The British government may be forced to drop its plans to force Apple to build a backdoor to access encrypted user data, according to the Financial Times (a subscription is required to read the article). And it should be forced to.
Earlier this 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, senior British officials speaking to the Financial Times say that the UK is likely to drop the plan amid pressure from the U.S. government: From the article: This is something that the vice-president is very annoyed about and which needs to be resolved. The Home Office is basically going to have to back down.
One of the challenges for the tech partnerships we’re working on is the encryption issue. It’s a big red line in the US — they don’t want us messing with their tech companies.
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