No one has been talking about the fact that you can rebuild transistors on an existing chip. It&#x27;s very high tech stuff, the sort that Intel uses to repair early engineering samples painstakingly, but it is used.<p>You decap the chip to expose the die with HF, and then use Focused Ion Beams and a million dollar microscope setup, you can rearrange the circuits. So, if the NSA <i>absolutely had to have the data on the chip</i> they could modify it to make it sing. So, if say they know an iPhone had the location of Bin Laden on it, they could get the goods without Apple.