[drdaeman]

For the phones, that can be pulled regardless of the app's security.

If the legal framework is laid out, government can tell Google or Apple (or phone vendor) to push a system-level update. It is trivial for both to push code that can run without any restrictions, have full access to screen, audio, camera and network.

Not sure why they bother, though. Wasn't it said many times almost every baseband module is already a black box with possibility of undetectable access to the main CPU/memory?