If the lab techies can't extract the murderer's image from the deceased's eyeballs, they must not be trying hard enough!

Smartphone encryption uses composite keys, made by combining the password the user punches in to gain access with a digital key baked into the phone. The latter is hard to extract by physical examination, and too strong to brute-force (256 bits, IIRC). Thus, an attack against an offloaded copy of the encrypted data is very difficult (effectively impossible if the attacker botches the attempt to extract the device key and burns it), and an attack against the user password alone can only be done on that device.

Apple and Google replied, in essence, that they could not [access the phones] — because they did not know the user’s passcode. (...United Way Update...) There is no evidence that it would address institutional data breaches

In words of one syllable (well, I can't do anything about the fact that "Apple" and "Google" are two syllables, so the authors of the article will just have to pop an aspirin and such it up): The whole point is to stop that kind of data leak -- if Apple and Google don't have it, a bad guy can't steal it from them.

That's not really a significant difference, since is is within our ability to make safes that are effectively impossible to crack without destroying the contents, which is equivalent from the point of view of government agents seeking information.

Voo-doo magic does not count as "another approach". (I am using the term in its precise technical sense. Unless the Feds' actions in breaking one copy of the file somehow produce observable effects upon the owner's copy of the same file (i.e. voo-doo magic), there is no way to "audit" their behind-the-scenes actions.)

The government repeatedly got caught spying on We The People... without a warrant. They are now being sat it the corner, with modern technology enforcing their time-out.

That's the whole point of making good communication security as close to universal as possible.

You want a citation? Here's a citation:

In 2013, Reuters reported that documents released by Edward Snowden indicated that the NSA had paid RSA Security $10 million to make Dual_EC_DRBG the default in their encryption software, and raised further concerns that the algorithm might contain a backdoor for the NSA.

Here's the outcome of

...the NSA's illegal and reckless actions. Yes, that sums it up nicely.

Perhaps if they weren't so busy snooping on the rest of us, they would have paid attention to specific warnings about the Boston Marathon bombers, the preexisting terrorism-related criminal record of the Garland shooter, etc.

The blame for that lies with the NSA -- they intertwined their domestic and foreign operations like a pair of perverted Siamese twin octopi in order to get around the laws that (somewhat) limited their ability to perform domestic snooping (the NSA spies on the British subjects; GHCQ spies on the American citizens; the two trade files).

That's true, and it shows that the ONOZ OMG TERRAISTS!!1! rhetoric is a pack of lies. You've listed (setting aside the facetious "tin foil hats" part) some techniques available to the government for monitoring legitimate targets of suspicion. However, it wants to snoop on everybody, and those techniques don't scale large enough to make that possible.

That makes it an exercise in futility, easily defeated by hacking the system to substitute some other second key (which could be random gibberish, since it's not actually used, just put in to defeat the backdoor).

Just last week they decided that "threatening" remarks on the Internet weren't no thing in the absence of clear evidence of intent to do more than blow off steam. Oh. Wait. That was a threat against some nobody, a precedent that clearly does not apply if the aggrieved party is instead a high and mighty judge. [_EMILY_LATELLA_] Never mind. [_/EMILY_LATELLA_]

Who knew that the Islamic State was run by the GOP?