It's the government trying to enforce their opinion of who should own those Bitcoins, thereby taking power away from the owner that the network has decided on, which would be "whoever has the cryptographic keys".
This is still true, no? Now the government has the keys, so they own it. It's clear that you can't be sloppy with your keys, because "whoever has the cryptographic keys".
If they used a brainwallet (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Brainwallet), the gov wouldn't have taken those keys.