It's possible for it to be a facade, but also real.

Apple is a part of PRISM so there's approximately a 100% chance that anything you send to Apple via message, cloud, or whatever else, gets sent onto the NSA and consequently any agency that wants it. But the entire mass data collection they are doing is probably unconstitutional and thus illegal. But anytime it gets challenged in courts it gets thrown out on a lack of standing - nobody can prove it was used against them, so they don't have the legal standing to sue.

And the reason this is, is because its usage is never acknowledged in court. Instead there is parallel construction. [1] For instance imagine the NSA finds out somebody is e.g. muling some drugs. They tip off the police and then the police find the car in question and create some reason to pull it over - perhaps it was 'driving recklessly.' They coincidentally find the cache of drugs after doing a search of the car because the driver was 'behaving erratically', and then this 'coincidence' is how the evidence is introduced into court.

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So getting back to Apple they probably want to have their cake and eat it too. By giving the NSA et al all they want behind the scenes they maintain those positive relations (and compensatory $$$ from the government), but then by genuinely fighting its normalization (which would allow it to be directly introduced) in court, they implicitly lie to their users that they're keeping their data protected. So it's this sort of strange thing where it's a facade, but simultaneously also real.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction

> the entire mass data collection they are doing is probably unconstitutional and thus illegal. But anytime it gets challenged in courts it gets thrown out on a lack of standing

It's kind of wild that this is the part of the deep state MAGA just forgot about.