Apples near the tree

Apple and the FBI have both for the moment stood down in their high-stakes standoff, with the government hacking into a dead San Bernardino terrorist’s iPhone without the recalcitrant tech giant’s help. One down and hundreds more to go. With lives in the balance, the encryption threat still cries out for a comprehensive solution.

Companies are building mobile devices with ever-more-uncrackable encryption technologies to keep their contents and communications impenetrable, even with court search warrants.

Hence law enforcement is finding more and more evidence needed to convict criminals — much less disrupt potential terrorist plots in motion — impossible to access, thanks to complex passcodes held by the phone’s users alone.

At least 30 devices obtained by Chicago cops since the start of the year are inaccessible due to encryption. The Los Angeles Police Department is sitting on roughly 300 such devices.

Boston has 57. Connecticut, 46. In Charlotte, N.C., 160. In Houston, well over 100.

Even San Bernardino, home of the infamous iPhone, possesses more than a dozen shiny bricks.

In the lab of Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance are 205 encrypted devices.

Most are newer models than the iPhone 5C that was at the center of the national staring contest, making it unlikely the 11th-hour exploit that unlocked that phone will work on them.

In some cases, the phones’ users are dead — victims of crimes the DA seeks to prosecute. If alive, they might well have given prosecutors access.

In others, the phones’ users are defendants — who generally cannot be forced to incriminate themselves by providing their passcodes.

These contain evidence on homicides; assaults; robberies; sex crimes, and more, where convictions may be impossible because the equivalent of desk drawers are sealed shut with a glue not even Superman could pull asunder.

Before the encryption arms race, prosecutors routinely found vital data on phones. Consider these Manhattan examples:

On a homicide victim’s phone, video of the shooting that took his life provided key evidence that won a murder conviction.

A trail of evidence left by rapists who had incapacitated victims before sexually assaulting them. Another conviction with hefty jail time.

A trove of child pornography on the iPhone of a man who had revealed to a cab driver his interest in having sex with minors. Another conviction.

And on and on. Which means Apple and other tech firms still have a date with the law.