Apple defends itself against British surveillance order
British watchdogs demand worldwide access to backups of iPhones and Macs. Apple lodges a complaint with a British committee.
(Image: Lightspring/Shutterstock.com)
Apple is legally defending itself against the British government's secret order to build a backdoor into the iCloud. This was reported by the Financial Times (FT), citing insiders. According to the report, Apple has lodged a complaint against the secret order with the Investigatory Powers Tribunal. The order requires Apple to create the technical conditions to enable it to extract encrypted content from backups and other data from all users worldwide at the request of the authorities in the UK.
There is no official confirmation of Apple's resistance. Under UK law, Apple is not allowed to talk about the “technical capability notice” surveillance order. Consequently, the company is also not allowed to say whether it has taken legal action, as this would confirm the existence of the secret order. The British Home Office does not talk about it anyway.
Videos by heise
The Investigatory Powers Tribunal is also based at this ministry. This body describes itself as an independent institution. It rules on complaints about possible breaches of the law in the use of secret investigation or surveillance methods by UK authorities.
Apple has shut down ADP in the UK
According to the FT, Apple emphasizes that it has never installed a backdoor and will never do so. The company is trying to get out of the affair by taking the Advanced Data Protection (ADP) add-on service off the market in the UK. Although this weakens the encryption, Apple does not believe it needs to build a backdoor into a service that is not offered in the country.
The British government is not satisfied with this, however, because it also wants to spy on foreign Apple users. Apple backups could be particularly attractive to Big Brother because they often contain keys for other encrypted data storage devices. US President Donald Trump has reacted angrily to the British secret order to Apple. Something like this “is familiar from China,” Trump said in an interview with the British political magazine The Spectator. The USA wants its citizens' data to remain exempt from British access.
(ds)
