The US Constitution makes it clear that the rights of the people to be secure in their persons and possessions is paramount, but for a narrowly defined list of exceptions. That crimes may go unsolved because the state is kept on too short a leash, or because modern technology has made their job more difficult, is a feature, not a bug. A government with perfect knowledge about its citizens behavior and correspondence, or one that can perfectly enforce its laws, is indistinguishable from tyranny.
>So telling law enforcement officers, "you can pry open my iPhone from my cold dead hands" tends to ring hollow, especially if they really are of the honest kind and really do want to put criminals away as well as respecting your privacy.
They can pry my iPhone from my cold dead hands, or my live warm hands will hand it over if they have a warrant, but it will remain encrypted either way, for no other reason than I have the right to do so, and they have no right to demand otherwise.
As for the rest, I can't tell if you are just trying to demonstrate that you can think creatively, or if you actually think that iOS disk encryption is an important element of a scheme to get away with murdering someone with a pathogenic virus recreated from sequence data. (Or to get away with 3D printing guns under illegal circumstances, or deliberately inducing an epileptic fit.)
Why do you insist on this artificial restriction on whether or not police officers should have access to the data on an iPhone? It seems to me this would help the clearance rate if anything. It's another tool in the arsenal.
> As for the rest, I can't tell if you are just trying to demonstrate that you can think creatively...
The internet allows new styles of crimes, perhaps crimes you or I have never really thought about yet. Or maybe I've been paying attention to crimes on the internet lately. And for the record, I'm not the first to think about resequencing viruses. See point #5 here:
https://www.vox.com/2014/5/22/5739380/why-were-never-really-...
And to answer the rest of your comment, your rhetoric reads stronger than it truly is.
To borrow a page from your argument book, if physical evidence alone were enough, we wouldn't have so many unsolved homicides. Look at the KC unsolved murder list for 2017:
http://kcmo.gov/police/homicide-3/2017-unsolved-homicides/#....
> You can't smuggle guns via SMS.
Technically, you can send the plans for a plastic gun over the internet now, which just needs to be printed on the other side.
You can also send a virus, if the other side has a gene sequencer.
> You can't vandalize shop windows over the Internet.
You can vandalize digital signage over the internet. As well a steal credit cards from the store's credit card readers.
> You can't kill people with a digital photograph.
Well... technically it's animated gif. But yeah you can.
http://fortune.com/2017/03/22/twitter-epilepsy-gif/
> Maybe LEOs believe their own rhetoric or maybe they just realize that "think of the victims of inside trading!" isn't the sort of terrifying scenario that will get the public on their side.
Honestly, I think law enforcement believes that they need more tools. I don't think they want unsolved murders any more than the citizens do. So telling law enforcement officers, "you can pry open my iPhone from my cold dead hands" tends to ring hollow, especially if they really are of the honest kind and really do want to put criminals away as well as respecting your privacy.