I have no more trust in the American government to not spy on its citizens than the Chinese government. If iCloud data is encrypted and only the user has the private key. It's just as secure as being on American servers.

Note that only some of your iCloud data is end-to-end encrypted: https://support.apple.com/en-us/ht202303. The rest is also encrypted, but Apple does have the key and can likely be legally compelled to share it with authorities.

What am I missing? According to the link, everything is encrypted at rest besides email. No one thinks email is secure.

The difference being that Tim Cook handed Beijing the iCloud private keys for Chinese users

How did he do that without completely rearchitecting how iOS works? Do you have any citations?

This is about the architecture of iCloud not iOS. Apple has the keys to all encrypted iCloud data (iCloud email is not encrypted at rest).

The only exception is iCloud keychain, but I believe only if you decline the default setting to create an iCloud security code (I'm not entirely sure about that)

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303

I'm not saying that this is what happened and I don't know the background of this story, but it would have been easy (technically speaking) to just push an update to Chinese users that will extract their private key and send it back to Apple without any significant changes.

AFAIK the Secure Enclave chip is specifically designed to make this impossible. There is no planned method to extract the private key from it. ("Planned method" meaning anything that's not an exploit or an electron microscope.)

Maybe generate the key in the normal processor, send it to apple for escrow, and then push the key to the secure enclave? I have no idea whether the secure enclave supports loading existing keys, but generally this is how it's done.

> I have no more trust in the American government to not spy on its citizens than the Chinese government.

This is more than a little hyperbolic. In the US you need a warrant.

Also, in the U.S., police don’t shoot unarmed suspects, get caught planting evidence on camera and the judicial system prosecuted and convicts fairly regardless of race and class and always follow the rules.....

Snowden?