U.S. House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan and Foreign Affairs Chair Brian Mast have asked the British government to brief them on its order to Apple to create a back door to its encrypted user data “so they could better understand the British move,” reports Reuters.
Last year the two lawmakers warned that such an order could allow encrypted user data to be exploited by cyber criminals and authoritarian governments. Britain subsequently dropped its demand, U.S. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said in August.
Jordan and Mast, who have previously criticized European Union actions against Big Tech, said the public should be informed of the facts of the case. Britain left the EU in 2020.
“For there to be a ‘mature and informed public debate,’ it is imperative that the Committees fully understand the actions taken by the UK government with respect to the TCN issued to Apple,” they wrote in a joint letter dated Wednesday to British interior minister Shabana Mahmood, seen by Reuters.
In March 2025 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 had ordered that Apple give it blanket access to all encrypted user content uploaded to the cloud.
At the time 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 reported 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.
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.
Apple, of course, appealed the British government’s ridiculous ruling. The Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) said in a March 2025 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.
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