What stops them from doing it now? What about Apple being willing to hop in bed with the US government affects whether they would with Russia or China, or whether either of them would ask for this from Apple?
Even if they wouldn't "hop into bed" with other governments, if they had hopped into bed with the US govt. they would have lost revenue in those other markets, which would be likely to view Apple products as backdoored by the US government.
As a multinational company, it's in Apple's interests to maintain a 'no backdoors' strong privacy stance, or it will both lose foreign markets (that are afraid of US/other nation's backdoors) and have to contend with increased requests from various governments for backdoors/audits (they got backdoor access, why can't we?), and the associated revenue lose.
That's not the point I was challenging (which I couldn't highlight and quote because Safari in the iPad apparently decided I didn't need that ability). I was challenging the idea that cooperating with the US government somehow makes it easier for, or in any way affects the ability of, other governments to demand cooperation with their own programs. I was not saying there wouldn't be consequences for Apple doing so, or that they should have.
I don't, and said nothing of the sort. I said that their decision to cooperate with one government is independent of their decision to cooperate with another. Thus, cooperating with the US does not mean they can't tell Russia and China to go fuck themselves if they asked for the same thing.
Money, more specifically the desire for it, knows no bounds. Apple is a multinational corporation whose goal is to deliver value (read: money) to shareholders. The idea of political boundaries meaning anything is a quaint notion that I feel was true only long in the past, if it ever was.
I'm not saying Apple is evil, merely that multinational corporations don't have to care about political boundaries.
