UK wants all your digital data, court filing suggests

Your freedom and privacy are at risk as the UK government continues its dangerous attempt to drive a great hole into data security, despite the vast weight of warnings that doing so will make all of us far less safe. 

In almost complete secrecy and without any mandate to do so, the UK has been demanding that Apple install a back door into encrypted data. We recently heard from the US that it had backed off in this attempt. 

This may not be true, warns the Financial Times, citing recent court filings from the top-secret Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) court in which Apple is opposing the UK demands. If that is indeed true, it will no doubt be seen in the US as fundamental dishonesty on the part of the current UK administration. 

Whose side are you on?

The report also confirms that the UK wanted access to much more data than we thought — far more than the information protected by the Advanced Data Protection feature that Apple withdrew from offering in the UK as it grappled with the government’s overreach. 

According to the Financial Times, the UK is demanding access to all grades of iCloud storage, and these demands extend globally: “The obligations… are not limited to the UK or users of the service in the UK; they apply globally in respect of the relevant data categories of all iCloud users,” the IPT filing states. 

This hypothetically gives British law enforcement the right to access the data of Apple customers anywhere in the world, including the US. It means that UK intelligence agents will be able to get people’s data, emails, and passwords with little protection, transparency, or oversight, and that this authoritarian overreach extends to users no matter where they are from.

There has been no real public debate around any of this. 

The back door everyone is searching for

The UK is attempting to take this action against everybody’s interests in near-total secrecy, wielding a law it invented precisely to give it the power to do so. That law gives the UK Home Office the power to demand that Apple and others create dangerous back doors into encrypted data. Apple is appealing against the demand, but the case is not expected to reach court until next year. 

While that process continues, the understanding is that Apple may already have been forced to meet these demands, which basically means the UK has fired a starting pistol for an international hacker’s race to find and exploit that door. 

If Apple has been forced to take steps to comply with the law, then nation-states worldwide will be searching for that vulnerability, with highly resourced armies of hackers already searching for the UK-mandated dangerous data insecurity. It is only a matter of time until these designer vulnerabilities are identified, exploited, and abused.

The UK’s actions will also give carte blanche to other repressive regimes to make similar demands. A recent Apple transparency report confirmed the extent to which the UK embraces surveillance, showing the nation to make more data requests per head of population than nearly every other nation.

An act of digital self-harm

In tandem with the decision to force UK internet users to share their personal details with little-regulated, foreign-owned authorization companies under the so-called Online Safety Act, and the equally stupid decision to force Apple to open up key components of its operating system to third parties, it seems clear that the UK is not committed to providing a secure online environment to do business online.

But while it engages in this deluded act of digital hara-kiri, the nation is also imperiling data protection for users from every other nation by demanding dangerous back doors through data encryption that impact every nation. These back doors will make everyone less secure, to the detriment of both individual liberty and international economy.

Step by step, the UK is becoming a less attractive place to do any form of digital business, and given the extent to which the current administration seems unable to listen to criticism of its decisions, it makes sense to think the UK is deliberately working to undermine the digital economy its feeble GDP growth relies upon. The repeated pattern of digital self-harm is so extensive that it must be deliberate, as it would take an effort of will to be so belligerently stupid.

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