Holder Lovejoy ⇥ washingtonpost.com

Craig Timberg, Washington Post:

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said on Tuesday that new forms of encryption capable of locking law enforcement officials out of popular electronic devices imperil investigations of kidnappers and sexual predators, putting children at increased risk.

“It is fully possible to permit law enforcement to do its job while still adequately protecting personal privacy,” Holder said at a conference on child sexual abuse, according to a text of his prepared remarks. “When a child is in danger, law enforcement needs to be able to take every legally available step to quickly find and protect the child and to stop those that abuse children. It is worrisome to see companies thwarting our ability to do so.”

This is an awfully similar line of attack to that from the FBI, and it’s just so played. If our values must be significantly compromised so as to treat us all as criminals, then they’re not values — they’re hobbies.

Besides, it’s not as if encrypted information is making it impossible for law enforcement to do their job. All of the cases that Cyrus R. Vance Jr., in an op-ed for the WaPo, complains would be made unsolvable by this encryption would indeed be solvable. This encryption just makes it less likely that the rest of us won’t have as much of our stuff scooped up by snoops.