Right now Apple is doing all they can, with the help of others, to resist a court order that orders them to unlock the iPhone belonging to a terrorist. The fear here is that if they lose the case, it will set a dangerous precedent in which who’s to say that the FBI or other law enforcement agencies won’t come knocking on their door for every single request?
According to a report from the New York Times, it seems that many Apple employees are behind the company’s decision to fight the court order, and it seems that these employees have also discussed what will happen should Apple lose the case, with more extreme scenarios being that they will actually be willing to quit the company rather than undermine the security of the software that they helped create.
This show of solidarity was echoed in a letter Apple’s CEO Tim Cook sent out to customers last month, in which he wrote, “The same engineers who built strong encryption into the iPhone to protect our users would, ironically, be ordered to weaken those protections and make our users less safe.” Apple’s lawyers even mentioned something similar in the company’s final brief to the Federal District Court.
It reads, “Such conscription is fundamentally offensive to Apple’s core principles and would pose a severe threat to the autonomy of Apple and its engineers.” Of course this is all hypothetical at the moment, so it will be interesting to see what will happen should Apple lose this fight.