The United Kingdom government gave up its demand for a backdoor into encrypted Apple iCloud accounts.
Tulsi Gabbard, the U.S. director of national intelligence, announced the change late Monday. The DNI had been fighting the attempt to violate the privacy of Americans since word of the U.K.’s plan first came to light.
UK drops iCloud back door request
News broke in February that the U.K. wante a backdoor into iCloud. This would allow law enforcement to secretly access the information that iPhone and Mac users store on Apple servers, despite the files being encrypted on accounts with Advanced Data Protection enabled. And the backdoor would be global — not just for residents of England, Scotland, etc.
The United Kingdom has now given up on the demand, according to Gabbard.
“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,” she wrote Monday on X.
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…
— DNI Tulsi Gabbard (@DNIGabbard) August 19, 2025
A red flag for privacy advocates
The request for the backdoor through Apple’s encryption was reportedly justified by the U.K. Investigatory Powers Act of 2016. This gives a wide range of agencies warrantless access to user data held anywhere in the world.
U.K. law forbids Apple from commenting on the issue. However, the company reportedly was fighting the British requirement. Apple and other companies long ago made it clear that hackers inevitably will exploit any deliberately inserted weakness in encryption.
Ed Hardy has been writing full-time about tech for 25 years, and using it for much longer than that. His intro to Apple was a Macintosh Classic II (which he still has), but now he uses a 13-inch iPad Pro as his primary computer. He’s written for NotebookReview, TabletPCReview, and Brighthand, as well as other sites.
