From: Rich Burroughs <richieb@teleport.com>
Date: Sun, 3 Nov 1996 12:11:12 -0800 (PST)
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Telling quote from Bernstein hearing
Message-ID: <3.0.32.19961103121133.006aa318@mail.teleport.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


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


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