FBI director James Comey and his supporters suggest that making Apple break its iPhone encryption for the San Bernardino shooter case would be a one-off event, and not the start of a slippery slope into unwanted surveillance.

Well, it seems that someone needs to tell the Department of Justice that, because the D.O.J. is reportedly salivating at the thought of being able to hack iPhones for criminal investigations — with court orders being filed for Apple to help extract iPhone data in a further dozen cases around the U.S.

Not too surprisingly, the five major publishers originally named in the U.S. Department of Justice’s e-book case regarding their collusion with Apple on pricing have now themselves filed a complaint regarding the Justice Department’s proposal to eliminate the use of the agency model in any Apple agreements with publishers for a period of five years.

Publishers like the agency model as it allows them to set prices for e-books, instead of the distributor, as Amazon did before Apple’s own iBooks system launched on the iPad.

The ongoing iBooks antitrust case between Apple and the United States Department of Justice took a very interesting twist this morning when the DoJ and 33 state Attorneys General laid out plans to remedy Apple’s wrongdoings and restore competition to the market.

The DoJ wants Apple to terminate all of its deals with book publishers, and refrain from entering into any new ones for at least five years. It also wants the company to start selling e-books from rivals like Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Following a lengthy trial, U.S. District Judge Denise Cote has today ruled that Apple conspired to raise the price of e-books. Another trial for damages will follow at a later date, Reuters reports.

Eddy Cue is at the Daniel Patrick Moynihan United States Courthouse in lower Manhattan testifying in the Department of Justice’s e-books antitrust case, and he’s been sharing more information on the work that went into developing iBooks prior to its launch in 2010.

Cue reveled that Steve Jobs, then Apple’s CEO, chose to give away a free copy of Winnie-the-Pooh not just because he liked the book, but because its colorful illustrations showcased the capabilities of digital e-books in the iBooks app.

Walter Isaacson, the author of the best-selling biography about Apple co-founder and former CEO Steve Jobs, will not have to share his notes or testify in an ongoing lawsuit over alleged eBook price fixing between Apple and book publishers.

Lawyers wanted to see Isaacson’s notes from interviews with Jobs in an effort to establish Apple’s agreements with publishers, but Isaacson refused to hand them over, citing a New York law that allows journalists to shield their sources.

Apple co-founder and former CEO Steve Jobs threatened Palm CEO Edward Colligan with patent litigation if he did not agree to stop poaching Apple employees, according to a court filing that was made public on Tuesday.

Confidential emails between the pair, along with documents from Adobe and Google, have surfaced in a civil lawsuit that claims a number of major companies in Silicon Valley violated antitrust rules by entering into agreements not to recruit each other’s employees. Five employees are now fighting for class action status and damages for lost wages as a result of the “no-hire” agreements.

In a somewhat ironic move, the U.S. government has entered into an ebook deal with Apple that will see a range of government reports, documents, and ebooks published in Apple’s iBookstore. The partnership, which was announced earlier this week, coincides with the Department of Justice’s latest legal filings in its anti-trust suit against Apple.

The deal with the Government Printing Office (GPO) will make a wide swath of documents and ebooks available through the iBookstore. While some government documents are available for free, a number of documents and full-length ebooks are not.

It’s long been rumored that the Department of Justice would file an antitrust suit against Apple for e-book price fixing, but now it’s happening, as the United States DoJ just filed such a suit against Apple, Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan and Penguin.

At issue here is Apple’s attempt to overthrow Amazon’s hegemony on e-book selling by collaborating with publishers ahead of the iBookstore launch to standardize how much is charged for e-books, not just through Apple, but through Amazon as well.

After 13 years, Microsoft will no longer be scrutinized by the Department of Justice. The timing is apt, because Apple has supplanted Microsoft as the biggest company in tech — and with Apple’s rise in fortunes come its own anti-trust concerns.