Because taken at face value, that comment means that they should be offering customers as much money as they need to get all of the data that their customers want. After all, if a customer don't have enough money to pay for it, then they don't really have the ability to buy it, do they?
Unless there's a hardware component (say a physical key you need to insert into a slot on the side of the phone)
....
What about having to physically enter a passcode on the device's keypad? The locking itself can be in software, but that locking software can easily be hardcoded onto the silicon, and not something you can bypass with any software technique.
I'm sure competent hackers will immediately find ways around this stupid "Kill Switch" idea.
I would assume that reversal requires physical access to the phone, and also the manual entry of the correct password into the device itself, the password being one that is created by the user (initially randomized at manufacture, the default code for it being on a small slip of paper that comes with the phone when you buy it brand new). Since each password attempt would have to be manually entered, there is no viable way to expedite cracking such a phone, and I would imagine that most people even trying to do so would probably quickly abandon the attempt. And if the point of the law is to simply make theft of cell phones unprofitable, I think it would probably succeed.
"It is hard to overstate the debt that we owe to men and women of genius." -- Robert G. Ingersoll