Comment by photochemsyn

Based on past history, it would be more surprising if Apple wasn't actively cooperating with the NSA, that was the case with PRISM (wiki):

> "The documents identified several technology companies as participants in the PRISM program, including Microsoft in 2007, Yahoo! in 2008, Google in 2009, Facebook in 2009, Paltalk in 2009, YouTube in 2010, AOL in 2011, Skype in 2011 and Apple in 2012. The speaker's notes in the briefing document reviewed by The Washington Post indicated that '98 percent of PRISM production is based on Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft'"

With the rise of end-to-end encryption in the wake of the Snowden revelations, this put large tech corporations in a bind, given the conflict between consumer desire for secure snoop-proof devices, and government desire for backdoor access. Pressure might have been applies by government contracting decisions, so no cooperation == no big government contract. The general rise of end-to-end encryption also meant that things like deep packet inspection along the trunk no longer worked, putting a premium on breaking into devices to install keyloggers etc.

All the fear of China doing this with Huawei (probably well-justified fear) may have risen in part as projection by politicians and insiders who knew the US government was doing it already with Apple, Android, Intel, ARM, etc. The US government has certainly retained legalistic justification for such behavior, even though the Act expired in 2020[1]. Also, corporations have been given retroactive immunity for similar illegal activites before [2], so Apple has that precedent to go by.

[1] https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/section_702_renewal_pres...

[2] https://www.aclu.org/news/national-security/retroactive-tele...