> Apple would be legally restricted from disclosing any government compromises, while still claiming their systems are secure and operating as intended in general.

I'm aware. The point is they can't give the NSA something they don't have. The photo sensor generates its own ECDSA P-256 signing key pair and never releases the private half.

Every device has a unique key pair and the private key is unavailable… there's not a way to give the NSA that would help them. The system is setup so that the image data, meta data, etc can't be accessed by anyone including Apple.