Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're completely right that there are undesirable consequences to mathematically absolute privacy that can't be compromised by any means. But I'd argue that the government has brought this scenario upon itself by blowing up the old system of procedural (rather than mathematical) safeguards. In the past, Apple had your iMessage data, or at least the ability to decrypt it on-demand. It was understood that this data wo…
I'm in favor of Apple's choices, but I can see the government's side of this too, I don't think it's as cut and dried morally as people are making it. I like to mentally "game out" repercussions of various scenarios to see where they lead, and I don't think it is bad with such wide sweeping and powerful technologies, to play devils advocate and argue on both sides. A lot of people don't seem to want get into the fine…
In contrast to criminal law, most regulatory schemes use a reverse onus. That is to say, the onus to prove compliance is on the regulated entity. So you can't just say, "sorry, we don't have that data / we encrypted it". That will be de facto non-compliance. So if you are encrypting internal data (which of course you should be doing, just so it isn't stolen), you had better have the means of decrypting it when the government comes knocking.
The thorny issues will be in criminal prosecutions where disclosure of the accused's (encrypted) stored data will now need the active participation of the accused, who of course can exercise their Fifth Amendment rights to refuse. And the government won't be able to go around them and get the device vendor to unlock it. But companies facing regulatory sanctions already don't have these rights.