It is true, you just said it. The shards are encrypted. I never made a comment about who has the decryption key. I said collusion was needed for the custodians to take your money. The government can definitely try to get those shards, the same way they can come into your home and take your steel back ups.
Discussion
If Ledger can unilaterally decrypt the shards to allow you to recover the seed, the encryption is kind of a moot point. They can recombine the shards and decrypt at any time.
And what's easier? The government raiding a million different homes to find a seed they think exists there?
Or the government sending a subpoena to 2 companies to gain access to tons of seeds they know exist there?
They can’t unilaterally get your seed, they need at least one of the other custodians to send a shard in addition to the one held by them. You don’t need to lie to criticize the product, which is my whole point. The encryption serves to protect against a bad actor trying to get into the servers, which matters whether the server is yours or not.
It is very unlikely that a government is gonna request millions of people’s shards. The more likely scenario is that they have individuals of interest for whom they can definitely get search warrants. And sure depending on the scenario a search warrant won’t do anything if the individual is savvy enough and was able to hide the backups well. But the state attack is not exclusive to this product.