A bill that is making its way through the New York state assembly would require that smartphone manufacturers build mechanisms into the devices that would allow the companies to decrypt or unlock them on demand from law enforcement.

The New York bill is the latest entry in a long-running debate between privacy advocates and security experts on one side and law enforcement agencies and many politicians on the other. The revelations of the last few years about widespread government surveillance, especially that involving cell phones and email systems, has spurred device manufacturers to increase the use of encryption. New Apple iPhones now are encrypted by default, as are some Android devices.

On the one hand, it is reasonable, that if the police turn up with a court order, then the phone should be decrypted.

The reality is, however, that encryption cannot be backdoored and be secure. The only thing you could do is escrow the keys, but once that was done, if somebody broke into the escrow database, every phone would be open to hackers.

They will just have to learn to accept that they will have to ask the owner of the phone to unlock it. Which in America is a problem at the moment with the 2nd Amendment, I believe.