This is the accurate take :)
Facebook, like Google, was very unhappy about the wholesale tapping of cables revealed in the Snowden docs and rapidly moved to encrypt all the things formerly assumed safe/inscrutable.
If you give an inch to a government you then have to deal with every other government wanting their inch too. The easiest way to deal with this is to vigorously fight every request from a government.
You can't do a secret backdoor that bypasses this because it will get discovered eventually and then same problem occurs.
Why wouldn't they just skip the annoying charade and the anti government precedent, and just give over the info secretly in the first place, least work for everyone?
And don't you think at some point one of the retired engineers or execs would leak the truth?
That's a limited ruse because at some point evidence has to be entered into the record at trial, and if the fact that the government could reach Messenger after all came out, this scheme wouldn't work again. Of course, often investigators can back-reconstruct evidence that they can present -- and if in some case they can't, well, maybe next time. Other times trial evidence might not even be a goal. So a limited ruse, but not that limited.
Is it plausible? I think so. Is it likely? No idea.
And the proof is Snowden, because... ???
Or are you all just agreeing you have your own conspiracy theories, and aren't directly commenting on what each other are saying?
A simple & plausible scenario: a governmental agency requests Facebook conducts a broad surveillance sweep. Facebook resists for obvious reasons, goes to court. Somebody at the middle level of one talks to somebody at the middle level of the other, figure out what the agency really wants - a small, well specified chunk of data - which gets requested separately & promptly delivered. Having gotten enough data now, the agency lets the original, big case falter simply by limiting the efforts and expenditures.
That's not even conspiracy, that's just a bunch of people figuring out how to quickly get done with their mundane responsibilities. #BanalityOfEvil
That's, ummm, not my point at all, and I honestly don't see how you took it from what I wrote.
What I meant was just that Snowden's revelations revealed a bunch of 'alternative' methods, beyond a court-ordered wiretap. Collusion, cable tapping, shipping intercepts ... all seem to have been on the table for the NSA and GCHQ.
My point was just that I'd be very surprised if this court result prevented the type of interception that was being requested.
I suppose that the boring truth is that Facebook just used it's vast financial resources to protect itself in a way that lavabit never could