Code is expressive. Full Stop. (FBIvApple)
I write code. More than a $billion of products have been sold where my code is the key component. I've written more than a million lines of it. I point this out because I want to address this FBIvApple fight from the perspective of a coder -- from the perspective of somebody who the FBI proposes to conscript into building morally offensive code. Specifically, I want to address the First Amendment issue, whether code is expressive speech.Consider Chris Valasek (@NudeHabasher), most recently famous for his car-hacking stunt of hacking into a Jeep from the Internet (along with Charlie Miller @CharlieMiller).
As Chris tells the story, he was on an airplane without WiFi writing code for his "CANbus-hack" tool that would hack the car. Without the Internet, he didn't have access to reference information, such as for strtok(). But he did remember from years earlier working on my (closed-source) code, and used the ideas he remembered to solve his immediate problem. No, he didn't remember the specifics of the code itself, and in any case, his CANbus-hack was unrelated to that code. Instead, it was the ideas expressed my code that he remembered.
What he came up with was this:
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