It may be entirely unrelated, however this is the exact sort of behaviour you would expect to see associated with providing compatibility with Australia's newly introduced AABill, or to implement GCHQ's ghost participant proposal (https://www.lawfareblog.com/principles-more-informed-excepti...).
The bizarre thing is how little people seem to have paid attention to Snowden. Apple joined the NSA's PRISM program in 2012. [1] PRISM enables the government to access data from participating companies including audio, video, and live chat. I'm linking to Wiki there only as a catalogue of sources. The page itself is useless and has overtly fake (though at least mildly amusing) quotes from Google. There's no need for new bills for these sort of issues to be a concern.
I also tend to agree with you that this is not necessarily related to these programs. The reason I mention this at all is because I think there is a reasonable chance that this is related, that this overall issue is very important, and that the amount of cognitive dissonance on this is surprising and regressive. These programs are real. Companies facilitating access, including real time, to your data and "private" conversations is real. And it seems to only be getting worse. Yet people seem to convince themselves otherwise, including throughout this thread. Part of the reasons these programs are able to carry on mostly unchallenged is because people convince themselves that what is happening, is not.
