The New York Times features a joint (and very one sided) opinion piece by prosecutors from Manhattan, Paris, London and Spain, in which they decry the default use by Apple and Google of full disk encryption in their latest smartphone OSes. They talk about the murder scene of a father of six, where an iPhone 6 and a Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge were found.
An Illinois state judge issued a warrant ordering Apple and Google to unlock the phones and share with authorities any data therein that could potentially solve the murder. Apple and Google replied, in essence, that they could not — because they did not know the user's passcode. The homicide remains unsolved. The killer remains at large.
Except, there is no proof that having such a backdoor would conclusively allow them to solve the case and wouldn't require actual police work.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 12 2015, @07:12AM
If the manufacturer prevents you, who have paid them money for a device, from rooting/jailbreaking it, then you have paid good money for a device you are at most renting. Maybe that's all right, but you need to keep that in mind. The manufacturer ought to provide you with any and all encryption keys required to root the device should you choose to do so, perhaps with the usual caveats about warranties. Rooting should never have to involve the exploitation of a security flaw in the device!