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UK Effort to Keep Apple Encryption Fight Secret Is Blocked
- madeofpalk 2y agoParent link seemingly doesn’t have the article when viewed on mobile. This was useful https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/apr/07/uk-home-office-loses-attempt-to-keep-legal-battle-with-apple-secret https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/apr/07/uk-home-off...
- gigatexal 2y agoI love that judges are saving society. They’re keeping the government here honest. Let’s hope it continues.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- amelius 2y agoI don't understand people who want to defend Apple in this case. UK is a functioning democracy, and why would you want to put a (foreign) company above that? If you want change, you know the route ...
- wzdd 2y agoI don't understand your comment. Apple seems to be engaging with the order in the appropriate way under a functioning democracy, i.e. by challenging it in the courts.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- amelius 2y agoYes, but this is the country that invented the CCTV.
- spacebanana7 2y agoEven functional democracies make mistakes. Calling them out is part of the correction process.
- like_any_other 2y agoSecret trials to enact mass surveillance on an unknowing population (the original demand gagged Apple from talking about it) doesn't sound like a "functioning democracy" to me.
- londons_explore 2y agoI don't know of any country with fully open governance. There are always decisions or information which is kept secret/illegal to publish.
- Leynos 2y agoAnd which parts of that governance can be kept secret should be subject to continuous review. Openness must be carefully guarded.
- HPsquared 2y agoMaybe there's a healthy middle ground.
- like_any_other 2y ago"Fully open" is a strawman. These are not names of MI5 agents, or a list of active police investigations. This is a massive breach of privacy of every UK citizen, and forced recruitment of every company into a government informant, forcing them to lie to their users that they're being given privacy, whilst informing on them. It is trying to keep the existence of the Stasi a secret.
- londons_explore 2y agoI'd be willing to bet if the government had to pick between publishing the list of all spies names Vs having backdoor access to all Comms, they'd pick having the backdoor access.
- rodwyersoftware 2y agoThe UK is not a functioning democracy, at all.
- ohgr 2y agoWell it is because the judiciary smacked the secrecy side of it down pretty hard to make sure that it was done in public. That's a pretty strong indicator of a functioning democracy.
- rodwyersoftware 2y agoThe UK has not had any real political activity for 100 years. It's all a show. If the UK represented the British natives then a lot of things would be happening that would get me banned from this website :)
- pjc50 2y agoSadly, the UK public are pretty authoritarian, especially about things they don't understand like encryption.
- mattmanser 2y agoDo you even know when our National Health Service was created? Or our social security net? When laws were repealed that suppressed minorities, when human rights were added to our legislation? National minimum wage? Freedom of information laws? Hint: All within the last 100 years.
- ohgr 2y agoAs a British native I feel well represented. It's not perfect of course. We might take a step back occasionally but this usually results in two steps forward. Some press like only to comment on the backward steps though.
- rapsey 2y ago[flagged]
- ohgr 2y agoI think you vastly misunderstand or are oversimplifying the problem here. They actually spoke up against a government mandated privacy violation. What I am worried about really is Google, Meta etc did not speak up against it and likely have had the same requests. So I am worried about some foreign companies complying with my government. And very surprised that one particular foreign company gives more of a shit about me as an end user than my own government.
- petepete 2y agoI don't think it's fair to tar Meta with that brush. WhatApp have said repeatedly they'll leave the UK before disabling E2EE.
- ohgr 2y agoI don't believe they've commented on this issue at all and they carry more messages than Apple do in the UK.
- petepete 2y agoNot in the last couple of months but they made a big deal about refusing to comply when it was raised in 2023. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/mar/09/whatsapp-end-to-end-encryption-online-safety-bill https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/mar/09/whatsapp-...
- Retr0id 2y ago"functioning" is a reach.
- Leynos 2y agoA functioning justice system is an important part of a functioning democracy.
- lynx97 2y agoSurely you are implying that everything in a "functioning democracy" can be solved by voting... I know a ton of pro-EU people that might want to have a talk with you...
- camjw 2y agoSurely you're not saying that leaving the EU wasn't democratic?
- dijksterhuis 2y agoshortened judgement available here: https://www.judiciary.uk/judgments/apple-inc-v-secretary-of-state-for-the-home-department/ https://www.judiciary.uk/judgments/apple-inc-v-secretary-of-...
- HPsquared 2y agoWe've fallen quite far from the tradition of policing by consent as developed by Sir Robert Peel: - Whether the police are effective is not measured on the number of arrests, but on the lack of crime. - An effective authority figure knows trust and accountability are paramount. Hence, "The police are the public and the public are the police." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_principles https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_principles Edit: another choice quote from that article, from the Home Office itself in 2012: "The Home Office defined the legitimacy of policing, in the eyes of the public, as based upon a general consensus of support that follows from transparency about their powers, their integrity in exercising those powers and their accountability for doing so."
- p0w3n3d 2y agoThe problem is the people nowadays can be easily convinced that everything should be accessible, because Ekhm They have nothing to hide and... Ekhm They will be more safe Thus the arguments about fighting terrorism and paedophilia...
- johnisgood 2y agoAnd in reality it has nothing to do with terrorism, nor paedophilia.
- dkdbejwi383 2y agoWhat does it have to do with in reality?
- Gud 2y agoObedient workers.
- dkdbejwi383 2y agoCan you expand on that? I don’t follow, sorry
- amiga386 2y agoUsers want their secrets to be secret. Apple wants its users' secrets to be secret. The UK wants the fact it wants Apple to reveal anyone's secrets to be secret.
- HPsquared 2y agoThere must be a healthy middle ground between mass untouchable criminal communication networks on the one hand, and full panopticon 24x7 for every civilian on the other. Or I don't know, maybe there isn't. But at least the debate should be public.
- ta1243 2y agoThe problem is that in the past you could rely on laws protecting privacy. You send a letter to someone, and it was illegal to open it. You couldn't eavesdrop on a phone call without breaking the law. You could thus have a judicial system allowing the invasion of that privacy. Reasonable people don't have a problem with the court system issuing say 200 wiretaps a year when provided with appropriate levels of evidence on a specific person. People don't have a problem with searching reasonable suspects either. Even when you ignored the law you couldn't do it at scale. The CIA might plant an illegal wiretap, but that will cost them significant resources, they can't do it to a thousand people for a year, let alone indefinitely to a billion people. Thus it was limited. The police have always been able to assign 50 people in performing a tail on a suspect. That doesn't scale. Today though you can scale up. If you spoke on a phone, 99.999% of the time nobody will have heard it, despite it being in the clear, you can track people by following their phone signals. Everyone is tracked all the time, and you just need the warrant to pull the tracking detail - including data from before the warrant. The next step is using that data and feeding it into AI. Currently the bottleneck is analysis - you can track a billion people. but you can only look at 1,000 of them. Feed that into an AI engine and you can analyse everyone. With wiretapping, today if you send something without end-to-end encryption, your message is read, possibly modified, by trillion dollar companies designed to extract value from your message, so you need end-to-end encryption. The problem society has is that judges can't then authorise wiretapping, which society agreed was a reasonable action 30 years ago, and 300 years ago. Even in the US with the optional constitutional amendments, allows for > Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized End to end encryption removes this possibility, there's no middle ground, because you either have * fully encrpyted and thus immune to warrants * encryption with backdoor and thus leakable and thus used against you (by corporations or foreign security agencies) The problem is the scale that modern technology allows, and that means we need new understandings on what's possible. But public debate doesn't do that, it's still routed in the "nothing to hide".
- DoneWithAllThat 2y agoAs I’ve gotten older and more moderate in my political leanings I’ve unsurprisingly revisited some of my earlier absolute positions (usually but not always very liberal) in light of real world considerations. Encryption and communications privacy is a position I’ve actually gotten more “extreme” on. No, I don’t think the government should get to see anyone’s communication if they don’t want it to. Yes, I know that will allow criminals of the worst kinds to communicate secretly. I’m okay with that. The alternatives are all worse.
- Zak 2y agoThe thing I think a lot of people don't want to acknowledge is that unlike so many issues with grey areas and middle ground, this one is binary: either criminals can have secure communication, or nobody can. I don't want a world in which nobody can have secure communications, so I must accept that criminals will have it, and police will have to work a little harder to catch them. It gets worse though. More sophisticated criminals will find ways to do it even if it's illegal, so a law mandating backdoors will hurt the general population and stupid criminals, but not the smart, dangerous ones.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- globular-toast 2y agoWhat a horrible headline. The Guardian's headline reads "UK Home Office loses attempt to keep legal battle with Apple secret".
- isleyaardvark 2y agoThe Guardian has had the most consistent "no bullshit" headlines of any news org nowadays.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 2y agoText-only: https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1CsokD https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1CsokD NB. It wasn't Apple who moved to block the secrecy of the hearing. Apple seems content to let UK Apple computer owners mistakenly believe they can trust the company's promises of "privacy". Meanwhile the company was participating in secret hearings with the government concerning computer owners' data. "The ADP service is opt-in, meaning people have to sign up to get the protection it provides." Defaults matter. They are intentional. They are chosen by so-called "tech" companies like Apple that interlope as alleged "necessary" intermediaries: "Send us your data and we will store it in our data centres." Apple's default is "no end-to-end encryption". ADP off. The judgment referenced in the submission is only the "public" one, a summary. Apple will not publish the "private" one. The data at issue is not Apple's. But the data owners are absent from these hearings. Their only knowledge of how the "data custodian" Apple advocates, negotiates and capitulates on their behalf comes from vague publicity and the custodian itself.
- amiga386 2y ago> Apple seems content to let UK Apple computer owners mistakenly believe they can trust the company's promises of "privacy" Not as far as I see. To me, Apple have been very clear that their "normal" protection can be accessed by governments, and they have withdrawn ADP completely from the UK (users not already using it: now. users still using it: at some time in future) - to let its UK customers know they have no expectation of privacy from their government. Apple can't stop the government demanding the removal of user privacy. But it can, and did, let all its users know this is happening. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cgj54eq4vejo https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cgj54eq4vejo > Data with standard encryption is accessible by Apple and shareable with law enforcement, if they have a warrant. > In a statement Apple said it was "gravely disappointed" that the security feature would no longer be available to British customers. "As we have said many times before, we have never built a backdoor or master key to any of our products, and we never will," it continued. > Existing users' access will be disabled at a later date.