Last Friday, journalists and civil liberties organisations waited outside London’s High Court while inside a secret court hearing took place. Despite efforts to petition the court, they were denied access even though the outcome impacts people in the UK and around the world.
Leaks to the press suggest that Apple may have been appealing a Technical Capability Notice (TCN) issued under the Investigatory Powers Act — often dubbed the Snoopers’ Charter. The TCN is believed to have instructed Apple to introduce a capability that would allow the company to access encrypted data stored in the cloud. We say believed because Apple are not permitted to disclose the detail of the TCN.
These secretive actions by the Home Office have already had real-world consequences. Apple has disabled its Advanced Data Protection service in the UK — a move that undermines the security of users’ iCloud backups and their overall digital privacy.
Liberal Democrat MPs have rightly written to the Home Secretary, warning that any government-mandated “backdoor” to end-to-end encryption (E2EE) introduces vulnerabilities that bad actors — including criminals and hostile states — could exploit. They also raised concerns about the lack of scrutiny surrounding such notices.
Discussing issues such as E2EE can often seem technical. I like to use a really simple analogy of locks to explain things. Most of us use locks every day — on our homes, cars, or devices. Criminals, of course, use locks, too, for example, to secure stolen goods. But we don’t respond to that by banning locks. That would be foolish as we understand the benefits to the law-abiding majority outweigh the benefits to criminals.
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