> This is an opportunity for Parks v.2016 - if you're asked by Apple to do anything to comply with the court order, don't do it.
As far as I know there isn't even anything that obligates Apple to punish any of their employees for refusing. If Apple's employees refused to do it they could just put the contract out for bids instead.
Then the contractor would be responsible for ensuring that the software is secure (which they can't do), against damage to Apple's six hundred billion dollar business (which probably no one would be willing to insure against), so there probably wouldn't be very many bidders. If there were any bids at all they would be very large and Apple having followed a public bidding process would have a very exact and market-proved cost to submit to the FBI. And when that cost is fifty billion dollars, it would kind of prove Apple's point about the unreasonableness of the request.
As far as I know there isn't even anything that obligates Apple to punish any of their employees for refusing. If Apple's employees refused to do it they could just put the contract out for bids instead.
Then the contractor would be responsible for ensuring that the software is secure (which they can't do), against damage to Apple's six hundred billion dollar business (which probably no one would be willing to insure against), so there probably wouldn't be very many bidders. If there were any bids at all they would be very large and Apple having followed a public bidding process would have a very exact and market-proved cost to submit to the FBI. And when that cost is fifty billion dollars, it would kind of prove Apple's point about the unreasonableness of the request.