[abritinthebay]

> I suppose tech companies could give them a backdoor and call it a front door?

They're more likely to go "LOL, no" and as it's both impossible AND compelling speech is impossible per 1st Amendment the Government would end up losing in the courts.

[lern_too_spel]

The compelling speech argument would not have held up in court. Apple was putting on a show because they had already advertised to customers that they wouldn't unlock phones for law enforcement.

[BinaryIdiot]

What? Apple was not putting on a show. What the FBI requested required actual software development to be done. You can't force someone to work for you.

[lern_too_spel]

Judges absolutely can force work and do it all the time. See the discovery process Uber is going through now. For an example more relevant to the Apple case, look at the Lavabit court orders.

The idea that writing software not intended for public release is compelled speech under the standard of Wooley v. Maynard is laughable. Nobody except a few gullible tech bloggers (are there any other kind?) took that argument seriously.

[BinaryIdiot]

> Judges absolutely can force work and do it all the time. See the discovery process Uber is going through now. For an example more relevant to the Apple case, look at the Lavabit court orders.

Discovery is different. Laws already require you to retain various records for later discovery. That's just general "shuffle stuff around" work that doesn't really require much effort.

What the FBI was asking for was custom software development to be done to circumvent existing software and hardware functions.

> The idea that writing software not intended for public release is compelled speech under the standard of Wooley v. Maynard is laughable.

Not sure I follow. The distinction wasn't public versus private release; it was writing the custom software itself. The whole "you can keep it and destroy it afterwards" didn't really matter. The FBI can't simply insert itself into your business, have engineers reprioritized from what they're currently working on and expect you to produce something for them.

[lern_too_spel]

> What the FBI was asking for was custom software development to be done to circumvent existing software and hardware functions.

Which is exactly what was requested in the Lavabit case, to the letter. I used the discovery example to show that courts compel work all the time, which you originally claimed they could not do.

[BinaryIdiot]

> Which is exactly what was requested in the Lavabit case, to the letter.

What you're saying is not true. If you take a look at what happened in the unsealed documents regarding Lavabit [1] the FBI wanted a copy of the SSL private key. That's it. The owner of Lavabit offered to do some coding so they could target the meta data of a single person but it was rejected so he ultimately shut his service down.

> I used the discovery example to show that courts compel work all the time, which you originally claimed they could not do.

Discovery is seeking data that already exists and is reasonably accessible. You can't use discovery to force someone to write software the doesn't exist to provide additional functionality to a product. The FBI had to resort to using the All Writs Act in order to attempt to do this and backed down before it could go through and set a precedent. I'd suggest taking a look at how electronic discovery [2] works.

Also the HN discussion around the Apple vs FBI case was rather interesting and is full of good information [3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_discovery

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11116801

[lern_too_spel]

> The distinction wasn't public versus private release.

As I said, that distinction matters for Apple's spurious "compelled speech" argument.

[BinaryIdiot]

> As I said, that distinction matters for Apple's spurious "compelled speech" argument.

It does not. Just because a government orders you to do something privately doesn't mean it isn't compelled speech. Regardless, see my reply to your other comment.