Britain’s government has issued a new order to Apple to create a backdoor into its cloud storage service, this time targeting only British users’ data, despite U.S. claims that Britain had abandoned all attempts to break the tech giant’s encryption, according to the Financial Times — as noted by Reuters.
However, this time the government is targeted only British users’ data, as if that makes it better. 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.
The British government claimed to have abandoned the plan. Obviously, it lied.
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