Its Apple's version of "Groundhog Day"—complete with a cameo by the FBI. The agency wants to penetrate the encryption guarding the contents of two iPhones used by a gunman during last month's shooting at a naval air station in Pensacola, Florida, but Apple is characteristically reluctant to prop open a backdoor. However, a recent article by The New York Times indicates that the situation may be escalating more quickly than the technology giant expected.

The debate over whether or not tech companies should build backdoors into their encryption has been raging for some time now, with Apple and other tech companies continuing to refuse to install law enforcement backdoors for fear of the key falling into the wrong hands. Meanwhile, the Justice Department appears determined to press the issue in the case of Pensacola in what may be an ultimately futile attempt to establish a favorable precedent for law enforcement to fall back on the next time it's locked out of a system.

Christopher Ballod, a partner at Lewis Brisbois Bisgaard & Smith, pointed to the lack of exigent circumstances surrounding the case. The shooter in question is dead and there is—at least based on the information made public—no immediate threat of danger. There may, however, be new opportunities.

"We have an administration that's more openly willing to put pressure on the tech sector. … You have an atmosphere where I think the [Department of Justice] is looking to try its hand again at getting this kind of surveillance built into the system," Ballod said.

So far, law enforcement in the United States and abroad haven't been very successful in those efforts. Five Eyes—a security alliance between the governments of the U.S., U.K., New Zealand, Australia and Canada—went so far as to draft the request into an official communique that ultimately went unheralded. Apple itself clashed directly with the FBI following a 2015 terrorist attack in San Bernardino, California, with the company refusing to penetrate the encryption on a dead gunman's phone. The FBI was eventually forced to engage the services of third-party companies such as Cellebrite to forcibly breach the device's security.

Apple's lack of cooperation also didn't prevent the agency from spending two months successfully breaking into a iPhone 11belonging to Lev Parnas, a businessman indicted for campaign finance charges who claims to have delivered quid pro quo offers to Ukrainian leaders under the direction of Donald Tump's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani.

So why not take the same track here? Per The New York Times, the phones recovered from the Pensacola shooting may be too damaged for third-party tools to be effective, which may preclude Apple from being able to offer up a viable solution as well. Even if a third-party like Cellebrite were effective in this instance, that may ultimately prove to be a game of diminishing returns for law enforcement.

"Ultimately, third parties that are able to pinpoint vulnerabilities in the system, those will ultimately benefit Apple because they will be able to block those vulnerabilities in their system [moving forward]. So it's kind of an interesting feedback loop," said Jarno Vanto, a partner at Crowell & Moring.

Taking Apple to court also has the potential to significantly curtail the efforts of the FBI long-term, since there's no guarantee that judge won't side with Apple on the issue of backdoor encryption. For starters, Vanto opined that the arguments the Justice Department is making with regards to the Pensacola case have failed to evolve since San Bernardino,

"This isn't really about that. This is about whether a private entity can be essentially forced to create a weakness in their product, which is not really a privacy issue," Vanto said.

It is, however, a potential issue for anyone who uses Apple's products. Ballod pointed out that forcing Apple to install a vulnerability in its products may constitute a significant risk to attorneys and other professionals who use phones, laptops and tablets that hold sensitive client information. Should those and similar arguments be enough to sway a judge, law enforcement could lose not only the encryption debate, but the ability to force entry with the help of third-party contractors, he said.

Of course, given the ongoing discourse around privacy and Silicon Valley in general, it's difficult to predict how public sympathies will continue to shift in the battle of privacy versus security.

"I'm a little bit worried that it's easy to fire up the public against their own interests these days," Ballod said.