The Macalope has a great rebuttal to Gawker Media’s Nick Denton’s implication that Apple’s presence on the REACT steering committee somehow gives them authority over police investigations.

“It depends,” Wagstaffe says. “If there’s something unusual about the phone, then yes, REACT would get involved. It deals with anything that’s high-tech. So if it’s hard to put a value on it — for instance, if it’s not just any cell phone — then a local police force might have trouble assessing its value, and the task force would have the expertise to do that.”

Oh, wait, turns out it’s really not hard to imagine why REACT might get involved at all! Because the damn thing was a freakin’ prototype of an upcoming product.