Bingo! The law aside, the bottom line is the government is at best incompetent, and at worst rising towards an authoritarian de facto dictatorship.
Unless people recognize the danger posed by unrestrained government, we will never be able to limit its power to that which is derived only from the consent of the governed, AND in compliance with the Constitution.
Right now there are still way too many people very naive about what the government is up to.
They use phony events and scare tactics to get people to surrender their money and their liberty.
You make excellent points in this thread. I’d like to add that the government still has all sorts of traditional intelligence gathering tools that do not require cracking phones, but I’m sure they can break encryption, too. It may be more difficult to catch criminals in some cases, but that’s the price of freedom.
I’d frankly rather let a criminal walk free (for a time) than give up our constitutional right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure. If law enforcement has probable cause that someone has committed a crime, they can get a warrant. That doesn’t seem an unreasonable hurdle to me.