The Washington Post editorial board just suggested that the tension between consumer’s right to encrypt their devices and the government’s legal power to access data with a search warrant could be resolved by magic.

Here is the final paragraph from Friday’s editorial Compromise needed on smartphone encryption:

How to resolve this? A police “back door” for all smartphones is undesirable — a back door can and will be exploited by bad guys, too. However, with all their wizardry, perhaps Apple and Google could invent a kind of secure golden key they would retain and use only when a court has approved a search warrant. Ultimately, Congress could act and force the issue, but we’d rather see it resolved in law enforcement collaboration with the manufacturers and in a way that protects all three of the forces at work: technology, privacy and rule of law.

They also seem to think that Congress could pass a law preventing us from using publicly available encryption technology on computers we own, which seems like a pretty big misunderstanding all be itself. Do you think they also want congress to mandate a secret unlock code for all physical safes sold in the US?