Apple takes UK to court over ‘backdoor’ order • The Register

Updated Apple has reportedly filed a legal complaint with the UK’s Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) contesting the British government’s order that it must forcibly break the encryption of iCloud data.

The appeal will be the first of its kind lodged with the IPT, an independent judicial body that oversees legal complaints against potential unlawful actions by a public authority or UK intelligence services, according to the Financial Times, which broke the news.

The revelation follows a battle between the iGadgetmaker and the UK’s Home Office, which has long set its sights on Apple’s encrypted cloud-hosted data, arguing it needs a backdoor in order for law enforcement to investigate persons of interest.

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Things came to a head in January when the Home Office issued Apple with a technical capability notice (TCN) under the Investigatory Powers Act, aka the Snooper’s Charter, nearly a year after talk of such an order began.

Despite being “technical” by name, it’s understood that the notice didn’t include any technical instructions for Apple, just an order to allow a so-called backdoor into its iCloud network which could be used to gather data that’s otherwise typically out of reach of criminal investigators.

The Home Office refused to either confirm or deny the existence of the notice when we asked about it, and under the Investigatory Powers Act 2016 Apple is prevented from revealing details about the notice.

Apple responded by disabling its Advanced Data Protection (ADP) feature for UK users in early February, effectively removing end-to-end encryption (E2EE) for data backed up to iCloud to appease the government without fully complying with the TCN.

We have never built a backdoor or master key to any of our products or services and we never will

Still, it means British officials can feasibly sniff around iCloud accounts, provided they get a court-approved warrant to do so. With ADP disabled, various types of user account data – such as iCloud backups, photos, and notes, but not iMessages and health data – stored in Apple’s cloud will not be end-to-end encrypted (E2EE), meaning the contents can be accessed and provided by Apple to investigators upon legal demand. It will also be done without alerting users, assuming someone involved in the process doesn’t leak it at any stage.

“We are gravely disappointed that the protections provided by ADP will not be available to our customers in the UK given the continuing rise of data breaches and other threats to customer privacy,” Apple told The Register at the time.

“As we have said many times before, we have never built a backdoor or master key to any of our products or services and we never will,” it added.

The Home Office has also previously voiced its ambition to break E2EE for all popular communications platforms in the UK, such as messaging app WhatsApp, although the case with Apple is believed to be its first foray into handing out TCNs to this end.

The UK’s entire approach to pressing ahead with the Investigatory Powers Act and its so-called war on encryption has come under intense scrutiny in recent years.

Its main arguments in favor of breaking encryption are largely based on the prevention of terror attacks and child sexual exploitation.

Security minister Dan Jarvis further justified the powers in Parliament last week, saying requests to access user data under the Act could only be made on an “exceptional basis, and only when it is necessary and proportionate to do so.”

Jarvis’s comments came after being questioned by other MPs about the TCN, and seemingly aim to dissuade the public from thinking the government can simply access user data on a whim.

The security minister didn’t offer much in the way of additional insights, whipping out the good old national security defense as a way to avoid further questioning.

Many who argue against the government’s ambitions, such as Big Brother Watch, say the action taken against Apple is “outrageous” and “draconian” and may eventually force encrypted messaging technology underground, meaning only criminals would have access to it.

US President Donald Trump also recently compared the UK’s treatment of Apple to the extensive state surveillance methods deployed by China – the two countries’ foremost intelligence adversary.

US director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has ordered a legal review of the TCN issued to Apple out of concern it could be used to gather data on US citizens. Doing so would violate the terms of the US-UK Cloud Act Agreement, she argued.

The Register has asked Apple for further comment. ®

Updated to add at 1833 UTC

Interestingly enough, the UK government appears to have scrubbed from the web its previous and now politically inconvenient advice to barristers, solicitors, and others in sensitive professions to use Apple’s ADP at-rest end-to-end encryption. Fancy that!

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