Comment Re:Where can I find the except clause? (Score 1) 575
Presumably this is about searching with a warrent.
Which is fine. They can still get a warrant. If they think John Doe is a suspect in a kidnapping, they can go swear an affidavit before a judge and get a warrant to search John Doe's stuff, including his phone. Nothing has changed there. If John Doe isn't too cooperative, that may present an inconvenience, but it's not one that didn't already exist back before Apple or Google announced their intent to encrypt things. Where, or even whether, encryption happens has zero to do with warrants.
So why would the government suddenly be upset if nothing has changed with regards to warrants?
Because lately they aren't getting warrants.
They've become accustomed to going on all sorts of extrajudicial fishing expeditions, whether that's digging through troves of data illegally intercepted by the NSA, or seizing and offloading the contents of peoples' phones without any legal basis, etc. What rustles their jimmies is that now they'll have to actually get a warrant for John Doe and his phone, as opposed to just sending some dubious administrative subpoena over to Apple.