25 years in prison if you do not comply.

make the system so it can only to be accessed by the individual none other. not even the makers of the phone or system ...

If you have resigned and are working elsewhere? The responsibility with this is the legal entity that is Apple, not the individuals concerned.

Legally speaking, if they can come up with a mad enough justification that they could actually enforce it upon a company to do it, the same justification could be applied equally to an individual.

Legally speaking, if they can come up with a mad enough justification that they could actually enforce it upon a company to do it, the same justification could be applied equally to an individual.

The process described by UCLA technology fellow Daniel Kahn Gillmor uses a technique called NAND mirroring to copy the portion of the phone's memory that counts the number of passcode attempts entered. By continually restoring the copy, the FBI could thereby circumvent the limit on the number of passcode guesses that can be made before the device is rendered permanently inaccessible.

Another, more risky – not to mention laborious – method is an invasive microchip attack known as "de-capping". This involves removing and de-capsulating the phone's memory chip, carefully drilling down into it using a focused ion beam to expose the portion of the chip containing the target data (in this case, the iPhone's unique ID and passkey algorithm) and then probing it, micron by micron, to extract the information.

The US Department of Justice has cracked the iPhone of one of the San Bernardino shooters without Apple's help -- and has abandoned its attempt through the courts to force the company to assist.

Prosecutors withdrawing (PDF) the court motion for Apple to help crack shooter Syed Farook's iPhone 5C said: "The government has now successfully accessed the data stored on Farook’s iPhone and therefore no longer requires the assistance from Apple Inc".