In this kind of situation I'd say the more realistic "risk" isn't subpoenas or court orders or whatever, at least not standing alone. Instead you just have the

In this kind of situation I'd say the more realistic "risk" isn't subpoenas or court orders or whatever, at least not standing alone. Instead you just have the government mandate that vendors provide this kind of capability though positive law. Then later legal processes like subpoenas or other orders simply use the capabilities that you mandated. Think basically CALEA, which required telecom providers to change their systems to better enable law enforcement wiretaps, as existing methods weren't quite keeping up with telecom digitization. You don't need to use the wiretap orders themselves to make AT&T build in your access points. Content matching by government mandate for various things feels kind of inevitable... It's already out there in terms of plans for requiring it in the copyright sphere, and obviously for CSAM. Anyway, I don't know that whether Apple actually deploys this system makes that much of a difference in this sense: the idea is already out there. Which is basically what you said.