The truth: Nobody knows [1] [2] [3].

[1] - https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/04/apples_imessa...

[2] - https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130405/01485922590/dea-a...

[3] - http://www.zdnet.com/u-s-government-cant-intercept-imessage-...

The truth is, Apple has made a clear statement that they can't intercept the contents.

That's more than anyone else has said about their products. Saying 'nobody knows' is pure FUD. It's equivalent to saying nobody knows whether Google pipes all their data direct to the NSA even though they've denied it.

They have stated that, but no evidence of end to end encryption has been found by people reverse engineering FaceTime/iMessage. It appears to use SSL/TLS to and from Apple's servers, but there's no sign of it being encrypted otherwise.

Messages can be sent to all devices of a user, which means if there was end to end encryption the key would have to be distributed across those devices, which would presumably require it residing on Apple's servers at some point, where it could be stored.

And people have received other users' iMessages in the past, unencrypted.

Ah nice, makes more sense. The same applies to iMessages doesn't it? Remember reading an article somewhere not so long ago.