In fact, they swore to it. https://twitter.com/mmasnick/status/700394031218499584

Who swore on it ? how high is he on the org chart ? is it possible that he is being kept in the dark ,intentionally ? or could such skills only availble at other agencies ,but the knowledge acquired can be shared ,like it has been in the past ?

The source link is a few tweets down. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2714170-SB-Shooter-M... The signatures are on page 20 but they're the same names as on the first page:

  Eileen M. Decker, United States Attorney
  Patricia A Donahue, Assistant US Attorney &
    Chief, National Security Division
  Tracy L. Wilkinson, Assistant US Attorney
  Allen W. Chiu, Assistant US Attorney

But the guy who said the specific statement you mentioned is just the regional director of the orange county forensic department in the FBI , Christopher Pluhar @pg 21.

Most people who think about this stuff often seem to think that TAO already has access and the only purpose is to create a precedent to use this legal process against anyone.

Do you really think that the information in this phone is otherwise beyond the reach of all mankind? Spare a few snowflake engineers and managers at Apple?

There are dozens if not hundreds of viable methods to obtain this info, FBI is choosing to pursue the court order route instead of any of the other forensic tools available to them.

The simple fact of the matter is that the encrypted data and the key to decrypt it both live in a piece of physical hardware on the device-- no matter how well obfuscated it is, it can still be analyzed and recovered by a sufficiently advanced technical entity.

This is exactly the type of work that NSA TAO exists to accomplish, and they are widely regarded as one of the best organizations of this kind in the world.

What is TAO?