Internet Imperialism: UK Demands Access to Encrypted Accounts of All Apple Customers Worldwide

​“I have as much privacy as a goldfish in a bowl,” Princess Margaret once said, despairing of the paparazzi. Now, thanks to the Home Secretary of the United Kingdom, you too can feel like royalty.
 
The British government has recently issued a secret order demanding a backdoor to all of Apple’s encrypted communications.
 
From time to time in the United States the Justice Department has demanded that Apple help it jailbreak a suspect’s iPhone. Apple stoutly refuses to bend the knee, knowing that granting one such demand would create a backdoor that would destroy Apple’s privacy promise forever. Since 2022, Apple has allowed users to opt for Advanced Data Protection in which no one but the user can access encrypted messages on iMessages.
 
Now London is not demanding, as the Justice Department did, to force Apple to create backdoors to individual accounts of suspected criminals. Instead, London is demanding backdoor access to all encrypted material – messages, texts, and images – stored on the cloud by all Apple customers around the world, including U.S. citizens.
 
“The British government’s demand is breathtaking by comparison,” said Erik Jaffe, President of PPSA. “It is nothing less than internet imperialism.
 
“We had a revolution, left the British Empire, and adopted the Fourth Amendment in part because of the abusive, unreasonable, and warrantless searches performed by agents of the Crown,” Jaffe said. “We should not tolerate the reimposition of such British high-handedness.”
 
Meredith Whittaker, president of the nonprofit Signal app, told The Washington Post, “If implemented, the directive will create a dangerous cybersecurity vulnerability in the nervous system of our global economy.” Given the breathtaking scope of this order, it is likely only a matter of time before similar orders will be directed at Meta’s encrypted WhatsApp backups. Signal and Telegram services might be next.
 
This is a terrible precedent with terrible consequences. With the UK now demanding a backdoor, expect China and other authoritarian regimes to follow suit.
 
The witless Whitehall nanny-staters overlook the value of encryption in protecting dissidents from tyrants, journalists from homicidal cartels, and even law-enforcement itself from organized criminals and state actors. Once this backdoor gets into the wild – and it will – women and children will have far less protection against stalkers and abusers. Inventors and businesses will also be exposed to industrial espionage by competitors and China. Everyday consumers who simply value their privacy will be betrayed.
 
It is out of concern for the human right to privacy that the European Court of Human Rights rejected a Russian law that would have broken encryption. Now, what Vladimir Putin could not achieve, the British government is happy to do for him.
 
This is just the latest sign that official attitudes toward personal privacy have crossed a threshold into authoritarian thinking. There is nothing shocking or unusual about privacy in communications. It has been the de facto rule for most person-to-person communications for all of human history. Once a government whets its appetite for your personal information, it will almost always seek more.
 
“Efforts to give the government back-door access around encryption is no different than the government pressuring every locksmith and lock maker to give it an extra key to every home and apartment,” Jaffe said.
 
Now the same country that celebrates the declaration of Sir Edward Coke, a 17th century jurist who declared that every person’s home is his “Castle and Fortress,” is busy forging digital keys.
 
PPSA urges the U.S. government to exert its diplomacy and defend Americans’ privacy.

DONATE & HELP US PROTECT YOUR PRIVACY RIGHTS