Can a court order someone to delete phrases from a letter or book?
Code is protected under copyright law. Code is a form of speech. How is either a court, or law enacted by Congress, telling someone what to write or delete what's already written, not abridging speech? Why is code different?
A bigger question might be if the government has the ability to require Apple to do this without compensation, and if they do, then who gets to set the rates or define the project -- Apple or the government? Possibly, a better tact/approach for Apple (discounting the setting of precedent, etc) would be to bill the government $700-$1000/hour per developer, and assign a team of 200-300 developers to this, with an expected delivery date of 3-5 years. As the government starts paying down $100 million/month for in effect, nothing, very quickly the public would become outraged and force the question of compensation into court. At the end of the day, the people/government would have to decide if its worth either 1) forcing Apple to do this uncompensated or 2) if it is worth the cost to decrypt one phone -- neither I believe would be widely popular/supported.
Regardless of what happens, unless the FBI withdraws this request, which is highly unlikely -- they have clearly chosen this case due to the terrorism connection to be its legal Alamo -- this is going to end up in front of the Supreme Court.
Almost certainly this expertise is billable to the government, and won't take $100 million, I'd be surprised if it took $1 million, but what do I know?
The more concerning thing is FBI almost can't lose. If they lose the case in court, they've put pressure, will continue to put pressure, on the public and Congress to change this in law, which is why I think it's important to establish constitutional reasoning for why this is a bad idea.
At the end of the day, there really is no way the government will succeed here, you really can't force Apple's developers to do this, as they could just tell the government to go pound sand. The only way they could get it done is through threat of violence/incarceration or by gigantic sums of money. The government can't really argue that Apple with its billions in profits, that their developers' time isn't worth a few billion.
You don't get to play games like this with the judiciary. They can require you to allow an outside auditor to review the code.
Abridge means to curtail. Telling someone to create something doesn't curtail anything.
