A key justification for last week's court order compelling Apple to provide software the FBI can use to crack an iPhone belonging to one of the San Bernardino shooters is that there's no other way for government investigators to extract potentially crucial evidence from the device.

Technically speaking, there are ways for people to physically pry the data out of the seized iPhone, but the cost and expertise required and the failure rate are so great that the techniques aren't practical.

In an article published Sunday, ABC News lays out two of the best-known techniques. The first one is known as decapping. It involves removing the phone’s memory chip and dissecting some of its innards so investigators can read data stored in its circuitry.

With the help of Andrew Zonenberg, a researcher with security firm IOActive, here's how ABC News described the process:

In the simplest terms, Zonenberg said the idea is to take the chip from the iPhone, use a strong acid to remove the chip’s encapsulation, and then physically, very carefully drill down into the chip itself using a focused ion beam. Assuming that the hacker has already poured months and tens of thousands of dollars into research and development to know ahead of time exactly where to look on the chip for the target data -- in this case the iPhone's unique ID (UID) -- the hacker would, micron by micron, attempt to expose the portion of the chip containing exactly that data. The hacker would then place infinitesimally small "probes" at the target spot on the chip and read out, literally bit by bit, the UID data. The same process would then be used to extract data for the algorithm that the phone normally uses to "tangle" the UID and the user's passkey to create the key that actually unlocks the phone. From there the hacker would load the UID, the algorithm and some of the iPhone's encrypted data onto a supercomputer and let it "brute force" attack the missing user passkey by simply trying all possible combinations until one decrypts the iPhone data. Since the guessing is being done outside the iPhone's operating system, there's no 10-try limit or self-destruct mechanism that would otherwise wipe the phone. But that’s if everything goes exactly right. If at any point there's even a slight accident in the de-capping or attack process, the chip could be destroyed and all access to the phone's memory lost forever.

A separate researcher told ABC News it was unlikely the decapping technique would succeed against an iPhone. Instead, it would likely cause the data to be lost forever. A slightly less risky alternative is to use infrared laser glitching. That technique involves using a microscopic drill bit to pierce the chip and then use an infrared laser to access UID-related data stored on it. While the process may sound like it was borrowed from a science fiction thriller, variations of it have been used in the real world. In 2010, for instance, hardware hacker Chris Tarnovsky developed an attack that completely cracked the microcontroller used to lock down the Xbox 360 game console. His technique used an electron microscope called a focused ion beam workstation (then priced at $250,000 for a used model) that allowed him to view the chip in the nanometer scale. He could then manipulate its individual wires using microscopic needles.

While such techniques are technically possible against the iPhone, in this case, their practicality is severely lacking. For one thing, the chances of permanently destroying the hardware are unacceptably high. And for another, the long and extremely costly hacks would have to be carried out from scratch on any additional iPhones government investigators wanted to probe.

By contrast, the software a federal magistrate judge has ordered Apple to produce would work against virtually all older iPhones with almost no modifications. Yes, Apple would have to alter the digital signature to make the software run on different devices, but that would require very little investment. More importantly, the software Apple provided in the current case would all but guarantee the expectation that Apple produce similar assistance in future cases. And even when a suspect's iPhone used "secure enclave" protections not available on the 5C model in this case, the firmware running on the underlying chips can be updated. Given the precedent that would be set in the current case, it wouldn't be much of a stretch for a court to require Apple to augment the software with functions for bypassing Secure Enclave protections.

The process laid out in Sunday's article is interesting, and technically it shows that it may be possible for the FBI to extract the data stored on the seized iPhone without Apple's assistance. But for the reasons laid out, it will never be seriously considered, let alone used.