Our phones are either insecure, making life easier for law enforcement — or, our phones are secure, making life more difficult for law enforcement, rendering some potential evidence unobtainable.
The problem is that more and more “potential evidence” is shifting from physical to digital form. So by making our phones impenetrable, we are reducing the amount of evidence that law enforcement can find. If we make our phones impenetrable, then one can imagine a world where criminals don’t own anything in the physical world except for their smartphone, preventing law enforcement from finding evidence against them.
We don’t ban matches to prevent people from burning evidence.
The digital equivalent to using matches to burn evidence is to wipe your device. Nobody is arguing right now that we should ban the “Erase All Content and Settings” feature.
We don’t mandate weak locks to make it easier for the police to crack safes.