It’s not as if they can’t crack any commercially available encryption, they just want easy access.
They won’t be happy until they can root through everything on every device from their office chairs. Period.
To an extent. The sort of encryption used by commercial entities such as Apple and Google, sure. Fact is that configuring a phone to run 4096 encryption all the time would drain the batter faster than running it with geolocation, wifi, and Bluetooth all at the same time. However, with 4096+ encryption and AES256 hashes, it becomes a matter of effort for the Feds to decrypt.
If you're an international spy with espionage ties, crack away. Low-level drug dealer on the street, not worth the time, effort, and expense for the Feds to do what it would take to decrypt their phone.
Remember, the CIA and NSA have come out and said that a bulk of their data collection comes from unencrypted connections like this one to FR and anything not using SSL. If you're shopping for doilies for your grandmother on Amazon, the Feds aren't going to take the time to sniff your traffic. Besides, they can just subpoena your purchase records and get it right away.
Same sort of thing goes for TOR. A bulk of TOR is porn or zero-day warez crap. The Feds have more important nuts to crack. Until quantum computing is viable, the Feds are going to have to be discrete with what they crack.
Actually, there is encryption they can't crack.
So, they do what all smart hackers do. They go around it somehow. E.g., by tricking the user into making a mistake. Or hacking his computer by installing hardware secretly, e.g., while its being shipped. Or getting him to install tainted software. Or exploiting a security hole in the software he's using.
It actually IS that they cannot crack Apple's 256 bit encryption. Apple allows you to use any of the 227 characters available on your keyboard and your pass code can be up to 256 characters in size. That is a ridiculously large passcode, I know, but it is possible. That passcode is entangled with the UUID of your device to provide the key to encrypt your data. This means that they would have to brute force their way through 227 256 possible combinations of passcodes (actually a bit smaller as Apple's passcode creation routine will not allow more than two consecutive identical characters) to test all of them to find your particular passcode to decrypt your data. Apple also has set it up that because it is hardware entangled with the UUID of the device, the attempts must be done on the device. . . and there is a increasing wait period between attempts, so your data cannot be downloaded to a supercomputer for crunching. It really wouldn't matter anyway, even making thousands of attempts per second, it would take multiple quadrillions of years to try every possible combination. The Universe would have died from heat death before you got anywhere near done.
Add that when your data is uploaded as a 256 bit encrypted stream to iCloud, it is further anonymized, broken into bits, and then AGAIN additionally 256 bit encrypted on top of your encryption. Apple does not have your key. . . and even if the government got Apple's key, all they would have would be anonymous encrypted data in blocks, associated with no particular person, without keys. Lots of luck in doing anything with the gobbledegook they would be handed.
The ONLY way they could get your data is the old fashioned way. . . get a court order, serve it on you, requiring you to turn over what they are SPECIFICALLY seeking, by description, naming exactly what they want. No fishing allowed. Just exactly what the Fourth Amendment requires.
I’ve got my tinfoil hat firmly in place. I have some suspicion that the goobermint can decrypt all this and that the complaints are merely for show in order to make the people complacent.