Hoo, boy. Western governments will talk our fuckin’ ear off about the dangers posed to our privacy and personal digital security by Chinese tech firms, to the point that TikTok is perpetually in the U.S. government’s crosshairs and drone-maker DJI is living on borrowed time.
But when it comes to their own intrusions into our privacy, they clam up. And so here we go again, as the British government has demanded Apple give it access to everybody’s encrypted iCloud data worldwide, ostensibly so that in the event of an investigation, it could snatch the data it wanted from a suspect’s iCloud account.
It’s the first time a government had the misshapen balls to do that.
all across the world
The UK Home Office made the demand under the Investigatory Powers Act (IPA), a lever the Home Office pulls when it wants to compel a firm to turn over data to law enforcement.
Governments demand access to their citizens’ data or data that resides on servers located in their own countries all the time. Demanding access to users worldwide is a bold move, even when governments worldwide are looking to Nineteen Eighty-Four as a playbook for the future of the internet.
Your iCloud data isn’t encrypted by default. Since 2022, you’ve been able to turn on Advanced Data Protection to encrypt it, so that should it fall into the wrong hands, it’s… well, not impossible, but very, very hard for all but the most expert hackers in the world to crack open.
Not even Apple can see it. Surveillance agencies and law enforcement don’t like that. Apple has a track record of stymieing law enforcement’s demands for data and back doors into iPhones. And then again. Like they’d been doing for some time.
It may be that Apple just removes encryption from its iCloud offering on the British market. “Apple has previously said it would pull encryption services like (Advanced Data Protection) from the UK market rather than comply with such government demands – telling Parliament it would “never build a back door” in its products,” reported the BBC.
Apple, it’s your move next. It hasn’t said anything publicly yet, but it’ll have to crack that silence soon. If there’s any member of the Big Tech roundtable that would put up at least some of a fight, it would be Apple.
But look to the guest seated to their right, and then to the guest seated at their left, and you’ll see that that’s a very, very, very low bar.
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