> This is an opportunity for Parks v.2016 - if you're asked by Apple to do anything to comply with the court order, don't do it.

As far as I know there isn't even anything that obligates Apple to punish any of their employees for refusing. If Apple's employees refused to do it they could just put the contract out for bids instead.

Then the contractor would be responsible for ensuring that the software is secure (which they can't do), against damage to Apple's six hundred billion dollar business (which probably no one would be willing to insure against), so there probably wouldn't be very many bidders. If there were any bids at all they would be very large and Apple having followed a public bidding process would have a very exact and market-proved cost to submit to the FBI. And when that cost is fifty billion dollars, it would kind of prove Apple's point about the unreasonableness of the request.

Apple/Tim have already made it abundantly clear that they will follow the law. If you read the briefing, it makes it clear that every reasonable legal argument you can make agrees with Apples position.

Yeah I don't think there's anything Apple could do but complete the request. Anything short of that would result in the dissolution of the company through daily fines from the government, which shareholders wouldn't like.

Apple could find someone to pay to complete the task, even if it required a significant raise. Don't suicide over nothing. Apple isn't.

Even if Apple did have to do this to survive, it wouldn't be the end of the tech world, it would just hurt a lot. And it wouldn't make us safer.

Regardless of the current judge's decision, this case will likely be in court for two years at bare minimum [1]

The pressing issue is whether or not Congress will eventually pass an anti-encryption bill. This would be a bad idea for our security and economy. We can help people understand this by a) allowing the bill to pass and watching idly as criminals change to use other encrypted communications software, hurting the IT industry in the process, or b) educating people

I'm interested in starting a grassroots campaign to do (b). If you'd like to help, email me at stillastudent on google's email service.

[1] http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-03-04/apple-and-the...

In some ways, it's a good thing that the FBI decided to take it public, where Apple could effectively argue their side. Though this has been built on many small victories that has forced sunshine.

It's not a small number of people though. Surely if anyone is going to refuse, it should be the manager ordering the change refusing to give the order. Why should the little guy at the bottom have to carry the can? So logically, that applies from Apple's legal counsel and management all the way down the chain. That makes up a large pyramid shaped chunk of the Apple reporting hierarchy.

Now in no way am I saying that a manager's career is worth more than that of a low level engineer. That because ethically speaking any dissent should begin with a manager and just because of that it's a non starter. My point is that the potential damage such individual action could do to Apple as an organization, taken to it's logical conclusion, could be catastrophic. So we're not just talking about a small handful of people taking a personal stand that just affects them. The people the buck stops with are Tim Cooke and Apple's legal and leadership teams, and they have responsibilities to Apple and their employees. It's nowhere near as simple as you're making out.

I agree the software engineer should not be the one. All they will do is get someone else to do it.

The more elegant solution for a 'rogue employee' is to leak the signing key and blame the FBI.

More elegant: leak the OS build itself, so that the specific attack vector they warned about comes to pass.

You don't think Apple has extreme protections around their signing key?

Eh, probably just sitting on a USB key on Tim Cook's desk with a Post-It note attached saying "DO NOT LOSE".

I'm also guessing that they routinely send out to Kinko's to get copies of the source code / signing key printed out for backup.

(sarcasm)

I guarantee job offers and a gofundme legal defense would be offered to any dissenting employees insanely quickly on this issue.

If Tim Cook was really upset he could start a new company called "Screw the FBI LLC" which coincidentally hired employees after they got fired from Apple...

You do realize Tim Cook is the CEO aka the one who is ultimately doing the firing in this scenario right? The US Government are not majority stakeholders in Apple.

In the UK there is this concept of a "shadow director", which is someone who, while not officially a director of the company, actually has executive power indirectly in some way. The legal concept exists to point out that a shadow director can be held legally accountable in the same way a director can.

Perhaps a similar concept applies here. If the FBI can compel action from Apple it is basically a shadow CEO of Apple.

If I were to Tim Cook, I would probably have an all hands meeting and tell them every single employee "no matter what you do, I respect your decision. I will make sure that your family is taken care of"

>Long ago, Rosa Parks declined to give up her seat on the bus in favor of a white passenger.

And before her others did the same (such as Claudette Colvin), but they weren't considered sympathetic enough, and so nothing happened. We need to remember that Parks was a calculated political tactic, less we find ourselves with a bunch of Colvins and not a single Parks.

>For Apple to comply with the court's order would require some of its employees to act. If whoever at Apple is told to comply with the court's order declines to do so, then what? If every Apple employee asked to supply information to the FBI refuses, then what? If every coder Apple tries to hire to comply with the court order declines to come aboard...how will the FBI get what it wants?

This will never happen. People like to keep their jobs. At the end of the day it will be on Apple's CEO's shoulders to comply with the court ruling. If people under him refuse to do it he has no option but to fire them and find someone who will do it. Obviously Apple could refuse completely from complying with the law, but that means they have to be ready to face the penalties, which will first be fines and later jail time.

My first thought was civil disobedience on the part of Apple's developers too… But I couldn't make it work out in my head how that could result in a positive outcome.

It's really not the same thing at all. Parks was standing against a wide-sweeping injustice leveled at a minority, of which she was a part. While we all have some vested interest in having Apple win the case, in reality very few people are ever going to be directly affected by this ruling. Many people are going to come down on the side of law enforcement and be happy to do the work, and many more just won't care. It's not an issue of one person standing up to fight a clear social injustice, it's an issue of a corporation complying with a highly specious legal action. Tim and the Apple board are by far and away the only ones in a position to stand up to this in a way that matters, everyone else may as well not exist.

Do you honestly think Rosa Parks risking her life and limb to protest racial injustice is even remotely equivalent to an engineer at Apple refusing to comply with a court order to look at the information on the iPhone's of the two nut jobs that killed:

Shannon Johnson Bennetta Bet-Badal Aurora Godoy Isaac Amanios Larry Kaufman Harry Bowman Yvette Velasco Sierra Clayborn Robert Adams Nicholas Thalasinos Tin Nguyen Juan Espinoza Damian Meins Michael Wetzel

?

Listen, I understand you feel passionate about securing your privacy, but it would likely help your case to keep things a little more in perspective

Your behaviour exactly illustrates the equivalent between the two: arbitrary social pressure against what is, I would argue, better for humanity.

Thankfully, we have strong smart influencal people taking a stand for us,humans. And we should appreciate that.

And I don't think I'm risking too much by saying that dodging an authoritarian surveillance regime is better for humanity.

Finally, I understand that people dying is scary, but let me put things in perspective for you: Should the death of a finite number of people put at risk 7 billions lives and the lives of their children for centuries?

Edit: few -> finite

> put things in perspective ... risk 7 billions lives and the lives of their children for centuries?

You and I have very different ideas of perspective. I don't want the FBI to win here, but it wouldn't be that bad.

This isn't Apple vs the FBI. It's Humanity vs Unprecidented Surveillance. It will be precisely that bad.

This is one battle in that war. It's not the whole war.

How will this affect the average citizen of China? Indonesia? Namibia?

If Apple loses, will they be immediately forbidden from creating devices such that they'd be unable to comply with similar future demands?

The war is important, but getting confused between the war and a battle seems like a failure of perspective.

> How will this affect the average citizen of China? Indonesia? Namibia?

Not sure about those specific countries you mentioned, but I can tell you that the result of this will indeed have far more overreaching implications than a lot of people think about.

Just as an example, where I live there are a ton of laws that get passed that are just copies of what the US is currently doing with their laws. Pretty much a copy/paste operation, except that it's adapted to our own national laws.

For example, anti-bullying laws, as soon as they started having some media attention in the US, the media also focused on that same subject over here. Also with marijuana legalization laws, some Internet copyright ones, etc.

The US likes to project its legal agenda to the rest of the world via TPP and such, but also there's this other effect where legislators from other countries try to emulate the current "trends" in lawmaking in the US, so to speak. In that context I think it's very likely that there will indeed be serious side effects to the citizens of other countries, whether their governments are on board with it or not.

I'm quite sure there will be serious side effects in other countries.

I'm also confident that they won't be "risk 7 billions lives and the lives of their children for centuries" serious.

Here's the frustrating bit for me though: the FBI going to the courts, getting a court order, and asking for that court order to be executed, is very different from "an authoritarian surveillance regime". It is exact opposite. If the FBI didn't do it this way, what exactly should they do? Whenever they come up against anything that was signed with an AES key, just go "oh well, can't get it"? Today your phone content has that kind of key, what's to stop that being used elsewhere?

>Here's the frustrating bit for me though: the FBI going to the courts, getting a court order, and asking for that court order to be executed, is very different from "an authoritarian surveillance regime".

The frustrating bit for me is that many people believe that a courts power is unlimited and that simply by virtu of the FBI obtaining a rubber stamp from a court it makes their demand A OK... makes their demand ethical, moral, or constitutional.

The frustrating bit for me is that many people on the side of the FBI believe because people died in a terrorist act that justifies any loss of privacy and liberty for anyone now and in the future.

>and asking for that court order to be executed, is very different from "an authoritarian surveillance regime". It is exact opposite

Actually it is not. Almost all Authoritarian Surveillance Regime are perfectly legal, and have the full blessing of the Law and Courts in their jurisdictions. In fact by having a courts approval, and the authorization under law that makes it a surveillance STATE the key requirement of a surveillance state is said surveillance happens legally.

>Whenever they come up against anything that was signed with an AES key, just go "oh well, can't get it"?

Yes. There seems to be an idea that the FBI is entitled to, has a right to all information at all times provided it ordered by a court somewhere. This flies in the face of historical fact. Never in human history has law enforcement had more information about its citizen, the needle is HEAVILY pointed in favor of the government, Encryption gives the citizens some limited authority to take that back. This idea that the government is entitled to know everything about you under court order is naive and not based in reality or history.

There is an extremely significant fact that this line of argument ignores: the FBI only seeks the ability to unlock a phone if it either has a warrant or (in this case) has the consent of the phone's owner. This is a capability that it already has for virtually every other type of phone--the only difference here is the amount of technical effort required to make it happen. I have a very hard time seeing how the FBI's ability to unlock a phone under these limited circumstances means they are an "Authoritarian Surveillance Regime."

They are not asking for the ability to unlock any phone at any time for any reason.

"They are not asking for the ability to unlock any phone at any time for any reason."

When he was asked by Oregon Senator Ron Wyden, “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?”

Director of National Intelligence and Admiral James Clapper: “No, sir.”

Wyden: “It does not?”

Clapper: “Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently perhaps collect, but not wittingly.”

^These are the people you're saying "aren't asking" for the ability. They are asking for a universal lock picking kit and the legal authority to strong-arm any manufacturer into allowing access to the keys for their devices as well. If you honestly believe that they wouldn't use these tools for other cases beyond this one phone, I've got this amazing bridge you may be interested in.

That's the beginning of a perfectly good argument that the activities of the NSA make the U.S. a surveillance state. (Though I don't, ultimately, agree with it.) But it has nothing to do at all with the topic under discussion which is whether the capability that the FBI seeks to unlock iPhones would turn the U.S. into a surveillance state.

And I never said anything about a single phone. I fully expect that the FBI would use this capability to unlock lots of other phones either with the owner's permission, or with a warrant. (Just as they do today, with every other type of phone.)

You are willfully conflating the NSA and the FBI. You are willfully conflating the illegal dragnets by the NSA with a legally obtained search warrant by the FBI. You seem to have decided because the NSA did what they did, no govt agency under any circumstances should ever be granted any request like this. If that's your case, then a) we disagree, and b) your position is extremely hard to defend in a historical context.

>I have a very hard time seeing how the FBI's ability to unlock a phone under these limited circumstances means they are an "Authoritarian Surveillance Regime."

Then you do not understand the security model of the phone, and should take the time the learn the actual issue before making statements in support of the FBI.

Nope. I know it well. Perhaps if you would actually make your point, instead of merely assuming that those who agree with you are misinformed, there would be something more we could talk about...

Sorry, but I do understand the security model of the phone well, and I would love you to elaborate your point.

What makes the FBI going to the courts a good thing is the ability for the courts to say "no" and the FBI respect that.

If that can never happen, the visit to the courts is meaningless.

The courts can (and do) say no. They didn't in this case. What makes the FBI going to the courts a good thing is that the courts can say yes and you respect that.

You realize that this is exactly how it works with locked crypto systems normally right?

If the system is designed better there isn't even an apple to cry to to demand it be unlocked because they don't possess the key nor the means to get at it.

This is not nearly so huge an impediment as you might imagine. A computer that you couldn't unlock for love nor money when its off and cold could be attacked and accessed beforehand and most people leave a multitude of electronic evidence behind outside of their own machine.

The parent is making an analogy, the point of which is to compare one singular aspect of situation A to one singular aspect of situation B. So no, it's safe to say that the parent isn't claiming that situation A and situation B are equivalent.

I asked for "even remotely equivalent" based on:

This is an opportunity for Parks v.2016 - if you're asked by Apple to do anything to comply with the court order, don't do it.

Seems fair?

Hmm, I think if you take that sentence in context, it's clear he's saying it's Parks v.2016 only in the sense of committing worthwhile civil disobedience -- an opportunity to do some good while risking legal consequences.

He wasn't saying that Apple's fight is as noble and necessary as Parks' was, nor was he saying that the government's goal of stopping terrorist attacks is as sinister as the goal of enforcing segregation. I think it was unfair for you to interpret his argument that way.

No I'm sorry, but I respectfully disagree here: if he was not trying to draw an equivalence between segregation and this case, and instead was merely trying to say that civil disobedience would be appropriate, then he should not have mentioned Rosa Parks. Doing so clearly attempts to drawn an equivalence. If he didn't mean that, then why not draw it to eg the Oregon occupiers?

Why not draw a comparison to the Oregon occupiers? Because, as I said above, his point is about "committing worthwhile civil disobedience -- an opportunity to do some good while risking legal consequences". Everybody agrees that Rosa Parks' deed was good, thus it serves as a good example.

A seat on the bus wasn't on its face a huge thing either its the symbolic meaning attached before and during that made the act relevant.