Come back with a warrant: Not just pretty words, Mr. Director.

Governments hate encryption*. That’s a truism like ‘a cloudless sky is blue,’ but the feds were traditionally a little more discrete about acting on their hatred before the current police state demanded out loud that we sacrifice ‘a little convenience for a lot of security.’

To everyone’s shock, I’m sure, that new power was promptly abused. Quite to my shock, a couple of electronic gadget vendors not normally associated with the love of privacy recently decided that if they had to choose, they’d rather alienate the feds than their entire customer base. This seems to have sent the director of the FBI, no doubt among others, into a bit of a tizzy.

“Encryption isn’t just a technical feature; it’s a marketing pitch … it’s the equivalent of a closet that can’t be opened. A safe that can’t be cracked. And my question is, at what cost?” Comey said. “Both companies [Apple and Google] are run by good people, responding to what they perceive is a market demand. But the place they are leading us is one we shouldn’t go to without careful thought and debate.”

In a tightly moderated speech and discussion at the Brookings Institution—not one technical expert or privacy expert was asked to participate; however, several questions from the audience came from privacy-minded individuals—Comey railed on the “post-Snowden” world that has arisen since people began caring about their privacy.

At the link there’s a video of the speech Comey gave at the Brookings Institute a few days ago, but it’s over an hour long and I can’t watch it. From the excerpts, I gather I’m not actually missing much of substance. But watch it if you will, you know, if you’re a connoisseur of lame arguments.

—
*When proles use it, of course. It’s a tool of truth and justice when governments use it.