I dont quite buy the "switch the app" argument as code signing easily fixes that. Intercepting at a higher level such as a keylogger or screenshotter would work

I dont quite buy the "switch the app" argument as code signing easily fixes that. Intercepting at a higher level such as a keylogger or screenshotter would work, but then you'd apply the same argument: the terrorists would just go one level higher. In fact they could go all the way to open source processors running their own code doing all the same things. Yes, it would delay them a few years to get there, but once there there would be little the US could do to stop it. At the network level, we simply dont sign hardware, so without some major refactoring to the core system, theres little to do there. Still though, at every level of this back and forth, consumers have to give up more and more privacy to allow the government to step in and get the same level of information they had before about terrorists until the terrorists will eventually win (or we completely lose privacy and trillions of dollars in infrastructure). So why play the game?