I suspected this was true ever since Apple released iCloud Keychain and did nothing interesting with it. Government pressure works. reuters.com/article/us-app…
This is the short-term strategy of these “Apple v. FBI” cases and the pressure campaign on Facebook to delay e2e encryption: the government knows that once encryption is deployed, the advantage moves to the tech companies. So the plan is to delay deployments.
Engineers and project managers: this is why you don’t have time to delay and “get everything right” if you’re planning an e2e deployment. The chances that the political environment remains favorable go down as the time horizon increases.
This is what makes me nervous about Facebook’s current plans to deploy encryption in its messaging platforms: given where we are, and this long of a timeframe, I worry there is zero chance this makes it to deployment. google.com/amp/s/www.wire…
Notice as well that Apple didn’t just abandon plans to encrypt iCloud backups by *default*. They even abandoned giving users the option to encrypt those backups. And due to the walled garden nature of iOS, there’s nothing you can do about it.
It was nice while it lasted, @Apple. 
