Apple and Google were responding to consumer demand when they announced that their next generation of smartphone software would include backdoor-free encryption by default. That would be reason enough by itself, but there's more to it than that. They have an even more compelling reason to tighten up their security -- they're getting into the electronic wallet business with Apple Pay, Google Wallet, and the inevitable bigger and (maybe) better followups.
More below the orange screensaver pattern....
As cybersecurity expert Bruce Schneier points out, any sort of "back door" access is a gaping hole in security, a problem that (unlike the doomsday cries emanating from various government bureaucrats) is real rather than theoretical:
You can't build a "back door" that only the good guys can walk through. Encryption protects against cybercriminals, industrial competitors, the Chinese secret police and the FBI. You're either vulnerable to eavesdropping by any of them, or you're secure from eavesdropping from all of them.
Back-door access built for the good guys is routinely used by the bad guys. In 2005, some unknown group surreptitiously used the lawful-intercept capabilities built into the Greek cell phone system. The same thing happened in Italy in 2006.
In 2010, Chinese hackers subverted an intercept system Google had put into Gmail to comply with U.S. government surveillance requests. Back doors in our cell phone system are currently being exploited by the FBI and unknown others.
The bottom line is that Apple and Google need to have tight security if they hope to convince a critical mass of users that it's safe to use smartphones as virtual wallets, and that the existence of a backdoor is incompatible with that level of security. Until now, they accepted the security hole so that they rescue the occasional customer who locked himself out of his own phone and respond to the occasional government subpoena (or fishing expedition), but the stakes have gotten too high for that. The hapless user who forgot his password, and the hapless Fed who can't remember how to do traditional police work, are out of luck.
If this analysis is correct, I expect that the government isn't going to get anywhere in its attempts to "discuss the issue" with the companies. If so, I predict that the next wave of bafflegab will be complaints about "giant corporations undermining the public good" (a truly comical complaint coming from representatives of an administration that has acted so feebly against actual cases of giant corporations undermining the public good). Perhaps they will try to sell a risk-benefit analysis which concludes that if a few thousand people get their accounts hacked every few months, it's still not as bad as the terrokidnapedodruggie menace.
Alternately, they may simply try to insist that the problem doesn't really exist. As an example, I present without comment this snippet from today's Washington Post editorial:
A police "back door" for all smartphones is undesirable -- a back door can and will be exploited by bad guys, too. However, with all their wizardry, perhaps Apple and Google could invent a kind of secure golden key....