Apple Inc. Engineers Would Prefer To Quit Than Cooperate With FBI

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Apple’s engineers have reportedly refused to help the FBI unlock the terrorist’s iPhone. Some of them even said they would quit their jobs rather than help the government break the security measures the iPhone maker has placed on iPhones and iPads.

Engineers don’t want to make GovtOS

Citing current and former employees, The New York Times said Apple’s engineers have decided among themselves who would and who wouldn’t work on building “GovtOS,” the software the court is asking the company to create. This resentment could pose a problem since the software the government is demanding is very complex, and only workers with very specific skills can help create it.

“But Apple employees say they already have a good idea who those employees would be,” the report says.

Among them is an engineer who developed the software for the iPhone, iPad and Apple TV and has worked at an aerospace company in the past. Another one is a senior quality-assurance engineer who has prior experience of testing the company’s products all the way back to the iPod, and he is well known for his expertise in catching bugs. The third specializes in security architecture for the operating systems that power the iPhone, Mac and Apple TV.

No dearth of jobs for Apple engineers

Apple previously said it would take a month’s time and six to ten engineers to build GovtOS. Previously also, reports of certain Apple employees quitting before helping the FBI had been making rounds. Last month, a report from The Guardian stated that breaking their own encryption would be a matter of shame for Apple’s engineers. It wouldn’t be tough for Apple’s cryptography engineers to quit their jobs and find a new high-paying job since security skills are very much in demand.

Syed Farook, one of the shooters in the San Bernardino attack, had an iPhone his government job had assigned to him, and the FBI requires the tech firm help to extract data from that device. Since the case is currently working its way through the courts, it is very possible that the iPhone maker will eventually have to build the software that CEO Tim Cook referred to as the “equivalent of cancer,” but this might take years to happen.

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