> allows officials to collect material including search history, the content of emails, file transfers and live chats
> The program facilitates extensive, in-depth surveillance on live communications and stored information. The law allows for the targeting of any customers of participating firms who live outside the US, or those Americans whose communications include people outside the US.
> It was followed by Yahoo in 2008; Google, Facebook and PalTalk in 2009; YouTube in 2010; Skype and AOL in 2011; and finally Apple, which joined the program in 2012. The program is continuing to expand, with other providers due to come online.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants...
If the NSA had that info, why go through the trouble?
To defend the optics of a backdoor that they actively rely on?
If Apple and the NSA are in kahoots, it's not hard to imagine them anticipating this kind of event and leveraging it for plausible deniability. I'm not saying this is necessarily what happened, but we'd need more evidence than just the first-party admission of two parties that stand to gain from privacy theater.