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The United Kingdom has issued a secret order to Apple. It wants the corporation to build a backdoor for Britain’s security services that it could use to access the cloud accounts of any iPhone user across the planet.
As first reported by The Washington Post, Britain issued the order in secret last month. The U.K. isn’t looking to root around in a specific account for a specific security reason. No, it wants free access to all a user’s encrypted material, full stop. The U.K is making the demand under a 2016 law called the Investigatory Powers Act, derisively known as the Snooper’s Charter.
There’s a fight over end-to-end encryption happening across the planet right now. Most normal people and corporations like Apple want stronger privacy around devices and personal data and seek technological solutions for it. Some, but not all, governments like the U.K. want backdoors and the ability to break into a user’s digital data. France is another country with its own Snooper’s Charter while Germany has gone the other way and passed laws to strengthen encryption and privacy protections.
Apple has long been on the frontlines of the battle against snooping. In 2022 it began to offer opt-in encryption for data stores on a user’s cloud cloud Advanced Data Protection. It attempted to offer the service earlier but stopped it because of objections from the FBI during the first Trump administration. Apple previously fought the FBI over its investigation into the San Bernardino shooter’s phone in 2016. Investigators wanted into the phone. Tim Cook said no and the FBI had to pay a third-party contractor a lot of cash to break into the device.
Now Apple is fighting the U.K. It didn’t publicly talk about the request because, under the terms of the British Snooper’s Charter, it’s illegal for the company to disclose it received one. But it’s issued public statements about the Act before and even filed official complaints about the broad powers of the law in Parliament.
“We believe these reforms could undermine our ability to offer users the most advanced data protections available, not only in the UK, but for all Apple users around the world,” it said in a public statement to Parliament last year. “The breadth of these reforms is unprecedented, and the potential impact on the security of technology users across the world cannot be understated.”
Citing rulings in other courts in other countries, Apple pointed out that putting a backdoor into an encrypted service wouldn’t stop at British soil. “Encryption facilitates and protects the exercise of fundamental rights. Yet the Bill would allow the UKG to weaken encryption for all users globally,” it said.
The Washington Post reported that Apple may remove encryption on stored data from devices sold in the U.K. rather than build a backdoor. But sources told The Post that this workaround wouldn’t satisfy the order.
Apple’s brand is privacy. Last year, police in the U.S. were confused when phones in evidence lockers mysteriously wiped themselves. Apple had rolled out an update to iPhones. It was a new security measure that rebooted phones after they’d been in a locked state for more than four days.
Every seized phone in the U.K. that the government wants to root through has a time limit attached. If the British police don’t have a backdoor, then they have four days to break in. It’s just another reason why Apple shouldn’t cave.
