Report from the Financial Times
In Brief – The US Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, has announced that the UK Government has dropped its demand of Apple to give its national security services the ability to access data uploaded to Apple’s iCloud storage by any user worldwide that uses Apple’s Advanced Data Protection (ADP), which is end-to-end encryption that Apple cannot break. Although the UK demand has never been formally confirmed by the company or the UK Government because publicly revealing it is itself a criminal offense under the 2016 Investigatory Powers Act (IPA), Apple stopped offering ADP to UK users in February and brought a legal complaint to the country’s Investigatory Powers Tribunal in March. Throughout the standoff Apple has said that the company will not build “a back door or master key to any of our products”, and once the demand was publicly reported, top US officials, including President Trump and Director Gabbard, publicly criticized the UK. Meta also joined Apple’s case in the surveillance tribunal.
Context – The Starmer Government was reportedly increasingly concerned that the conflict over encryption could hamper their ability to pursue tech and AI growth initiatives, including partnerships with the United States and US-based digital companies. The standoff became another example of the UK’s digital policy schizophrenia with the country publicly aiming to be a European haven of tech and AI investment while also pressing forward on tech regulations that run contrary to that goal. The Online Safety Act (OSA) was nearly derailed in 2023 over threats to encryption, with top messaging services threatening to abandon the market. The Home Office’s move against Apple in January might have been based on a mistaken belief that the incoming Trump Administration, which was harshly critical of Apple and Meta over encryption in its first term, would be amenable. However, this Trump Administration has a more robust digital right wing that is becoming increasingly vocal about the UK’s OSA and its potential impact on populist speech online.