Is there a way to set up a phone so that typing a "special" password puts the phone in an alternate state with different apps and content, etc. (and possibly erase the regular content)?
- Investigators are not going to be typing your password into the running original device, they're going to be trying it against an offline clone of the encrypted storage. All that will happen is the decryption won't succeed and they'll tell you that it was the incorrect password and continue holding you until you give it up.
- This is hardly unique to France, US courts have jailed suspects for refusing to provide passwords in numerous cases. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/man-jailed-indef...
Fundamentally you can't have a key and the data inside the same physical box and expect encryption to remain intact. Enclaves are just security through obscurity on steroids.
https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/rawls...
Oh no, absolutely not. We're not talking about "investigators" here, just random cops in a random precinct who have zero infrastructure, zero knowledge about anything, and aren't pursuing any serious "investigation".
They will absolutely type your password into the running device. They're doing this all the time.