Hmmm

Planting malware would violate the CFAA, 18 U.S.C. § 1030(a)(5)(A) (intentionally damaging through knowing transmission, imprisonment up to 10 years), as well as state computer crime laws.

The CFAA provides both criminal and civil penalties, and specifically prohibits: (1) unauthorised access (or exceeding authorised access) to a computer and obtaining national security information (imprisonment up to 10 years); (2) unauthorised access (or exceeding authorised access) to a computer used in interstate or foreign commerce and obtaining information (imprisonment up to one year); (3) unauthorised access to a non-public computer used by the United States government (imprisonment up to one year); (4) knowingly accessing a protected computer without authorisation with the intent to defraud (imprisonment up to five years); (5) damaging a computer intentionally or recklessly (imprisonment up to five years)

https://iclg.com/practice-areas/cybersecurity-laws-and-regulations/usa

Good thing laws don’t apply to the people who make the laws.

I don’t see the issue here.

The seizure of the devices happened with appropriate warrants, the actual search was done with appropriate warrants, there’s apparently some weird time limit on the search warrant on a seized device, and some of the maintenance involved took place outside that weird time restriction.

The actual hacking of the device and the actual search of the contents of the device were with a warrant.

The headline is a bit misleading. The government had a warrant to search the phone, which required repair before they could do so. The court ruled that repairing the phone was not a separate search requiring a separate warrant.