Well I don't know what news you've been reading the past year, but personally I've been given the impression that your NSA will try and compel whoever to do whatever they please, be it through court order, economic/political pressure and/or psy-ops.

> If Apple already had the keys to decrypt the message, they could be compelled to hand them over, but that's very different than compelling them to actually modify their end-user software.

It's also very different from the NSA actively hacking into, breaking security infrastructure of their ALLIES. Which is what they've done repeatedly.

It's also been shown that the NSA doesn't (can't or won't) really make a very fine distinction between who/what exactly are enemy, allied or US-targets. In particular if they really really want certain information that can be considered of high tactical value in their pursuit of foreign targets. Such as, say, private encryption keys for OS updates or whatnot.

While this is not proof that this happened or is happening, I'm arguing that there is very little stopping the NSA if they wanted to.