Crazy is never in short supply in Washington. Through lean times and boom times, regardless of who is in the White House or which party controls the Congress, the one resource that’s reliably renewable is nuttery.

This is never more true than when that venerable and voluble body takes up a topic with some technical nuance to it. The appearance of words such as “Internet”, “computers” or “technology” in the title of a committee hearing strike fear into the hearts of all who use such things. This is the legislative body, after all, that counted among its members the late Sen. Ted Stevens, who so eloquently described the Internet as a “series of tubes.”

That existential dread of Congress’s technological ineptitude manifests tenfold when the topic at hand is encryption. Encryption is really, really hard for professionals. Folks who have spent their careers designing cryptographic algorithms and building cryptosystems describe it alternately as great and greatly frustrating. And Washington’s track record on this matter is, to put it politely, horrendous. A quick tube search for Clipper chip or key escrow will bring you all the evidence you need on this.

And so when a panel with the wonderfully Orwellian name of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform announced a hearing titled “Encryption Technology and Potential U.S. Policy Responses”, the expectations in the security and crypto communities were for plenty of crazy. And it delivered in spades, but perhaps not in the way observers had expected.

The legislators gathered on Wednesday afternoon to discuss the problems that default encryption schemes implemented by Apple and Google on their mobile devices would cause law enforcement in the investigation of crimes. Freely available encryption software is decades old now and the idea that encrypted devices are a challenge to police is hardly a new one, either. But the prevalence of smart phones with large storage capacity and full-disk encryption that can’t be easily defeated has brought the issue back to the fore in Washington and elsewhere. Specifically, in the office of Daniel Conley, the district attorney of Suffolk County in Massachusetts, which includes Boston. In his testimony, Conley sideswiped both Google and Apple for their monetization of the data they collect from users and then accused them of constructing a straw man called government intrusion to justify their decisions to implement strong encryption.