I've spoken to several IT folks, and its pretty much unanimous.....Apple is doing the right thing here, and what the Government is demanding is wrong. They may claim its "only to hack this phone", but given the laundry list of information that Snowden provided us, with the levels the Government and NSA will go to keep tabs on ordinary citizens, this effort to force Apple to provide them a program that could literally be used to bypass all i-phone security features is beyond "national security" needs. The FBI and Fed might say they'd only use the program for this phone and then "discard" the program, but who would believe that?
Perhaps if Apple was provided sole access to the phone, allowed to do their own counter programming, and whatever they find, then hand over to the FBI, that might be acceptable. But I doubt the Federal Government would be convinced they had been given everything, and would again demand full access with their own techs