Maybe I'm dense or naive, but I don't think there's any precedent for that. A gag order is one thing (and there are certainly places for it), but forcing someone to lie would hopefully violate the First Amendment.
It's strange that chainsaw10 is being downvoted for their comment. From the second link above, "Have courts upheld compelled false speech? No, and the cases on compelled speech have tended to rely on truth as a minimum requirement." That sounds more like there is not precedent to force people to tell explicit lies.
Also true. But we know from the Snowden revelations and other sources that Apple has been backing up its promises. So we have at least some level of assurance that Apple is a good actor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/40-bit_encryption was the most secure thing it was legal to export. The Netscape browser, in particular, had a lot of hoops you had to go through in order to get the 56 bit version meant for US audiences. Therefore, even most Americans with internet access at the time had the crippled international version.
Laws can and have been written that require companies to gather data.
> Similarly, laws cannot force a company to divulge encrypted data if the company does not hold the encryption keys.
Laws can and have been written that require companies to use weaker or broken encryption.