The government of the United Kingdom reportedly wants a backdoor into Apple accounts so it can spy on any iPhone or Mac user anywhere. It allegedly ordered Apple to allow it to access everything from any iCloud account globally, breaking the encryption protection on the files.
Apple is fighting the order.
UK demands backdoor to spy on anyone anywhere
iPhones and other Apple devices back up photos, contacts and other information to iCloud. These files are encrypted so they can’t be accessed by anyone but their owner. The U.K. government allegedly wants a way around this.
“Security officials in the United Kingdom have demanded that Apple create a back door allowing them to retrieve all the content any Apple user worldwide has uploaded to the cloud,” the Washington Post reported on Friday.
The order comes under the authority of the U.K. Investigatory Powers Act of 2016, which expanded the electronic surveillance powers of the government.
What makes the order extraordinary is that it doesn’t cover only U.K. residents. It requires Apple to make accessible the online files of every iPhone, Mac or iPad user globally.
Apple is fighting back
Apple executives regularly call privacy a fundamental human right. And it’s more than talk — the iPhone-maker has previously made moves to protect user privacy at the expense of law enforcement, including encrypting iCloud images so they can’t be scanned for illegal content. And that’s exactly what the U.K. government wants to circumvent.
Sources told the Washington Post that “Apple is likely to stop offering encrypted storage in the U.K.” That would give the government easy access to any iCloud files in the country, but it doesn’t address the demand that U.K. investigators have access to every iCloud account globally.
When law enforcement agencies have previously proposed backdoor access to encrypted files, Apple and other companies strongly resisted with the argument that any deliberately inserted weakness in encryption will inevitably be exploited by hackers.
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.
