Apple is appealing against a British government order to create a “back door” to its encrypted cloud storage systems, the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) confirmed on Monday.
Reuters reports that the IPT said in a written ruling that it had refused the British government’s application that “the bare details of the case,” including that it was brought by Apple, be kept private.
In early March Apple removed its Advanced Data Protection iCloud feature from the United Kingdom after government demands for backdoor access to encrypted user data. The British government has ordered that Apple give it blanket access to all encrypted user content uploaded to the cloud.
The Washington Post (a subscription is required to read the article) said the secret order requires blanket access to protected cloud backups around the world and, if implemented, would undermine Apple’s privacy pledge to users,
The British government claimed that it would “damage national security if the nature of the legal action” if the details were made public. However, the BBC reports that this argument didn’t hold up to scrutiny. From the article: In a ruling published on Monday morning, the tribunal judges rejected that request – pointing to the extensive media reporting of the row and highlighting the legal principle of open justice.”
It would have been a truly extraordinary step to conduct a hearing entirely in secret without any public revelation of the fact that a hearing was taking place,” it states.
For the reasons that are set out in our private judgement, we do not accept that the revelation of the bare details of the case would be damaging to the public interest or prejudicial to national security,” it later adds.
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