Telling quote from Bernstein hearing

Dale Thorn dthorn at gte.net
Sun Nov 3 09:37:18 PST 1996


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)








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