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EFF On Why FBI Can't Force Apple To Sign Code (boingboing.net)
New submitter Kurast writes with this article at Boing Boing: Code is speech: critical court rulings from the early history of the Electronic Frontier Foundation held that code was a form of expressive speech, protected by the First Amendment. The EFF has just submitted an amicus brief in support of Apple in its fight against the FBI, representing 46 "technologists, researchers and cryptographers," laying out the case that the First Amendment means that Apple can't be forced to utter speech to the government's command, and they especially can't be forced to sign and endorse that speech. In a "deep dive" post, EFF's Andrew Crocker and Jamie Williams take you through the argument, step by step. (You can follow along by reading the brief itself (PDF), too.)
Code is text that conveys meaning, which is one possible definition of "speech" in written form, but it really carries two purposes: to instruct a computer to behave in a certain manner (in which sense, code is a machine) and to convey the intent of the program to humans.
You can write a functional equivalent of any program with meaningless identifiers, variables like x, y, z, functions like func1, func2, etc. Yet we don't do that, and there's a good reason. Computer languages are meant to be read by humans as well as computers.
But, code is not speech.
Yes it is. This is a legal question that's been settled already by several cases. Here's a quote from one of them (Universal City Studios vs Corley)
Communication does not lose constitutional protection as “speech” simply because it is expressed in the language of computer code. Mathematical formulae and musical scores are written in “code,” i.e.,symbolic notations not comprehensible to the uninitiated, and yet both are covered by the First Amendment. If someone chose to write a novel entirely in computer object code by using strings of 1’s and 0’s for each letter of each word, the resulting work would be no different for constitutional purposes than if it had been written in English.
Look. I see EFF lawyers saying code is speech and is protected. And I see EFF lawyers saying code is math and is not eligible for patent protection and sometimes not even eligible for copyright protection. I want an EFF lawyer to explain their stand on how these three mechanisms apply to code before this story gets posted AGAIN and it had better be consistent.
for one in aSetWithOneMore {
change(one).intoOneWithPlus(4)
if ( one.isNot(five) ) {
print("The numbers don't jive!!")
\\/* At this point increase players score. */
}
}
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
ah you think the constitution is your ally. When your precious constitution declared warrantless search and seisure to be unlawful, we merely declared our our borders to be hundreds of miles long. We declared our wiretaps to be constitutional through "metadata."
When the constitution declared the first amendment sacrosanct, we merely declared those who spoke against us as "enemy combatants" and had them executed by drone without so much as a second thought. We bombed the news stations that refused to fall in line with our message during our wars, and we openly slaughtered their journalists in the field. When it was reported, we sentenced the whistleblower to rot in prison.
Good people go to bed earlier.
It would seem to me that EFF's line of defense is dependent on the Citizens United vs Federal Election Commission, where it was ruled that corporations have the same constitutional rights to free speech as people. If Apple did not have such a right, then the government could force them to produce and sign code. I personally was unhappy with the Citizens United vs FEC ruling, but this is an area where it could have a positive impact on me.