At 09:31 AM 11/3/96 -0800, Dale Thorn <dthorn@gte.net> wrote:

Lucky Green wrote:

...

In the recent hearing of the Bernstein case, Anthony Coppolino for the Justice Department said: "We don't care about the theory; we don't care about the idea Mr. Bernstein has, which was to take a particular type of algorithm and use it to allow for an encrypted interactive conversation. That's his idea. We don't care about his idea; we care about the result of what it can do."

[snip]

Could I suggest a translation? "We're going to trust Professional Government Consultant Organization XYZ to tell us about Mr. Bernstein's idea, since we obviously won't understand Mr. Bernstein's own explanation." (And we do care about his idea, but we can't admit that, because it would make us look stupid)

Heh :) I think that Lucky hit on a choice quote from Coppolino -- it was really at the heart of his arguments. Since Judge Patell ruled that source code is speech, the ground has really shifted from just limiting crypto to limiting Bernstein's freedom of speech, and this is much to the government's disadvantage. Coppolino tried to avoid the issue by claiming that the government is not interested in restraining Bernstein's ideas (claiming several times that the government does not interfere with academic discussion of crypto), but that they want to impede the specific functionality of Snuffle. Bernstein's attorney, Cindy Cohn, aptly replied that the ideas behind the crypto _dictate_ the functionality, and that you can't restrain one without affecting the other (or words to that effect). I don't think that Coppolino meant that they do not understand Bernstein's ideas :) (though perhaps he does not...) Rich ______________________________________________________________________ Rich Burroughs richieb@teleport.com http://www.teleport.com/~richieb See my Blue Ribbon Page at http://www.teleport.com/~richieb/blueribbon U.S. State Censorship Page at - http://www.teleport.com/~richieb/state New EF zine "cause for alarm" - http://www.teleport.com/~richieb/cause