It's a TSOP48 package, I guess you could clamp it but not that easily. The bigger problem I see is that if you try to program it in-system, you need to apply power to it, and since the power rail is shared with the CPU, the CPU will wake up and try to read the chip, messing with the programming.
At the end you mentioned it's possible to re-flash the fw, would you really need to de-solder the chip though? I imagine you could just clamp it.