It's funny to see this on here now, 10 years later. I went to school with both of them. Was and still is a very cool project! GMU produces some pretty good minds out of the ECE Dept.!
Couldn't agree more on this being bad terminology. Something is always implicitly trusted. Whether it's your root CA certificates, your Infineon TPM, the Intel hardware in your box, or something else. When I first saw this term pop-up I thought it meant something completely different than it does, I guess because of the domain I work in.