Comment by _flux

Is it not a fair assumption that companies would try to follow local laws, though? It seems rather perilous for businesses to do otherwise.

It looks like in these cases either the FBI dropped the case or the request was found to be unlawful in the first place. Arguably Apple indeed was following the law even when opposing it within the framework of the law, but what the FBI asks them to do is not the law.

We might be looking at a different story had the case fallen to the side of the government—or perhaps no story at all had that requests also contained a gag-order, which I understand is quite common in these cases and could be the key reason why people hardly ever hear of these cases.

I also wouldn't say the case of basically cracking customer device the same as providing wiretapping of a service a company provides similar at all—and even in this case it looks like the FBI would have been given access to the iCloud storage, but the problem was that the latest data was not backed up there, it needed to be retrieved directly from the device.

There were 42 digital wiretaps (not including combinations) in the year 2023 in US according to https://www.uscourts.gov/statistics-reports/wiretap-report-2... "Types of Surveillance Used, Arrests, and Convictions for Intercepts Installed". I wasn't able to find how many of them were in datacenters from that data, though..