Compelling a company to produce a product is bad enough, let's not add treating people like chattel on top of it.
A Judge can order you to leave work and sit on a Federal Grand Jury for 36 months.
A Judge can order an innocent bystander to testify or sit in jail until he agrees to do so.
Employment status has nothing to do with anything. Just because you quit the police department doesn't mean you don't have to cooperate with a federal investigation or anything that a Judge orders you to do during that trial, from the grand jury phase up to and through sentencing.
I so often agree with the general sentiment of HN posters but the lack of understanding around basic civics is disheartening.
On what grounds? None of them have broken the law and the order, should it come about, would be for Apple to perform this work, not specific employees (or, if they resign, ex-employees). What would be the route for the government to compel specific individuals – who do not own or control Apple's code or data, and individually are not the only people who can perform this work – to do this?
2) Judge issues a subpoena to an employee that another employee has said is capable of retrieving the information.
"Do you have the capability to retrieve this PIN number?"
"Yes, your honor."
"Will you do so?"
"No, your honor."
"I find you in contempt. Lock this gentleman up."
The answer to this question is no, since the person would be no longer employed by Apple, would not possess the source code, and would not possess the signing key.
Even if you assumed that the court could force Apple to disclose these items to somebody who is now a third-party, it may be the case that there isn't any person who is capable of doing this. Are the same people at Apple responsible for code signing and writing the code necessary to do this?
> The answer to this question is no
Doesn't matter. All the judge needs is to notice in your face that you do have that capability.
Don't believe me? Look at this case:
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-10-07/news/ct-met-lo...
According to the judge:
"What I saw in his face was just defiance. He was not going to testify in this double homicide case because he wasn't going to testify. That's all there was to it. So I saw pure scorn for the judicial system in the defendant's face."
Because the judge didn't like his face he gets 20 years for contempt.
20 years!
If it reaches anything approaching this point (it won't) stopping it basically requires an individual to commit to doing the work then sabotaging the device when presented with it.
That's the act of civil disobedience. And you can expect to spend more than a night in jail should you grow the balls to do it.
Care to say what were the charges originally?
It was an excellent lesson in how arbitrary and asymmetric the criminal justice system is. The police are basically free to make shot up on the police reports, and it was only because we had so many people with identical reports with egregious mistakes that we were able to fight them on the charges.
I'm sure there'd be a GoFundMe up within minutes that would collect enough money to cover the salaries of a few engineers while the court battle plays out. Afterward, go back to work for Apple.
The sentiment is nice, but I doubt the government is worried in the slightest. The government is all powerful and can be whatever it wants, lest we forget.