Similarly, laws cannot force a company to divulge encrypted data if the company does not hold the encryption keys.
So as long as you trust the company, the country it's in is not relevant, at least for the situations outlined above.
Laws can and have been written that require companies to gather data.
> Similarly, laws cannot force a company to divulge encrypted data if the company does not hold the encryption keys.
Laws can and have been written that require companies to use weaker or broken encryption.
Apple has thus far been steadfast in resisting this sort of activity and in advocating against any such laws.
So for me at least, this is behavior that is worthy of trust.
Court rulings and legal authorisations to conduct surveilance can and have ... you guessed it ... been kept secret
Source? Example? I don't know an example of this. (At least in the US)
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/03/can_the_nsa_b...
http://gizmodo.com/nsa-paid-security-firm-10-million-bribe-t...
Not just that. Laws can (and probably have been) written that require companies to gather data and to explicitly lie about it.
Maybe I'm dense or naive, but I don't think there's any precedent for that. A gag order is one thing (and there are certainly places for it), but forcing someone to lie would hopefully violate the First Amendment.
It's well know about.
Trusting the company has nothing to do with it - they could be legally compelled to do so in a secret court, and gagged with a NSL to keep them from revealing such an order. Sadly that's the reality we now live in.
In theory Apple could modify iMessage to MITM the key distribution server and enable eavesdropping. The only way to protect against that is to provide in-person validation mechanisms so users can directly compare keys. I hope they add such a thing, not that 99.99999% of their users would ever use it.
As far as the US legal system goes you'd need positive law to enforce wiretapping requirements. Courts (as a general rule) can't issue orders to force Apple to write new code or modify their silicon design to support something the government wishes it could have. Given the way SCOTUS has been approaching cell phone privacy I'm not sure such a law would pass muster.