The FBI wants Apple to write software code to help it break into the iPhone. Apple doesn't want to say this. Andrew Crocker, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, or EFF, a digital civil rights group, says the government can't make you say what you don't believe. He looks to a Supreme Court case that began in New Hampshire.

Tim Cook has not been afraid to confront the government on issues he considers morally important.

Apple doesn't have to write code, which equals speech, when it doesn't agree with what the government wants to do. And it's not that the government can't make you do anything you don't want to do.

[Eric]Goldman [a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law] says back in the 1990s, courts began to confront the question of whether software code is a form of speech. Goldman says the answer to that question came in a case called Bernstein v. U.S. Department of Justice. Student Daniel Bernstein who created an encryption software called Snuffle. He wanted to put it on the Internet. The government tried to prevent him, using a law meant to stop the export of firearms and munitions. Goldman says the student argued his code was a form of speech.

The Washington Post speaking out against state legislation that he believed would let businesses deny services to gay, lesbian and transgender people. [Tim] Cook himself came out as gay in the pages of Bloomberg Businessweek.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, and software has been treated as a form of speech ever since. So if software code is speech, Apple says the First Amendment also means the government can't tell Apple what to say.

The FBI wants Apple to write software code to help it break into the iPhone. Apple doesn't want to say this. Andrew Crocker, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, or EFF, a digital civil rights group, says the government can't make you say what you don't believe. He looks to a Supreme Court case that began in New Hampshire.