| > 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 |
https://www.wired.com/2014/04/lavabit-ruling/
"The case began in June, when Texas-based Lavabit was served with a “pen register” order requiring it to give the government a live feed of the email activity on a particular account."
"Levison resisted the order on the grounds that he couldn’t comply without reprogramming the elaborate encryption system he’d built to protect his users’ privacy."
"So in July the government served Levison with a search warrant striking at the Achilles’ heel of his system: the private SSL key that would allow the FBI to decrypt traffic to and from the site, and collect Snowden’s metadata directly."
In other words, they asked him to write software to get just metadata for Snowden's correspondences and when he delayed, they requested everything.
> You can't use discovery to force someone to write software the doesn't exist to provide additional functionality to a product.
You absolutely can.
https://www.federalrulesofcivilprocedure.org/frcp/title-v-di...
"A party may serve on any other party a request ... to produce ... any designated documents ... stored in any medium from which information can be obtained either directly or, if necessary, after translation by the responding party into a reasonably usable form."
If the amount of translation is infeasible without writing scripts, you can be forced to write scripts.
But again, the whole point of this discovery tangent was to show that courts can and very often do "force someone to work for you," which I will assume you now concede is true. Let's stick to the Lavabit case and what constitutes illegal compelled speech, as these are the points on which we still disagree.