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Apple presses a London tribunal to say whether the UK's backdoor order exists
At the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, Apple and two campaign groups argued that Britain's refusal to confirm the notice blocks public discussion of a demand that already cost UK users the Advanced Data Protection switch.
The Product Desk · Product desk
What happened
- Apple challenged the UK government's continued refusal to confirm or deny that it has issued a new Technical Capability Notice, at a hearing before the Investigatory Powers Tribunal in London.
- The hearing dealt only with the secrecy around the order, not with whether the government is legally entitled to demand access to Apple's encrypted user data.
- Ben Jaffey, for Privacy International and Liberty, argued the secrecy was pointless because US politicians and officials had already referred to the original notice publicly and unnamed UK sources had confirmed it to the press.
- Britain dropped the demand for American users' data after White House pressure, then issued a fresh notice covering Apple users in the UK.
- In April 2025, judges rejected the government's attempt to keep even the basic details of Apple's legal challenge secret, ruling that disclosing the case's existence would not harm national security.
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Why it matters
- decision Anyone who wrote an end-to-end encryption promise into a UK security policy or a data processing agreement has to decide what that clause is worth when the supplier is legally barred from reporting that the promise changed.
- exposure Apple absorbs the customer-facing cost of the demand: it withdrew a security feature in one country and could not name who asked, so UK users read the withdrawal as Apple's own product decision.
- precedent The tribunal is ruling on whether the government can stay silent in this case, so the next company handed a notice starts from the same position unless the reasoning is applied more widely.
A UK user who opens iCloud settings looking for Advanced Data Protection does not find the switch. Apple stopped offering ADP to new users in the UK instead of complying with the order The Washington Post reported early last year, a demand for access to all iCloud content uploaded by users anywhere in the world [8][10].
ADP is the setting that makes iCloud Backup and several further categories of iCloud data end-to-end encrypted [11]. A UK organisation that put "end-to-end encrypted backup" in a policy document saw that property change through a toggle that was no longer there.
Apple could not explain the removal. The British government neither confirms nor denies individual orders of this kind, and the companies that receive them are restricted from disclosing that they got one [9]. A transparency page cannot list a notice its publisher is forbidden to mention. What reaches the customer is a product change with no stated cause.
Ben Jaffey, the lawyer for Privacy International and Liberty, said the government's position had "become farcical" [4]. "The horse has long bolted," he said, meaning it was already public knowledge [5]. Both he and Apple's lawyer said the neither-confirm-nor-deny policy was an affront to open justice and prevented meaningful public discussion of the issue [7]. The tribunal will now decide whether the government can keep relying on that policy in this case [15].
Apple's current case is its second, brought after the worldwide order was replaced by one aimed at British users [14]. Reuters reports that a full hearing on Apple's challenge to that underlying notice is unlikely before next year [16]. Count from the first public report, early last year, to the earliest date the demand itself gets argued, and new UK users will have gone at least two years without the ADP option [17].
There is a test here that does not wait for the ruling. Take each encryption guarantee in a supplier's documentation and write down what you would observe, from a test account in the country you care about, if it stopped holding. Sometimes the answer is concrete: a setting that is absent in one market, a feature that ships everywhere else. Sometimes there is nothing to observe at all, and those are the guarantees held purely on the vendor's word. Check the first kind on a schedule. For the second, ask the vendor what it is permitted to tell you and when, and keep the answer with the contract.
What to watch
- The tribunal's ruling on whether neither confirm nor deny can stand in Apple's case.
- Whether Apple restores the Advanced Data Protection option for UK users, and what it says about why.
- Whether the UK-only notice draws the same White House pressure that removed American users from the original demand.