[jbuhbjlnjbn]

No they really couldn't, because someone investigating, monitoring and reverse engineering the device traffic might have noticed, it would be leaked by a whistleblower, there are plenty of ways this could ruin Apple.

Not so now, they are in the clear either way because Apple themselfes cannot look into the hashes databank. So the backdoor is there, the responsibility of the crime of spying is forwarded to different actors, which even cannot be monitored by Apple.

This is truly a devilish device they thought up. Make misuse possible, exonerate any responsibility to outside actors, act naive as if hands are clean.