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Comment by cubano | Hacker News Reader

Your nativity on how "criminal justice" and law enforcement works is kinda astounding to me.

If a judge orders an injunction against these citizens and they don't comply, he won't fine them, he will jail them, which is an incredible hardship, esp. against people not used to the prison industrial complex and its dehumanizing effects.

Perhaps sitting in jail for weeks or months will endure these guys to the IT masses as martyrs-to-the-cause, but I would fully expect them to cave after a little while.

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Can the court order you to do something you don't know how?

If you can show these people would know how to do it, then it must be common enough knowledge that the courts could find someone else.

If it is highly specialized knowledge that only these people might even know, then you can't prove that they do know how to do it.

Either way, you can't justify forcing them to do it. And it is if we are even fine with slavery to begin with, which I'm not.

I think he meant Apple will be fined. The engineers, if directly ordered by the court to "fix" [0] the software will be charged with contempt of court, and jailed.

[1] I mean this in the sense of to deal with or correct a problem, and also to influence the result by improper or illegal methods

That's when it gets interesting.

Creating code is not like being compelled to testify. Is the DoJ going to have a prosecutor ask them "Now what would be the next line of code?" until they get a working tool?

The coders have an excellent case against them being jailed. The government has already stated their fallback position - that they want Apple's source code and signing keys. Apple will probably at that point secure their signing keys and code, perhaps by moving them offshore.

It will be interesting to see if some defense contractor can make head or tail of Apple's code, build system, etc. That could be a comedy I'd pay to watch.

The developers need to talk to their own lawyer about the future. If they stay at Apple, the firm might pay for their legal costs. But if they leave, they'll have to pay their lawyers themselves. Even if someone like the EFF comes in to defend them pro-bono, they're going to be out of work and un-hireable (no company is going to take on that potential liability).

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