> As an illustration, if we get reasonable evidence suggesting that someone is growing marijuana in their ranch, we can get a warrant and go inside. There's not too much the owner can do to stop it. However a perfectly encrypted iphone cannot be broken into, no matter if the entire world agrees that there's evidence of crime in it.
These examples are talking about a different thing, we should be careful to not mix them up since the arguments for and against can be different.
The discussion prior to your comment was about protecting data in transit (end-to-end encryption); both your examples are about data at rest (full disk encryption).
With encrypted data in transit, not only can it be broken into by intercepting at the endpoints (in the case of video or audio calls, even through the physical world by pointing a camera and a microphone at the user's device), but also the end result of an end-to-end encrypted connection is much closer to a physical world private conversation (can be "broken into" only by intercepting the endpoints, that is, pointing a camera and a microphone at the persons involved).
With encrypted data at rest, the best physical analogy is a diary written in code; even if the whole world agrees that it contains evidence of embezzling, it cannot be decoded without the help of its owner's mind.
These examples are talking about a different thing, we should be careful to not mix them up since the arguments for and against can be different.
The discussion prior to your comment was about protecting data in transit (end-to-end encryption); both your examples are about data at rest (full disk encryption).
With encrypted data in transit, not only can it be broken into by intercepting at the endpoints (in the case of video or audio calls, even through the physical world by pointing a camera and a microphone at the user's device), but also the end result of an end-to-end encrypted connection is much closer to a physical world private conversation (can be "broken into" only by intercepting the endpoints, that is, pointing a camera and a microphone at the persons involved).
With encrypted data at rest, the best physical analogy is a diary written in code; even if the whole world agrees that it contains evidence of embezzling, it cannot be decoded without the help of its owner's mind.