TL;DR: "they're asking the public to grant them significant new powers that could put all of our communications infrastructure at risk, and to trust them to not misuse these powers. But they're deliberately misleading the public (and the judiciary) to try to gain these powers. This is not how a trustworthy agency operates. We should not be fooled."
The TL;DR should be "iPhone 5C NAND flash can be wiped and restored to default, making brute forcing the PIN a possibility," not this speculative snippet.
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?
