Then they explain why it doesn't work to a judge and the judge decides if it doesn't work for a good reason or if it doesn't work because someone intentionally screwed it up.
If it was for a good reason then welp. Sometimes shit doesn't work. Oh well.
If they intentionally screwed it up then they could be found in contempt of court and fined and/or jailed.
In either case the would be asked to try again if that was feasible.
But how would a judge have the technical know-how to make that determination? If the answer is to have security experts listen in an make the call, would that even be legal since one of the requirements is to allow Apple to keep this in-house for fear of leaking said code? One last final question, if they do force the engineers to come in and explain themselves over and over to the government's satisfaction, that will increase the time commitment from key members of Apple. At what point would the questioning push the original request into "unreasonable burden" territory which would counter the All Writs' Act's own requirement?
Our legal system is asked to make findings of fact all the time on technical matters. This would be just like any of the rest of those. Witnesses could be questioned. Expert testimony could be delivered. Etc.
I understand that it's a common viewpoint on HN that the courts are ill equipped to make these determinations. Personally I think that viewpoint is vastly overstated, but that's a debate for another day.
As to your question about "unreasonable burden", Apple made something like 50 billion dollars in profit last year. The burden is going to have to get pretty high before it starts to get unreasonable. A couple of hours (or dozens of hours, or hundreds of hours) isn't going to even begin to get there.
> As to your question about "unreasonable burden", Apple made something like 50 billion dollars in profit last year. The burden is going to have to get pretty high before it starts to get unreasonable. A couple of hours (or dozens of hours, or hundreds of hours) isn't going to even begin to get there.
Does this mean that "unreasonable burden" is relative? That just seems really weird to me that such a vague clause would be allowed in law. Like who makes that call? (honestly trying to understand the laws here)
Edit: Also consider that pulling off key engineers to do something completely unrelated to helping the company means time away from trying to stay ahead of competition. 1 month is already a huge amount of time when you're trying to stay ahead in one of the most competitive markets (mobiles). Also, a couple hours in court doesn't factor in time away from the office, travel time, and the additional cognitive burden of being in court. This also assumes the court schedules things in a manner that works within Apple's internal schedules. To me, this just sounds like a huge burden to any company in the mobile market.
> I understand that it's a common viewpoint on HN that the courts are ill equipped to make these determinations. Personally I think that viewpoint is vastly overstated, but that's a debate for another day.
I never said the courts were ill equipped to make those determinations. I said a judge wouldn't be able to do it because... well... that's not their expertise. To restate my question more clearly (I hope), how can you safely bring in security experts without compromising the case and guarantees that the courts would be allowing Apple?
> Does this mean that "unreasonable burden" is relative?
Yes, "unreasonable burden" SHOULD be relative. Not all tasks take the same amount of time.
An example I can use is a future court case that involves the safety of rockets transporting people to Mars. It becomes immediately obvious that any investigation and changes a court may demand would cost a large amount of money in such an expensive field.
It doesn't make sense for there to be a strict, absolute cap on burden, say $100000. Sure, that's the salary of an Apple engineer for the better part of the year, or several year's salary for people in other fields, but it's also a fraction of cost of a single rocket component and a tiny portion of the budget of a rocket launch for a company putting rockets into space.
I don't mean relative based on the task cause that is obvious. I mean relative based on financial situation. Take two hypothetical companies, one with huge amounts of cash reserves, and another that is just a startup with no cash reserves. The government takes both to court over the same situation as Apple. The same task ends up requiring the same large sum of money and 1 months time from each company. Obviously this could really hurt the startup and while it'll hurt the larger company, it won't be as big of a burden.
Does the "unreasonable burden" mean something different in this case? Who makes the call as to when this crosses the line? Something just doesn't feel logically right to me if this line moves at the whim of the current decider (judge? jury? someone else?) despite being an identical request with identical financial impact (just relatively different). There has to be some sort of guideline definition for "unreasonable" somewhere, right?
>But how would a judge have the technical know-how to make that determination?
They would ask a jury of people not sly enough to get out of jury duty (maybe with one or two people who are there because they want to do their civil duty). It will not be your peers, but it will be your peers as the government determines.
