as easy as typing “G-cipher,” however, because it is portrayed that way in movies, many people (maybe about 38.2% of them) end up believing that it actually is that easy to crack.

That really is not a reflection on the people who end up with that misunderstanding. Encryption is hard and requires lots of arcane math to really understand how it works and why it is secure. Unless someone is a specialist in that particular area, it probably is not worth the significant time and effort needed to understand material that difficult. After all, as Calvin Coolidge said, “The business of America is business.” It is not payment processing. And it is definitely not encryption.

So it is perfectly reasonable to expect people to not really understand encryption and the protection that it provides. But because it is so much easier to get inaccurate information from how encryption is portrayed in movies, it should not be too surprising that so many people do not have an accurate understanding of how good the protection provided by encryption really is. Encryption is not the sort of thing that anyone can bypass by typing a few characters on a keyboard. It is the sort of thing that takes implausible amounts of resources to actually carry out. And it is definitely not the sort of thing that hackers are going to crack any time soon.

What the FBI is basically doing is forcing Apple to pay either in resources (CPU clusters) and or engineers, Which I'm pretty sure the government has that stuff too. As I said, they have been trying to break encryption for at least 20 years.