The Washington Post has revealed that Britain’s new Labour government has ordered Apple to provide backdoor access to the encrypted data of all users worldwide. The UK government has not admitted the existence of this order, which they can choose to keep secret per powers granted by the 2016 Investigatory Powers Act, and there will be no parliamentary scrutiny of the decision. Individuals with inside knowledge of the order spoke to the Post on condition of anonymity.
The British government’s undisclosed order, issued last month, requires blanket capability to view fully encrypted material, not merely assistance in cracking a specific account, and has no known precedent in major democracies. Its application would mark a significant defeat for tech companies in their decades-long battle to avoid being wielded as government tools against their users…
Rather than break the security promises it made to its users everywhere, Apple is likely to stop offering encrypted storage in the U.K., the people said. Yet that concession would not fulfill the U.K. demand for backdoor access to the service in other countries, including the United States.
American politicians usually have no qualms about spying on the data of foreigners but they tend to get upset when foreign governments spy on Americans. If the British government wanted to unite Republicans and Democrats against them it would be hard to imagine a more effective method than trying to exercise secret control over the USA’s most valuable tech company. iPhones continue to dominate the North American mobile phone market, and privacy is an important component of Apple’s brand values, so there will be many Americans who will perceive this development as a threat.
The issue of protecting Americans from foreign snooping is already near the top of the US political agenda due to concerns over China’s technology surveillance capabilities in general, and the particular uncertainty over whether TikTok will be allowed to continue providing its service in the USA. That makes this a terrible moment for the British government to try to supplant China as the leading foreign threat to American privacy, unless the plan is for British spies to share all their findings with their US counterparts, in which case the rest of the world will rightly despise Britain.
US Senator Ron Wyden has been a reliable champion for cybersecurity and has consistently challenged infringements of privacy by both the US government and others. His assessment of the UK’s secret order provides a fair representation of what privacy advocates will be thinking across the USA.
Trump and American tech companies letting foreign governments secretly spy on Americans would be unconscionable and an unmitigated disaster for Americans’ privacy and our national security.
Note that Wyden is a Democrat Senator, and that his immediate focus was on pressuring President Trump to take action against the UK. Recent events show Trump is not shy about using the USA’s economic might to hurt foreign countries if there is the possibility of boosting his ‘America First’ agenda.
The response from many quarters of Britain’s tech community was relatively muted. This may be because they spent 14 years moaning about the lack of respect for privacy shown by the previous government, so there will be some embarrassment that the new government has shown even less respect for privacy. Nevertheless, British privacy advocates have criticized the news. Privacy International (PI), a UK-based charity, slammed the secret order in their press release.
PI has long campaigned against the use and proliferation of such disproportionate government powers. If the UK succeeds in this misguided attempt to access encrypted data, it may set a damaging precedent and encourage abusive regimes around the world to take similar actions.
Big Brother Watch, another British campaign group, were scathing in their press release.
We are extremely troubled by reports that the UK government has ordered Apple to create a backdoor that would effectively break encryption for millions of users — an unprecedented attack on privacy rights that has no place in any democracy.
Big Brother Watch has been ringing alarm bells about the possibility of precisely this scenario since the adoption of the Investigatory Powers Bill in 2016.
We all want the government to be able to effectively tackle crime and terrorism, but breaking encryption will not make us safer. Instead it will erode the fundamental rights and civil liberties of the entire population — and it will not stop with Apple.
I am not going to pretend to be even-handed about this story because the British government has behaved like short-sighted imbeciles. They have tarnished the reputation of Britain in the process. Government lawyers may have advised that the order will remain secret per UK law but it was inevitable that its content would be leaked because of the scale of the changes they were demanding from one of the USA’s most powerful tech companies. If the British government still gets what it wants then Russia, China, Iran and every scumbag authoritarian government on the planet is going to demand the same access. That will leave everybody worse off, except for the terrorists and organized criminals who have already adopted more extreme methods of maintaining secrecy because they expect surveillance.
You can read The Washington Post’s story here.
