An observation
This might have been posted before but also might bear repeating.
The phones that got the prosecutors all worked up were an iPhone 6 and a Samsung S6 Edge - neither of them a typical burn phone, so probably traceable to their owners without resort to decryption of the contents. My s3 has a barcode inside the back cover labelled "VZW' and the IMEI can be seen by lifting the battery. It would be harder with an iPhone, but I suspect that equipment available to law enforcement agencies could identify the carrier and implicitly the account without destroying the phone. Of course the account information, like the stored data, might be useless. The phones might have been left at the scene because the killer(s) stole them and found them useless due to the lock code. Hopefully the police didn't handle them so much as to destroy latent fingerprint information.
I also found annoying in the article the false statement that Google had reengineered Android encryption so that they - Google - no longer could to decrypt phone contents. Intentionally faulty data encryption, as far as I know, was a uniquely Apple failing.
But then, this was an opinion piece and maybe not subject to significant fact checking by the New York Times, bastion of journalism, with a masthead that still reads "All the News That's Fit to Print".
Biting the hand that feeds IT
