UK officials will no longer compel Apple to create backdoor access to its users’ data, according to US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. She wrote on X that she, President Trump and Vice President Vance worked closely with their “partners in the UK” over the past months. “As a result,” she continued, “the UK has agreed to drop its mandate for Apple to provide a ‘back door’ that would have enabled access to the protected encrypted data of American citizens and encroached on our civil liberties.”
As The New York Times notes, the UK government issued the secret order earlier this year after amending the Investigatory Powers Act of 2016. The law gives the UK government the right to compel companies to turn over data to law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Reports about the mandate started to come out in February, however, and Apple pretty much confirmed it when it disabled iCloud’s Advanced Data Protection feature in the UK. ADP gives users the power to to add optional end-to-end encryption to a variety of iCloud data, which means the information can’t be accessed by authorities unless they have the user’s device in their hands. “As we have said many times before, we have never built a backdoor or master key to any of our products or services and we never will,” Apple said at the time.
A bipartisan group of US lawmakers asked Gabbard to take measures to prevent what they called “a foreign cyberattack waged through political means” after the information about the mandate went public. Meanwhile, Apple filed a complained with the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), which “investigates complaints about the alleged conduct of public bodies in relation to members of the public,” to get the order reversed. The company has yet to issue an official statement about the reversal of the UK mandate.
