It's strange that you jump straight to thinking the government is involved. Moving most system components to be updatable independently of the core os is a good

It's strange that you jump straight to thinking the government is involved. Moving most system components to be updatable independently of the core os is a good thing. Google should be taking these steps. Not being able to update apex files makes sense as any update will quickly overwrite your changes. This change just moves the bar for modification to be controlling the remote update source. I'm sure it will still be possible to alter that and therefore gain control. This would be similar to how you handle DNS.