What if I “forget” the PIN under all that situational stress? Is there a way they can legally prove that I didn’t genuinely forget?
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Not necessarily. Judges will sign off on any cop’s warrant application without reading it 9 times out of 10. Cops are judges workmates. They constantly rely on each other’s cooperation. There’s no incentive for judges to scrutinize a cop. There’s no incentive for DAs to charge cops. There are lots of incentives for cops to lie about everything to everyone.
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In that case, they’d have a search warrant and open it up, whether you give them a key or not.
I’m guessing the same thing is applicable in the case of an iphone. That is, they have a search warrant for the contents. However, they obviously do not have the capability to open it. So, they hold you in contempt, fining or jailing you, until you open it. (Except, if there is incriminating evidence there, you’d be a fool to do so, no?)
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How about “My phone contains privileged conversations with my lawyer. You cannot require me to provide access to that.”
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They might could get your social media history, like BB comments, to demonstrate that your ‘forgetting’ was pre-meditated. 
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The information in the filing cabinet physically exists. It’s letters on sheets, and all that’s in the police’s way is getting physical access.
When something’s encrypted, the information the police is after does not currently exist. It can be created by performing some operations on two data sets: the encrypted disk itself, and the passcode.
In my mind there’s a big difference between “allowing access” and “actively participating in the creation of evidence against you.”
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But if the “evidence” is encrypted to begin with, is it ever really evidence if you delete it without decrypting it?
Me: * types password *
Phone: * scans my face * “It seems you’re under duress. For your safety we’ve rejected your password.”
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So glad I have an Android phone.
It gets even more philosophically murky if it was encrypted with a one-time pad. Depending on the key, the information could be literally anything; it’s all in the correlation. There’s even a reasonable use case for such a method in which you don’t trust the cloud and you don’t trust the (future) phone, but you can use them together in real time to make use of your data.
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I don’t think that’s either correct or a legal argument. Information is called “encrypted” when it can’t be interpreted without a ‘translator.’ I could just as easily argue that writing down information using ASCII code to generate “words” in “English” is encryption.
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No, that’s more like translation. Turning the magnetic flux on the disk into a data stream, interpreting that stream as letters — that’s following a step-by-step recipe.
Encryption is an incomplete recipe. What they what to do is make Coke without the secret ingredient. And without knowing what that missing ingredient is, whatever they end up with, it’s never going to be Coke.
Decryption is a step-by-step recipe too, which is why I posed this philosophical question.
Given correctly sized random data for the encrypted blob, Can’t you create a key that will produce any unencrypted text you want?
I’m sure that a bit of percussive maintenance to your head would fix that memory problem right quick. If not, maybe a change of temperature or some chemical stimulants.
Not without frankly astounding computational power.
Now you can create hash collisions fairly easily on old hashes like MD5. But generating a key to get what you want out of random data is not simple or easy.
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The solution seems trivial to me, which means it’s probably impossible: Have two passcodes. One is the real one that unlocks all the info on the phone and the other opens a limited-but-not-obviously-so subset of that data. No social media, very few texts, no email, limited contacts, limited photo albums. How would the cops know?
This is why I think it’s important, more and more, to separate the work of public safety from the work of crime investigation. That and the logical flaw of recruiting medium-intelligence individuals for policing then using that as your exclusive talent pool for investigators. 
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The article wasn’t clear: Do they need to arrest or charge you before ordering you to unlock your phone?
eta: Also, how many layers down does this go? I normally do notes on my phone in a Tiddlywiki, which can be encrypted. I might own the phone, but can I be expected to know the passcode for a file on the phone? And what if the Tiddlywiki isn’t on the phone, but on Google Drive that needs a login?
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“Ha! Try to get evidence from a phone that’s currently on fire, suckers!”
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