Steve Kinney wrote:
Insubordination is always grounds for dismissal
It's NOT insubordination if it's NOT your job description. Telling a coder whose never done anything besides sit at a desk and code they need to do janitorial tasks for instance. Telling someone who writes crypto that it's also their job to torture test it is going to step on the QA director's toes, ya think? If anyone can be legitimately tasked, it would be the QA department. It's also dysfunctional to let someone who created the code test it. That's like letting a machinist who created the part certify it's Mil-spec 415-D compliance. Otoh Apple COULD change the job description... IF they want to re-negotiate the person's salary. If that person walked I'd speculate there'd be dozens of companies willing to hire them just because they walked instead of cooperating with the feds.
they can just hire any skill sets they don't already have on hand
The government can't require them to hire anyone. Further, If the government forces them to add a government paid contractor or govt employee they could sue for damages caused by reputation loss with their commercial vendors who buy and sell their products and material. I'll bet they can easily prove it too! By charting the DIVE iPhone sales take if they publicly cooperate. All in all the government demanding a private entity do ANYTHING without the full force of the law, not JUST some interpretation by the DOJ backed by some district court hack is a dysfunctional mess that would tie the government up in court until ios is so fucking obsolete no one even remembers what it was. But as I said, as soon as this is out of the news, and Apple has made enough noise to calm their customers, they'll just do it in secret, as FISC/A requires. If they can. -- RR "Through counter-intelligence it should be possible to pinpoint potential trouble-makers ... And neutralize them, neutralize them, neutralize them"