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Comment by foolfoolz | Hacker News Reader

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foolfoolz·

they could have appealed again. what is the cost of their legal team?

complying with laws and regulations is a cost of doing business in the any country

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I think lawyer time is quantifiable so that's one thing.

But the cost of moving a developer over to satisfy the DoJ's request is practically unquantifiable. Say DH has a dev team of 10. One of them moves over to implement the DoJ search protocol and develop redaction scripts. Do the other 9 now work this person's workload?

Or does DH bring in a new developer? Now DH has to train this person up. We all know, as programmers, that a new developer to a team induces a temporary drag on performance.

Anyways, I think Apple covered this hypothetical in their response brief to the FBI request.

Again, this just sounds like the cost of doing business. You’re not always going to be able to have everyone working on the ideal goals. Sometimes a developer will have to be working with auditors (be they from the private or public sector) or lawyers on something other than their typical project.

I also don’t think a search protocol would be a part of this request, as much as a dump of redacted data.

Another good example of this is an IRS audit. I went through one the first year I setup my business. They said it was a "random" audit, meaning not based on any specific findings. I had to put all of my small business resources (me) onto defending the audit for probably 40 hours. In the end, they found nothing, so it was just purely a resource drain.

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