Apple is stepping up its fight with the British government over a demand to create a “back door” in its most secure cloud storage systems, by filing a legal complaint that it hopes will overturn the order.
The iPhone maker has made its appeal to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, an independent judicial body that examines complaints against the UK security services, according to people familiar with the matter.
The Silicon Valley company’s legal challenge is believed to be the first time that provisions in the 2016 Investigatory Powers Act allowing UK authorities to break encryption have been tested before the court. The Investigatory Powers Tribunal will consider whether the UK’s notice to Apple was lawful and, if not, could order it to be quashed.
The case could be heard as soon as this month, although it is unclear whether there will be any public disclosure of the hearing. The government is likely to argue the case should be restricted on national security grounds.
Tulsi Gabbard, US director of national intelligence, said tapping Americans’ data would be an “egregious violation” of privacy that risked breaching the two countries’ data agreement.
A bit rich coming from America after what we found out after the Snowden whistleblowing.
Stormy1701@lemmy.zip 3 hours ago
Apple will pull out of the UK before implementing a back door.
Oh sure our authoritarian government can pretend these orders apply worldwide but in practice they simply don’t. The richest company on Earth can afford to just not do business here anymore and be beyond the reach of Two Tier Kier.
Word of warning though. As these orders are secret you must assume every cloud provider on Earth has been served the same notice to break encryption. Don’t trust any of them. They can’t all afford to not comply as Apple is doing.
The ONLY way to protect your data is local encrypted storage with ghost and dummy partitions. It’s really simple to do and when Comrade Starmers woke police come knocking to look at your data they can go get fucked.