No, we expect phone locking to work, even against state actors. The news here is that some Samsung model has an otherwise unknown exploit.
If they can crack his phone they can crack your phone.
If they can crack his phone they can crack your phone.
The only strategy that might work is to make it expensive or unviable to crack every single device. But in the case of something like this, an assassination attempt, then it’s a given that all stops are going to be pulled to crack it.
Those generic statements are great and all until you realise that every year, dozens (hundreds, thousands???) people disappear without a hint of a trace and the government is powerless to do anything about it and can't find them.
Or when a large, wealthy company commits crimes (or just government officials sometimes), all they have to say is "we lost the data" and suddenly, there is nothing that can be done about it, it's lost to the ether for ever without any possibility to find out anything about it.
In those cases that people get way with crimes, it is much more likely that there is no political motivation to go after them for whatever reason du jour. I don't think it's because the technology is so strong that they can't.
Saddam/Osama
And not just them, anyone with access (legal or otherwise) to these tools can.
But that's an unreasonable expectation because software is universally such garbage. Some is just less garbage than others.
State actors have the resources to find the holes in anything that isn't utterly perfect.