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The FBI-Apple encryption dispute was a legal debate between the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the technology company Apple Inc. over the issue of whether US courts could force technology firms to unlock devices that had been encrypted to protect users' data. The dispute began in the wake of the 2015 San Bernardino terrorist attack, in which two shooters killed fourteen people before being killed by police.

Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is a data encryption standard widely used by many parts of the US government and by private organizations. Data encryption standards such as AES are designed to protect data on computers. AES is a symmetric block cipher algorithm, which means that it encrypts and decrypts information using an algorithm. Since AES was first chosen as the US government's preferred encryption software, hackers have tried to develop ways to break the cipher, but some estimates suggest that it could take billions of years for current technology to break AES encryption. In the future, however, new technology could make AES obsolete.