> It doesn’t matter /who/ has that decryption key Of course it matters. Apple already has nearly total power to modify their devices, and are clearly acting wi

> It doesn’t matter /who/ has that decryption key Of course it matters. Apple already has nearly total power to modify their devices, and are clearly acting with caution. American courts are not going to give a warrant so an officer can steal nudes. There is no a priori reason that your phone should require a greater kind of warrant than your home or your bank account, and wanting zero access at all only makes sense if you think law enforcement has negative utility. Personally I'd do something more like this: Print one code on the inside of each device, so as to make access strictly harder than physical access, store one code internally as per your other mission-critical keys, distribute one key each to choice governments, inside a physical module so as to prevent clumsy storage and reduce the chance of cloning (since singly-owned keys can just be revoked if stolen), perhaps with some protocol so multiple members are needed to agree, if you are particularly paranoid. That way you can only get access if Apple wills (either given a warrant or otherwise coerced), the court wills (either a genuine case or simply corrupt), and you had physical access to the device. Apple could not then backdate court keys, so can only be coerced by China into providing access for future phones exactly as they are already in the position to do, though of course OS updates means they already effectively have a backdoor.