U.S. Director of National Intelligence Claims U.K. Has Retreated from iCloud Backdoor Demands ⇥ bbc.com

U.S. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, in a tweet that happens to be the only communication of this news so far:

Over the past few months, I’ve been working closely with our partners in the UK, alongside @POTUS and @VP, to ensure Americans’ private data remains private and our Constitutional rights and civil liberties are protected.

As a result, the UK has agreed to drop its mandate for Apple to provide a “back door” that would have enabled access to the protected encrypted data of American citizens and encroached on our civil liberties.

Zoe Kleinman, BBC News:

The BBC understands Apple has not yet received any formal communication from either the US or UK governments.

[…]

In December, the UK issued Apple with a formal notice demanding the right to access encrypted data from its users worldwide.

It is unclear to me whether Gabbard is saying the U.K.’s backdoor requirement is entirely gone, or if it means the U.K. is only retreating from requiring worldwide access (or perhaps even only access to U.S. citizens’ data). The BBC, the New York Times, and the Washington Post are all interpreting this as a worldwide retreat, but Bloomberg, Reuters, and the Guardian say it is only U.S. data. None of them appear to have confirmation beyond Gabbard’s post, thereby illustrating the folly of an administration continuing to make policy decisions and announcements in tweet form. The news section of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence is instead obsessed with relitigating Russian interference in the dumbest possible way.

Because of the secrecy required of Apple and the U.K. government, this confusion cannot be clarified by the parties concerned, so one is entrusting the Trump administration to communicate this accurately. Perhaps the U.K. availability of Advanced Data Protection can be a canary — if it comes back, we can hope Apple is not complicit with weakening end-to-end encryption.

Also, it seems that Google has not faced similar demands.