I remember hearing about these types of requests that also have a gag order placed on them so companies can't explicitly inform the public about them. I haven't heard much about that sort of thing lately though. Either very good or very bad.
Keep in mind that warrants and gag orders are very much behind the state of the art. Apple might receive a request for all the information they have on you, and are absolutely compelled by law to give that to them. But unfortunately, the information is all encrypted with a key that only you know. So the government has no choice but to come to your house and hit you with a rubber hose until you tell them the key, but bad news! it turns out it's illegal to do that. They can't hit you with a rubber hose until a pesky jury has heard the evidence against you and returned a guilty verdict, which if they had, they wouldn't be probing your iCloud account.
What is more of a grey area is whether or not a court can compel Apple to hit you with some malware. The government can ask "give jrockway a special firmware so that whenever he tries to shitpost on HN, the browser locks up until he types his iCloud encryption key into nsa.gov". What's not clear is whether or not Apple has to obey that request. It seems pretty likely that the government doesn't have that power, so Apple can tell them to go away. But who knows, it's perfectly possible to pass a constitutional amendment that literally says "Apple, Inc. has to dedicate 100% of their resources to spying on readers of the dark website Hacker News", and it's all moot. I've seen Congress (or rather, the states in this case) trying to agree on less controversial things before, though, and I'm not too worried about anything changing. (What's the opposite of pro? Con. What's the opposite of progress? Congress.)
Encryption is literal kryptonite for democratic governments. Apple is putting themselves at the forefront of the debate. It will be interesting to watch!
