My expectation is anyone participating in illegal activities would already be using encryption. Encryption is readily available and and isn't very tedious as long as someone walks you through it. It is not like terrorists use Google docs and write their plans in plain text. What am I missing? The best I can infer from desperation of government is that they want to control people by collecting as much info as possible.
Your intuitions and reality are very different. In general terrorists and the like aren't savvy like your average HN-reader. They're savvy like that weird kid in school who had all the Anarchist Cookbooks and likes to build and set off pipe bombs for fun. They can teach you how to not blow off your hand, that's about it.
I don't know how many times you've tried to 'walk someone through' using moderately complicated software, but I've had to do it enough times to realize that there's no such thing as foolproof. I once advised a lady who kept three phones because she was worried that her ex-husband was breaking into her communications.
At one point she called me frantic that her husband had broken into her phone. I calmed her down and asked her what had happened. He'd called/texted her at a number she had been trying to keep secret from him. I surmised that she had accidentally sent him a text from the secret phone and had her go through her recent communications until she'd found it.
Information security is something that doesn't seem terribly hard to most geeks, because many of us have an intuitive understanding of threat models and how things work underneath. We can be skeptical of companies that say that they take security seriously. Most everyone else is utterly reliant on commercial solutions and has no idea how to understand how following a set of procedures makes them safe, or what happens when they fail to follow them, what the failure modes are.
It is completely unsurprising to me that criminals use their cell phones to document criminal acts, it falls totally in line with how people tend to think about technology. So I believe law enforcement when they say that cell phone searches have become an important tool to help them investigate crime.
Do I believe they should have that access? To me the answer is unclear. It would be easy to conflate LE with the NSA and say hell no. But there are some very bad people out there that cell phone searching gives us a critical advantage over. If it were up to me, I'd say to solve this problem at a different level by legalizing the drugs whose trade promotes criminality. In absence of that, legal searches procured through warrants seems to be better than nothing, and we should fix abuses through regulatory action rather than blanket, reactionary bans on useful enforcement techniques.
It's not like LE hasn't had its own fair share of power abuse.
But regardless, I think you're missing that for LE to obtain those keys with a warrant, we must entrust them to two private multinationals without any court order. And by trusting those two companies, it's not only included trusting their board but also their protection from hackers and rogue employees. For example, Google already had an incident of an employee tapping a minor's account and getting personal information: http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/14/google-engineer-spying-fire...
(This is, of course, assuming the encryption actually works as announced. Personally, I don't trust it)
