The presence or lack of an argument by Apple that they're being coerced by intelligence/LE agencies is not demonstrative of anything. You know that gag orders a

The presence or lack of an argument by Apple that they're being coerced by intelligence/LE agencies is not demonstrative of anything. You know that gag orders are a thing. You know that the programs revealed by Snowden were not the subject of disclosures by the participant organizations or any argument such as you're expecting Apple to make under the same conditions. All we know is what they do. It's not a stretch by any means to suspect that when an American corporation adopts uncharacteristic policies that violate their customers' privacy, the government is probably involved. Difference here is that unlike TrueCrypt, Apple can't just shut down. Hell, even the rumor of Apple doing this has beneficial impact to law enforcement. The press release may be the product. Let's take the effort at the most altruistic face value - defeating child porn mongers. If you're trying to herd such people to a very narrow set of solutions that you can monitor and/or control, simply undermining trust in the alternative options may be enough without actually implementing invasive tools being discussed. The comedy in some of this is how hammy the next act can get - if I were a cynical man, I'd expect a technology to come out in response to Apple's move, or maybe it's out there already but suddenly gets a new push for mindshare. I'm sure the security world has a term for solutions like this. Not really honey pots, but more like fly paper. A product the agencies have either straight up owned or surreptitiously gained control over, marketed to people who would use it for ill.