The UK’s war on encryption affects all of us
A week after this story was first published, Apple removed its Advanced Data Protection feature in the UK in response to government demands, calling itself agravely disappointeda with the move.
Originally published February 13th.
The encryption wars have reached a fever pitch, and the most contentious battle is not happening in the United States, where much of the action has been in the past a like the governmentas efforts to restrict exports of encryption software until the 1990s and the FBI's standoff with Apple in 2016. It's in the United Kingdom, where the government has reportedly ordered Apple to give officials blanket access to iCloud usersa encrypted backups. And the order allegedly didnat just apply to UK users ait demanded backdoor access for users worldwide.
The secret order, first reported by The Washington Post, was issued in January under the auspices of the UKas Investigatory Powers Act of 2016. Appleas compliance or refusal will have ramifications far beyond the UK, potentially making users less safe and signaling to other governments that they, too, can seek backdoor access a a way of bypassing encryption a to usersa information via …