FBI Complains About Encryption Making It Difficult to Scrape Dead Person's Phone

And they STILL clear an abysmally low percent of crimes, despite the 4th being de facto ignored for decades

They were waiting to retrieve the phone

This sounds like a title from the Onion.

From what I'm aware they can get the key by physically milling a chip on the board to get access to memory, but they take evey opportunity to complain so that companies might be forced to install backdoors

My understanding is that at least in recent years Cellebrite has not had any 100% reliable way to crack a phone. But because people typically use short, numbers only passwords it is enough to be able to bypass the rate limiting to brute force all possible combinations.

To put on my tin hat for a moment. Even if the government had a bullet proof way to crack phone encryption, I would expect that to be a closely guarded secret. Best make a bunch of noise huffing and puffing how you are stymied and cannot see the data. That being said, even if they had the tools, might be something kept in reserve for the most dire of cases, rather than tip your hand and let Apple/Google discover the trick on a minor case.