Apple has called for the United Kingdom’s Home Office to admit that it secretly ordered the technology giant to create a “backdoor” into iPhones, according to The Telegraph.
The Home Office is the United Kingdom government department responsible for internal affairs, national security, immigration, and public safety.The tech giant and two human-rights organizations, Liberty and Privacy International, have asked a tribunal to lift restrictions that gag officials from confirming the existence of a government encryption order. The Telegraph says they hope that confirming the existence of the confidential demand would mean a legal challenge could be heard in public.
Last year, the British government 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 required blanket access to protected cloud backups around the world and, if implemented, would undermine Apple’s privacy pledge to users.
Apple challenged the order at the U.K.’s Investigatory Powers Tribunal in a closed-door hearing on March 14. The bipartisan group of members urged the court to “remove the cloak of secrecy” surrounding the order, and to make this hearing and any further proceedings in the case public. They noted that secrecy in this case is pointless, given that the order has now been widely reported and commented on, and that Apple withdrew its encryption service for U.K. users last month.
“Given the significant technical complexity of this issue, as well as the important national security harms that will result from weakening cybersecurity defenses, it is imperative that the U.K.’s technical demands of Apple— and of any other U.S. companies — be subjected to robust, public analysis and debate by cybersecurity experts,” the members wrote. “Secret court hearings featuring intelligence agencies and a handful of individuals approved by them do not enable robust challenges on highly technical matters.”
A bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers also came to Apple’s defense over the UK government’s attempts to get backdoor access to users’ iCloud data, report. A bipartisan letter from the U.S. Congress to the President of the Investigatory Powers Tribunal published in March demanded that the IPT “remove the cloak of secrecy related to notices given to American technology companies by the United Kingdom.
Now Daniel Beard KC, representing Apple, has told the tribunal this would allow “facts to be deployed in the open” and “advance the challenge in a meaningful way.” Lawyers for campaign groups Liberty and Privacy International said maintaining the order was “farcical”, because of the widespread reporting and discussion related to the order, reports The Telegraph.
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