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.
Any physical lock can be broken into. If we make our phones impenetrable, then it is not “harder” to crack the safe; it is “impossible.”
In the words of Obama, I would caution against taking an absolutist perspective on this. :-)
To your point 1: true, but also consider how much more evidence our digital life brings to law enforcement. You can be tracked using your cell phone, all your purchase history is available in a heartbeat, your travels, your social media, everything is now sitting in a database somewhere, that the govt can access very efficiently. All of these were not available (to law enforcement) even 40 years ago.
The digital world brought as many, if not more, tools to law enforcement than it brought to the public. The argument that law enforcement is the victim here is spurious.
To your point 2: true again, but I suppose Gruber did not mean it that literally. His point is about the dual use of any technology, and about the fact we must perform a cost/benefit analysis before banning anything. Knifes, guns, cars, ladders, fires (matches): they all kill people (many more than terrorists). They are not banned because (society decided that) the benefits outweigh the costs.
So we must not ban encryption considering only its effect on law enforcement, because otherwise there are a lot more things we should ban (for examples matches because they can be used to destroy evidence).
To your point 3: (To establish street cred: my day job is securing the revenues of Dish Network and DirecTV and other PayTV operators worldwide.) False. Anything can be broken, all it takes is "time & pressure". I suppose some physical locks/safes must take days to break, even with the manufacturer assistance. From a security perspective this is good enough because thieves do not have days, whereas the government has. So physical lock resistance is measured and useful in, say, hours.
Now consider a "digital portable safe" (what the iPhone could be said to be). Now if I steal it, I have days to attack it at home. If I just focus on the encrypted data, and use distributed processing, I have years to brute force the key. So to be useful, digital safes need to resist for centuries (because they do not have the protection physicality brings).
And if you read the FBI requests, all they ask for is a way to attack faster. And what Apple is saying is that if "a way to attack faster" exists (instead of not existing), like all technology it can potentially be used by anyone for anything, and is this what we want ?