[irq-1]

Bricking the phone works against law enforcement by only allowing raw access to the data. Even if Clear worked correctly, law enforcement couldn't open apps and see the data in the correct context. They'd have raw data files full of indexes, hashes, and cached data. Worse, apps would start to encrypt data on the client specifically to avoid Clear.

The only significant change between plain key escrow and Clear (bricking the phone) would defeat the usefulness of Clear.

[allenz]

Apps could potentially work in read-only mode. Plus it's pretty easy to design a tool to pretty print iMessages given raw data, and that alone would be very useful for law enforcement.