Professional obligations prevent compliance
"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."
"If -- and this is a big if -- every engineer at Apple who could write the code quit and, also a big if, Apple could demonstrate that this happened to the court's satisfaction, then Apple could not comply and would not have to," said Joseph DeMarco, a former federal prosecutor. "It would be like asking my lawn guy to write the code."
Mr. DeMarco, who filed a friend of the court brief on behalf of law enforcement groups that supported the Justice Department, also noted that if the engineers refused to write the code, rather than outright quit, "then I think that the court would be much more likely to find Apple in contempt," he said.
Rather than contempt, Riana Pfefferkorn, a cryptography fellow at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, said Apple could incur daily penalties if a judge thought it was delaying compliance.
The government has cracked down on tech companies in the past. A judge imposed a $10,000-a-day penalty on the email service Lavabit when it did not give its digital encryption keys to investigators pursuing information on Edward J. Snowden, the former intelligence contractor who leaked documents about government surveillance.