This is a bit like protesting door locks because they make it harder to pop in and look around.
The issue isn't that law enforcement can no longer "look around" your phone. The issue is that they can no longer get a warrant and use what is on your phone as evidence in an investigation or court case without the phone owner's cooperation. Basically your phone goes from being personal property that can be used against you as evidence to an extension of your mind that is now subject to 5th amendment protection. That is a big shift.
In terms of your originally analogy, encryption isn't a simple door lock, it is a magical warrant proof lock. I certainly understand why law enforcement wouldn't be happy about this.
What's very very bad about this, in addition to the direct effects on people's privacy, is that it creates a class system of people who are allowed access to strong encryption while the cattle being farmed on this plantation are not.
What do you mean?
Actually, it does not go that far. The 5th Amendment protects people from being forced to inciminate themselves. Otherwise, a person could be charged with contempt of court, obstruction of justice, or similar crimes. Someone who refuses to decrypt their data when subject to a warrant will face that penalty, just like someone who refuses to answer a subpeona or destroys documents relevant to a counrt case.
Hell, if I just hide my information in a stack of a million other paper files, that would be enough to thwart all but the most determined investigator from accessing it without my cooperation.
None of your examples would prevent an investigator from finding evidence, only delay them. Strong encryption enabled by default could slow down an investigation to the point where it would go on past the heat death of the universe.
I would prefer to have the password NOT be protected by the 5th amendment and have strong encryption on phones than not have strong encryption on phones. That seems like the only way to prevent casual warrantless rummaging.
Encryption might make it hard for them to find much of use, but that's not our problem. A really sturdy safe will make it difficult to execute a warrant too, but that's not an argument for deliberately compromising the integrity of safes.
I can, of course, understand why law enforcement wouldn't be happy about this. They shouldn't be happy about this. But the rest of us should be perfectly happy to tell them to pound sand.
Strong encryption may be tougher to break but I disagree that it's entirely different. It's merely a quantitative difference. It's a standard principle that the police can break into whatever they can if they have a warrant, but they can't force you to make things easy for them ahead of time.
If the situation has changed and there are legitimate law enforcement needs that simply didn't exist in the past, then they should request a change to the social contract through legitimate channels and propose the necessary amendment to the constitution. Law enforcement's failure to even try going through proper channels speaks loudly to how little they actually respect the law.
Why do you say they aren't going through the proper channels? Law enforcement officials have just as much right to make their viewpoints heard through the press as you and I have. If they feel the need to seek new legislation, they would need to make the argument in advance in order to gain support any bills being proposed. Unless the Supreme Court thinks otherwise, I doubt a constitutional amendment would be necessary, but that depends largely on what was being proposed. I haven't seen any evidence that any law enforcement official is disrespecting any law with regards to this issue.
I'm not really suggesting that an amendment is (or should be) necessary, because the surveillance that is going on (and being passed down[1] from the NSA to the FBI, DEA, and local departments). These activities should not be necessary at all for law enforcement, as the warrant system is easily sufficient to allow any necessary searches. Even if a specific device such as cell phone is inaccessible (despite having a valid warrant), that doesn't stop any policeman from conducting traditional (in person) surveillance or upstream wiretaps.
Yet police insist they need far broader access and we have numerous examples of the 4th Amendment warrant requirements being ignored[2]. IFF their claims have merit, the proper way to get exceptions to needing warrants would be an amendment, which has not been suggested. There could be some edge cases where "merely" a circuit court or SCOTUS ruling could "find" additional powers for police, but it doesn't matter - I don't see the the various TLAs trying to setup a test case on this matter, either. Instead we see many cases where law enforcement (and/or people in Obama's administration) have tried to prevent lawsuits from going forward.
[1] [pdf] https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/1011... Some of the training slides and request forms. Especially interesting is how often they repeat the need to keep the practice secret, including having a 24-hour hotline local police can use to get advice on how to hide the source even if they have to immediately give testimony in court. I believe (and a friend of mine who is a lawyer agrees) that these repeated statements like "To use it, we must protect it, or lose it." easily counts as mens rea.
[2] Riley v. California being a notable exception, though I know at least two friends that had their phones searched (in their presence) just a couple weeks ago in Oakland, CA; some departments haven't gotten the message yet, unfortunately.
(emphasis mine)
"...Today, the SOD offers at least three services to federal, state and local law enforcement agents: coordinating international investigations such as the Bout case; distributing tips from overseas NSA intercepts, informants, foreign law enforcement partners and domestic wiretaps; and circulating tips from a massive database known as DICE. ...
...Wiretap tips forwarded by the SOD usually come from foreign governments, U.S. intelligence agencies or court-authorized domestic phone recordings. Because warrantless eavesdropping on Americans is illegal, tips from intelligence agencies are generally not forwarded to the SOD until a caller's citizenship can be verified, according to one senior law enforcement official and one former U.S. military intelligence analyst."
[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/05/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE....
What would be lost with local iPhone encryption keys is the ability to gather large amounts of data by strong-arming Apple (Prism, possibly). Note that most of the people freaking out over Apple's changes are not NSA. It is law enforcement who is fearing losing their access; the same law enforcement that would be using parallel construction to actually use the data that logically they didn't have a warrant to search and seize. (if they did have a warrant, they can bypass the encryption with various other ways, which apparently includes compelling passwords)
As for the Reuters article, I linked to a specific document that was a follow-up to that Reuters article, which had very little to do with foreign governments, and a lot to do with protecting access to the surveillance infrastructure. If you want the TL;DR version (understandable; it's 300 pages of slides and forms), [1] is a decent overview though it lacks some of the relevant details.
[1] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140203/11143926078/paral...
Your argument seems to be that law enforcement wants to keep the phones unencrypted so that they can seize them with a warrant, hand them over to the NSA, and then the NSA can hand the data back to the police using "parallel construction" in order for the police to hide where the data came from (i.e.: acquired lawfully by the police with a warrant)
Yes, and...? That sounds about right. An implanted device wired directly to your brain seems like the ultimate conclusion to this age of "wearables" we're just now entering.
Not that many people will choose a good passphrase...