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What?

Yes, a judge could hold them in contempt and jail them for some time. That's the only legal option.

It's possible they could seize some assets as part of the contempt charge, but there are already plenty of legal groups that would jump at the opportunity to represent them pro bono.

The other suggestions you offer are, to be blunt, those of a conspiracy nut.

> Yes, a judge could hold them in contempt and jail them for some time.

Not some time, there's no limit. It can be extended arbitrarily.

All the others points I made in the legal section are indeed legal and have been used in the past though they are indeed unusual.

It is legal to accuse someone of an astronomical tax debt and take their assets, I do not believe it would be considered legal for the IRS to make that accusation without papers showing the work they used to arrive at the accusation, and it would not be considered a valid chain of reasoning 'because the FBI asked us to'.

This, and other techniques you describe, have been used by the FBI in the past but as far as I know only against the relatively powerless. It seems silly to think the FBI would do it in this case.

If the FBI started doing that to employees or ex-employees I suspect Apple would leave the U.S.

For the time limit, yes and no. Jailing someone who is held in contempt is done as a coercive measure. If the need for the person to do something passes, they can't continue to be held. Could they theoretically be held for 20 years? Sure. But that type of action is extremely rare and isn't likely to happen here.

The FBI can't take away the person's children. --Even if he's put in jail, the other parent would retain custody. The FBI would have to convince social services to remove the children from the home, and family court judges aren't overly likely to go along with that.

The FBI could potentially convince a psychiatrist to have a person involuntarily committed for a short time for observation, but they can't force any doctor or hospital to put the people on drugs or otherwise force some form of treatment on them if there's not diagnosis of mental illness.

The FBI doesn't get to tell the IRS to make claims about a person owing an astronomical sum. I suppose they could fabricate evidence and give it to the IRS, but then the individuals responsible would be performing illegal actions and risk being sent to prison themselves. Most members of the law enforcement community are decent people and aren't willing to do that type of stuff.

> But that type of action is extremely rare and isn't likely to happen here.

Given the importance of the situation it seems it is very likely it is going to happen just here. It's up to the judge(s).

>and family court judges aren't overly likely to go along with that.

It's up to the judge(s).

>The FBI could potentially convince a psychiatrist...

This is just redirecting pressure to a different person, keep doing it until you find that someone who will buckle.

> Most members of the law enforcement community are decent people and aren't willing to do that type of stuff.

Just like above, most are honest, but you only need one that isn't.

If you think all of those are impossible by the US government, take a look at you know where, where torture doesn't happen, and no-one was prosecuted for torture that didn't happen.

Exactly, it's this kind of nuance people so often miss.

Black and white thinking. The government does something you disagree with, so suddenly now it's natural to expect them to wield literally every tool of state power against you to make that happen.

The government, after all, is not a singular entity. Its made up of many checks and balances and institutions that often act in disagreement with one another.

This is spot on, and this is why bulk surveillance is so dangerous. It would not surprise me to know that the FBI has already started following/spying, and tasked the NSA to electronically monitor key Apple representatives and their lawyers. If they can find anything shady, they can then use that of individuals to try and use that as leverage.

The key point here is that if the USG find a way to force Apple and Apple engineers to do this work then the government, by default, they must have too much power.

> If they can find anything shady

This is always better but they don't even need to find it. That's just a bonus.

They can just fabricate it. Assange is still in effective house arrest because someone apparently was a victim of "sex by surprise".

Oh please. He did something wrong under Swedish law. That's pretty obvious. Of course he is still there in his little room because of dirty politics. I am sure he would have taken a fine or whatever in Sweden if he were not afraid of being extradited to the US.

> The state can just harass them into compliance.

If that were actually implementable against large powerful corporations universally, we would not have had a bailout after the derivatives bomb. As it is, not even the ratings agencies got nicked.

What? No. More than half of those things cannot be done in this case. You're being paranoid.