Chairmen Jordan and Mast Challenge UK Home Secretary to Come Clean on Order to Break Apple Encryption Around the World

Reps. Jim Jordan and Brian Mast

Rep. Jim Jordan, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and Rep. Brian Mast, Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, are urging the United Kingdom Home Secretary to reveal details of a secret order to Apple that may kill encryption for Americans and Apple customers around the world.

The secret order involves Apple’s Advanced Data Protection, which offers customers end-to-end encryption so strong that even Apple itself does not have the ability to break it. As a result, journalists and their sources, women and their children hiding from stalkers, dissidents around the world, businesses communicating about proprietary products, and people who simply value their privacy, all rely on Apple’s ADP to protect their communications.

In February 2025, the UK Home Office – roughly equivalent to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security – issued a Technical Capability Notice (TCN) to Apple demanding access to end-to-end encrypted data stored in Apple’s iCloud. In order to be able to continue to serve Britons with other products and services, and to protect customers’ privacy, Apple was forced to comply with the law by disabling ADP for 35 million iPhone users in the UK.

This had the additional unfortunate effect of depriving Americans and people from around the world of the ability to privately communicate with UK Apple customers – including with other Americans inside the UK.

The UK’s Gag Order – an American Company Cannot Talk to Its Government

“However, it remains unclear whether this action satisfies the UK’s demands, particularly as the order reportedly extends to data of users outside the UK, including American citizens,” Jordan and Mast wrote in a letter to Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood.

Such an order is not only in violation of the Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data (CLOUD) Act, which authorizes the U.S. to enter into data-sharing agreements with the UK and a few other countries, but prohibits orders that require providers to decrypt data. Incredibly, the UK government’s TCN imposes a gag order on Apple that makes it a criminal violation for this American company to petition or even discuss the order with the U.S. Department of Justice.

The “Bare Details” of the TCN Are Not Enough

Since then, a tribunal in the UK rejected the idea that “the revelation of the bare details of the case would be damaging to the public interest or prejudicial to national security.”

Late last year, the Investigatory Powers Commissioner, which advises Prime Minister Keir Starmer, agreed with the tribunal’s ruling, saying that disclosure of some details about the TCN is necessary for “a mature and informed public debate.” Yet no such briefing is in the works, which is why the chairmen are now making a direct request to UK Home Secretary Mahmood to provide a briefing that would spell out the terms of the TCN to the committees by March 11.

What’s more, the committees need more than the “bare details” of the TCN to ensure that the actions of the UK government are within the terms of the CLOUD Act. Otherwise, how could Chairmen Jordan and Mast ascertain if the order weakens “the security, privacy, and constitutional rights of American citizens”? PPSA applauds the chairmen for taking this stand for the right of Americans.

The U.S. Can Suspend the CLOUD Act Agreement with the UK

Bob Goodlatte, former Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and PPSA Senior Policy Advisor, who helped lead the passage of the CLOUD Act in 2018, is pointing to a way out if the UK does not respond to Jordan and Mast.

In a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi on Dec. 12, Goodlatte noted that the CLOUD Act was intended to streamline cross-border cooperation, but “was never intended by Congress to be leveraged by a foreign partner to compel any form of ‘backdoor’ access or other types of decryption assistance.”
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• Goodlatte noted that the CLOUD Act anticipated the danger that a foreign partner would try to exploit the goodwill of the United States. “Accordingly,” Goodlatte wrote to the attorney general, I urge the Department of Justice to invoke Article 12.3 and suspend the Agreement unless and until the UK withdraws its use of TCNs.”

The letter from Chairmen Jordan and Mast did not invoke the possibility of taking this strong action. But Home Secretary Mahmood would be wise to realize that this is likely a step the Trump administration and Congress will take if the British government continues to remain resistant to American concerns.

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