> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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].
"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.
"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.
> You got Lavabit case exactly wrong. No wonder you're confused.
I can't tell if you're trying to troll me or what at this point. I link you to the lavabit case details then you link me to the lavabit details.
They wanted a "pen register" which assumes reasonable hook-up-ability. This wasn't possible without reprogramming the system. This made it unreasonable and it was withdrawn. Then they asked for the SSL key so they could use a pen register. The owner suggested, instead of the SSL key, that he write software to avoid it and they declined so he shut it down.
You stated I got it wrong but my original post was factual and specifically referenced the wikipedia article that references the exact order. Nothing that you have posted has shown otherwise.
> > You can't use discovery to force someone to write software the doesn't exist to provide additional functionality to a product.
> "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."
But you can't. Translation cannot be twisted to meaning "develop a new feature that creates another way to enter a system". It just can't.
> 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.
The best they can do, again, is reasonable collection from a medium which consists of direct or requiring translation. I'm not sure what I would concede here as nothing I have said goes against the sources you have posted.
As far as I am concerned this conversation is over as I do not see the value in continuing to repeat the same information, over and over.
> You stated I got it wrong but my original post was factual and specifically referenced the wikipedia article that references the exact order.
Let's refresh your memory.
> 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.
No, he didn't offer to do it. He was ordered to do it and refused. Only after refusal did the FBI ask him to hand over his private key, not because it was "unreasonable" as you erroneously claimed but because after he realized he would be held in contempt for not doing the work, he was delaying access to the data by negotiating terms of work too slowly, causing the government to forever lose the ability to collect metadata that would have been generated in the meantime. https://www.justsecurity.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/lava...
> Translation cannot be twisted to meaning "develop a new feature that creates another way to enter a system". It just can't.
You're moving the goalposts. First, it was 'the government can't make you work," for which I gave you the discovery example as a counterexample that happens all the time. Then it was "the government can't make you write software," and I showed you that it just so happens you can be effectively forced to write software as part of discovery. Now it's "you can't be forced to write software to create another way to enter a system." Discovery doesn't serve as a counterexample to that claim because I never intended it to be a counterexample to that claim but to that first claim. As I've repeatedly stated, the Lavabit case is a counterexample to this third claim.
> I do not see the value in continuing to repeat the same information, over and over.
Nor do I. I'm hoping you actually have some new information that your argument can stand on instead of repeating the same things I debunked in my very first post.
> 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.
> Just because a government orders you to do something privately doesn't mean it isn't compelled speech.
As I said earlier, the standard for illegal compelledspeech was defined in Wooley v. Maynard, prior to which there was no such thing as illegal compelled speech. Do you actually have an argument about why forcing the writing of unreleased software is illegal compelled speech, or are you going to keep saying it as a truism?
I suppose tech companies could give them a backdoor and call it a front door?