Even if the federal government wins a court battle to compel Apple to help break into one of its devices, the company’s engineers may still refuse to comply, according to a Thursday report.
“It’s an independent culture and a rebellious one,” Jean-Louis Gassée, a former Apple engineer, told the New York Times. “If the government tries to compel testimony or action from these engineers, good luck with that.”
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A well-known component to the problem is the fact that Apple splits its engineers into several different groups to prevent anyone from having the ability to break into one of the company’s devices on their own. Breaking through the encryption on an iPhone would require more than one team to create the software, which would also need to be signed with the company’s master key.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is asking the company to do something that is slightly more simple, which is to write software that would deactivate a self-destruct mechanism that enables after an incorrect password has been entered on a device more than 10 times. However, even that would be antithetical to the company’s culture, former employees said.
“If someone attempts to force them to work on something that’s outside their personal values, they can expect to find a position that’s a better fit somewhere else,” said Window Snyder, a former senior product manager at Apple in the security and privacy division.
A brief filed by the company’s lawyers also notes the challenge posed by any attempt to conscript employees to help write hacking software for the government, which has been referred to within the company as “GovtOS.”
“Such conscription is fundamentally offensive to Apple’s core principles and would pose a severe threat to the autonomy of Apple and its engineers,” the company’s attorneys wrote in a final brief to the Federal District Court for the Central District of California.
“In the hierarchy of civil disobedience, a computer scientist asked to place users at risk has the strongest claim that professional obligations prevent compliance,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “This is like asking a doctor to administer a lethal drug.”
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak expressed a similar sentiment on Wednesday. “I was brought up in a time when communist Russia under Stalin was thought to be, everybody is spied on, everybody is looked into, every little thing can get you secretly thrown into prison,” Wozniak said. “We had our Bill of Rights. And it’s just dear to me. The Bill of Rights says some bad people won’t do certain bad things because we’re protecting humans to live as humans.”
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“But there are also other problems,” he added. “Twice in my life I wrote things that could have been viruses. I threw away every bit of source code. I just got a chill inside. These are dangerous, dangerous things, and if some code gets written in an Apple product that lets people in, bad people are going to find their way to it, very likely.”
