[blisterpeanuts]

Another issue, tangential and not widely discussed, is the very fact that a court, at a federal agency's behest, is ordering a private company to do highly technical and difficult work, at its own expense. They have not demonstrated that Apple committed a crime, and yet they demand that Apple set up an internal project and commit employees and resources to, essentially, do the FBI's work for it.

There has to be a violation of the Constitution in there somewhere. The government cannot compel private companies or individuals to surrender private property (in this case, intellectual property), it cannot restrict freedom of speech (in this case, software is an expression of speech), and perhaps there is also a tie-in to the Commerce Clause.

In other words, at a certain point the U.S. government's power should be and must be limited. Unlimited power is dangerous and surely would violate the vision and foundational philosophy behind the Constitution. In this case, unlimited power means that a law enforcement agency can justify nearly any kind of forcible action with the vague reasons of "national security" or "criminal justice".

[btreecat]

> at its own expense.

I don't think that is true. My google-fu is failing me however.

I think I remember the party being compelled to comply is entitled to charge the Gov a fee for this work.

[blisterpeanuts]

I'm curious what Apple would charge for this "service". If I were CEO, I'd request ten billion dollars. A million or so for the time and manhours, and $9.999 billion for the damage to the company's reputation, stock price, etc., that this will cause -- breaking of a promise that "even Apple can't retrieve your data". Suppose Samsung, a non-American company, jumps on this and says, their phones are truly non-crackable and Samsung would not be able to do it, even if they installed a hacked OS to work around the login failure limit. Boom. Apple has just lost millions of sales. Our heavy handed government hard at work, damaging America's best companies.