It's only the FBI complaining since their technical methods are not on par with NSA (and it's 15 billion a year budget). NSA can already "get around" crypto pretty well, especially if it's a high-value target (as the Snowden documents showed in great detail). If NSA wants your data, they will get it and there's nothing you can do about it, no matter how technically savvy you are. They have the money and the experts that no one else has (they hire more PhD mathematicians than any other entity in the world). Most importantly, they have a privileged position (i.e. they can force companies to put backdoors in electronics, which is already happening as Snowden showed). It's hard to beat someone who has owned your machine before you even bought it.
Now as for the FBI -- there has not been a single criminal case in history where it was shown that an encrypted device stopped an investigation. Not one. There have been investigations where suspects had encrypted data,
but in every case, the suspect was eventually prosecuted successfully anyway. The FBI keeps stats of this sort of thing and have released the number of cases where encryption was an issue. The number of cases per year has been under 10.
From
Bruce Schneier (the god of crypto and computer security):
In 2013, encryption foiled the police nine times, up from four in 2012. -- and the investigations proceeded in some other way.
Bruce goes on:
This is important. All the FBI talk about "going dark" and losing the ability to solve crimes is absolute bull..... There is absolutely no evidence, either statistically or even anecdotally, that criminals are going free because of encryption.
So, if there are so few cases, one may ask "why are they making such a big deal out of it?" I think they want everything to be easy (i.e. give us all your data) and don't want to do real leg work. Part of it is just fear mongering in order to get more money from Congress. I lean more towards the "they are lazy" argument. They just want to be able to look at a phone and see your whole life for free. I mean, afaik, Cops are still searching people's phones at will after arrests (i.e. get busted for a DUI and the cops look at your phone, your contacts, your texts, your emails, the nude pics from your mistress, etc.). Phones now contain people's whole lives. The FBI knows this and they don't want anyone to be able to stop them from snooping at will.
We went through an identical argument from the FBI in the 1990's during the "Clipper chip" debate. The Clinton administration proposed that all phones and other communications would be encrypted with an NSA designed cipher. Everyone's key would be stored by a trusted third party. When the cops got a warrant, they could request the key from this third party. Academics, average people, and corporations all banned together and lobbied to stop this silly idea. Eventually it died. Little did we know that NSA went ahead with the plan anyway (in secret, of course).
