U.K Demands Access to British Citizens’ End-to-End Encrypted iCloud Data ⇥ ft.com

Anna Gross and Tim Bradshaw, Financial Times:

The UK 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 US claims that Britain had abandoned all attempts to break the tech giant’s encryption.

[…]

Apple made a complaint to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal over the original demand, backed by a parallel legal challenge from Privacy International and Liberty, another campaign group. That case was due to be heard early next year but the new order may restart the legal process.

When U.S. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard announced in August that “the UK has agreed to drop its mandate for Apple to provide a ‘back door’”, I stressed the ambiguity in her statement. I had no additional information, but the wording of her tweet was vague.

Reporters like Tripp Mickle, at the New York Times, and Annabelle Timsit and Joseph Menn, of the Washington Post, were too eager to claim the U.K. would wholly abandon its pursuit of customer data. Neither allowed for different interpretations of Gabbard’s tweet. Journalists like these have sources who could have offered clarity. It is unclear in either article whether they did reach out to their contacts; if they did, their stories were misleading even with — or perhaps because of — that information.

Anyway, this sucks. I do not think Advanced Data Protection is coming back to the U.K. any time soon.