> The UK government's demand came through a "technical capability notice" under the Investigatory Powers Act (IPA), requiring Apple to create a backdoor that would allow British security officials to access encrypted user data globally. The order would have compromised Apple's Advanced Data Protection feature, which provides end-to-end encryption for iCloud data including Photos, Notes, Messages backups, and device backups.

One scenario would be somebody in an airport and security officials are searching your device under the Counter Terrorism Act (where you don't even have the right to legal advice, or the right to remain silent). You maybe a British person, but you could also be a foreign person moving through the airport. There's no time limit on when you may be searched, so all people who ever travelled through British territory could be searched by officials.

Let that sink in for a moment. We're talking about the largest back door I've ever heard of.

What concerns me more is that Apple is the only company audibly making a stand. I have an Android device beside me that regularly asks me to back my device up to the cloud (and make it difficult to opt out), you think Google didn't already sign up to this? You think Microsoft didn't?

Then think for a moment that most 2FA directly goes via a large tech company or to your mobile. We're just outright handing over the keys to all of our accounts. Your accounts have never been less protected. The battle is being lost for privacy and security.

My understanding is that Android's Google Drive backup has had an E2E encryption option for many years (they blogged about it at https://security.googleblog.com/2018/10/google-and-android-h...), and that the key is only stored locally in the Titan Security Module.

If they are complying with the IPA, wouldn't that mean that they must build a mechanism into Android to exfiltrate the key? And wouldn't this breach be discoverable by security research, which tends to be much simpler on Android than it is on iOS?

If that were true, then their claims to support E2E encrypted backups are simply false, and they would have been subject to warrants to unlock backups, just like Apple had been until they implemented their "Advanced Data Protection" in 2022.

Wouldn't there have been be some evidence of that in the past 7 years, either through security research, or through convictions that hinged on information that was gotten from a supposedly E2E-protected backup?

1. encrypt data with special key 2. encrypt special key with users key, and 3. encrypt special key with government key

Anyone with the special key can read the data.the user key or the government key can be used to get special key.

This two step process can be done for good or bad purposes. A user can have their key on their device, and a second backup key could be in a usb stick locked in a safe, so if you loose your phone you can get your data back using the second key.

With the present state of politics—lack of both government and corporate ethics, deception, availability of much fake news, etc.—there's no guarantee that you could be certain of the accuracy of any information about this no matter what its source or apparent authenticity.

I'd thus suggest it'd be foolhardy to assume that total privacy is assured on any of these services.

BTW, I don't have need of these E2E services and don't use them, nor would I ever use them intentionally to send encrypted information. That said, occasionally, I'll send a PDF or such to say a relative containing some personal info and to minimize it being skimmed off by all-and-sundry—data brokers, etc. I'll encrypt it, but I always do so on the assumption that government can read it (that's if it's bothered to do so).

Only fools ought to think otherwise. Clearly, those in the know who actually require unbreakable encryption use other systems that are able to be better audited. If I were ever in their position, then I'd still be suspicious and only out of sheer necessity/desperation would I send an absolute minimum of information.

Given the carefully crafted way companies describe their encryption services, it seems more likely than not they have master keys of some sort.

In any case like this, the only thing you could truly trust would be the source code and even then you’d have to be on the lookout for backdoors, which would definitely be beyond my own capability to spot.

In other words, the best bet is to probably only use open source solutions that have been audited and have a good track record, wherever available. Not that there are that many options when it comes to mobile OSes, although at least there are some for file storage and encryption.

We have seen this many times throughout history, where people like academics, researchers, teachers, people of particular faith, etc are targeted and each of them has some sort of “evidence” produced as to some sort of crime they have committed either in the present or past to justify their arrest.

The group who needs it today may be small, but having it on and secure by default for all is a far better protection than any justification that the current need is small.

Not only have you misquoted me, but also you've attempted to distort what I actually said by changing its inference.

Since you are sending the data to google, isn't google an intended recipient? Google has to comply with a variety of laws, and it is likely that they are doing the best they can under the legal constraints. The law just doesn't allow systems like this.

they also employ things like exempt cases. for example, Whatsapp advertise E2E... but connect for the first time with a business account to see all the caveats that in plain text just means "meta will sign your messages from this point on with a dozen keys"

The claim is that Google has implemented a security weakness and lied about it in claims to customers and investors.

Show me another company that did this, was exposed, and was not sued.

They have lawyers aplenty, governments would file amicus briefs "explaining" E2EE and so on. Worse case they'll settle for a pittance.

I guess for consumer use all that stuff is hidden in the T&C legalese which is unreadable for normal people. I know the EU was trying to enforce that there must be a TL;DR in normal language but I haven't seen much effect of that yet.

No, it does not. It means that only endpoints - not intermediaries - handle plaintext. It says nothing about who those endpoints are or who the software is working for.

Key escrow and E2EE are fully compatible.

Unless you’re fine with the escrow agent and anybody they’re willing to share the keys with being a member of your group chat, in which case my original point still stands.

> is indistinguishable

Technically correct (with respect to the escrow agent specifically) but rather misleading. With E2EE intermediary nodes serving or routing a request do not have access to it. This protects you against compromise of those systems. That's the point of E2EE - only authorized endpoints have access.

The entire point of key escrow is that the escrow agent is authorized. So, yes, the escrow agent has access to your stuff. That doesn't somehow make it "not E2EE". The point of E2EE is that you don't have to trust the infra. You do of course have to trust anyone who has the keys, which includes any escrow agents.

If we used the definition "only your intended recipients can access the plaintext" ... well let's be clear here, an escrow agent is very much an "intended recipient", so there's no issue.

But lets extrapolate that definition. That would make E2EE a property of the session rather than the implementation. For example if my device is compromised and my (E2EE) chat history leaks suddenly that history would no longer be considered E2EE ... even though the software and protocol haven't changed. It's utterly nonsensical.

So what would be the name for a mechanism where escrow is deliberately not a part of the design and nobody aside from the sender and recipient can access the plaintext data, no 3rd parties whatsoever, as long as those two participants aren’t compromised.

I’m not disagreeing with you but I’ve heard people talk about E2EE while actually thinking it’s more like the above. There is probably a term for truly private communication but I’m sleepy and it eludes me.

However I don't think that's so much a technical mechanism as it is a statement of preference or understanding about who you intend to have access to something.

To that end, you'll need to define "intended recipient" pretty carefully. After all, your intended recipient could take a screenshot and share it. Or there could be someone in a group chat who isn't participating and you forgot was there. Etc.

> There is probably a term for truly private communication

I'd argue that E2EE is "truly private" between the intended recipients, and that understanding who exactly those are is entirely the responsibility of the user.

Of course I recognize that we're talking past each other at that point. Your concern seems to be users not realizing an escrow agent is present. To the extent they might have been deceived about the implementation I'd point out that "snuck in an escrow agent" is just the tip of the security iceberg. They could also have been deceived about the implementation itself. And even if they weren't deceived initially, a binary or web app could be intentionally updated with a malicious version. Does it count as "truly private" if you didn't compile it yourself?

All of these are good points, thanks for taking the time to respond! I think that to a certain degree this means that, for the average layperson and someone with more skills and knowledge, there are still a bunch of challenges and attack vectors to contend with.

It probably involves more of something in the category of OpenPGP (or just Signal, I guess) where you yourselves are in control of the keys, and less of counting on various web apps to do right by the users. That said, E2EE with escrow is still helpful against certain risks and is a net positive, even if I've seen a lot of that misunderstanding about what it actually does.

Anything that you can either audit or compile yourself is generally a good bet. You might add Matrix, XMPP with OMEMO, Briar, and Cwtch to your list.

Proprietary stuff isn't an entirely bad deal though. If you assume they aren't blatantly fraudulent then presumably your data is better protected than it would have been without even an attempt at E2EE.

Same for key escrow schemes. Even if the agent was literally the NSA you'd still most likely be better off than the much more vulnerable alternative. The fewer entities with access and the more deliberate that access is the better.

The biggest problem remaining to me is that you don't chat alone. You're always chatting with one or more people. Right now there's no way of knowing how they handle their backups and thus the complete history of your chats with them.

It's the same thing as trying to avoid big tech reading your emails by setting up your own mailserver. Technically you can do it but in practice it's pointless because 95% of your emails go to users of Microsoft or Google anyway these days.

Presumably there are a finite number of escrow agents who are known to you. Worrying that they will pass your messages along to others is the same as worrying that the people you're chatting with do the same. It's always on you to assess the trustworthiness of the other parties; key escrow is no exception to that.

To be clear I'm not a fan of large scale key escrow schemes and am not going to willingly use one outside of a corporate setting. But lets have accurate use of terminology while discussing these things.

Surely a company with auditing requirements running their own key escrow would still be considered E2EE? If not E2EE then what would you suppose to call that and where would you draw the line?

This makes absolutely _no sense_. If I do not trust my end user to not propagate the message I send them, then I will not send them that message. There is no need for a third party here to make that mistake. It _is_ that black and white. Adding another end user is compromising your promise on the secure communication you established. There is no workaround to that.

I can imagine a likely objection. "But I'm forced to use this particular agent by [ tech company | employer | government ]!" I don't see how that's any different from needing to communicate with a particular person. If I need to communicate with someone and I don't trust them not to share things then I will (must!) compose my correspondence accordingly.

If the government is forcing this on you, well, what is the alternative? Is point to point encryption somehow better in that scenario? Either way they're getting copies of everything you write assuming that the service you're using abides by the law. With key escrow that snooping is more explicit and there are fewer unknowns for the end user.

The point is that the dictionary definition of E2EE really doesn't matter. Being pedantic about it doesn't help. The only thing that matters is that the vendor describes what they call E2EE.

"a special key" afaik is where instead of using 2 large primes for a public key, it uses 1 large prime and the other is a factor of 2 biggish primes, where 1 of the biggish is known, knowing one of the factors lets you factor any public key with a not insignificant but still more compute than most people have access to.

UK has also invested in some serious compute that would appear dedicated to exactly this task.

basically if you dont have full control over the key generation mechansim and enc/dec mechansim it is relatively trivial for states to backdoor anything they want.

Systems that incorporate a method to allow unlocking using multiple keys don't usually advertise the fact that this is happening. People may even be legally obligated to not tell you.

“End-to-end encryption (E2EE) is a method of implementing a secure communication system where only communicating users can participate. No one else, including the system provider, telecom providers, Internet providers or malicious actors, can access the cryptographic keys needed to read or send messages.”

So if you send another set of keys to someone else, it’s obviously not E2E.

This is not enforceable and promises that are not enforceable are usually seen by BigCos of today as optional. My 2c.

> It is possible to set up end to end encryption where two different keys unlock your data. Your key, and a government key. I assume google does this.

Which by definition is wrong (unless the government is a party in the communication you want to E2E-Encrypt).

For example, asking for 10 gallons of soda at a restaurant advertising unlimited refills will not fly, even though virtually everyone will agree on the definition of the term "unlimited". My 2c.

E2E encryption is not vulnerable to MITM. E2E encryption is vulnerable only to how many keys there are and who has access to them.

What if google told you they also have a key? Does that change the above answer to the question?

There are no practical end-user protections against this vector.

PS: I strongly suspect that at least a few public package distribution services are run by security agencies to enable this kind of attack. They can distribute clean packages 99.999% of the time, except for a handful of targeted servers in countries being spied upon. A good example is Chocolatey, which popped up out of nowhere, had no visible source of funding, no mention of their ownership structure anywhere, and was incorporated along with hundreds of other companies in a small building in the middle of nowhere. It just screams of being a CIA front, but obviously that's hard to prove.

Chocolatey assuredly did not "pop up out of nowhere" - it was a labour of love from Rob Reynolds to make Windows even barely usable. It likely existed for years before you ever heard of it.

> had no visible source of funding

Rob was employed by Puppet Labs to develop it until he started the commercial entity which now backs it.

> a small building in the middle of nowhere.

As I recall, Rob lives in Topeka, Kansas. It follows that his business would be incorporated there, no?

Sure, now, they have staff photos and the actual names of people on their about page, but just a few years ago it was almost completely devoid of information: https://web.archive.org/web/20190906125729/https://chocolate...

Look at it from the perspective of a paranoid sysadmin half way around the world raising a quizzical eyebrow when random Reddit posts mention how convenient it is, but it's distributing binaries to servers with absolutely no obvious links back to any organisations, people, or even a legitimate looking business building.

Even if you somehow manage to ensure 100% consistency with other users for updates you manually “pull” from the vendor, the vendor could simply have your device automatically reach out and update itself with a stealth update.

Or everyone can get the same exact binary, but it has a hash code check on it that activates the evil bits only on your device.

Etc…

> or through convictions

If they wanted to use this evidence for a normal criminal case, they would just do parallel construction.

I wouldn't count on it. The main way we'd know about it would be a whistleblower at Google, and whistleblowers are extremely rare. Evidence and court records that might expose a secret backdoor or that the government was getting data from Google that was supposed to be private could easily be kept hidden from the public by sealing it all away for "national security reasons" or by obscuring it though parallel construction.

It'd be a huge mistake to look at the instances where somebody did come forward and spill a secret and assume that it means secrets aren't possible to keep or that there are no secrets being kept right now. It's may not be easy to keep a secret, but governments and corporations are extremely well practiced and have many documented successes.

Anyway, there have been hundreds, perhaps thousands of whistleblowers in the past and the examples you picked I think are representative of the upper bound, rather than the lower bound of the secret keeping capacity of organizations.

But it's not clear that funding for early research into data warehousing (back when a terabyte was a lot of data) has anything to do with whether or not Google uses end-to-end encryption? Lots of research got funded through the Department of Defense.

Without having relevant evidence, this is just "let's assume X is true, therefore X is true."

[1] https://papers.rgrossman.com/proc-047.htm

How much good does an encrypted device backup do when harvesting user data and storing it on your servers (to make ad sales more profitable) is your entire business model?

It's possible to decrypt this network traffic and see if the key is sent. It may be obfuscated though.

But still Apple operates in China and Google does not. This is weird to me. Google left China when the government wanted all keys to the citizens data. Apple is making a stand when it's visible and does not threaten their business too much.

Apple is not really in the business of protecting your data, they are just good at marketing and keeping their image.

Google left China after China started hacking into Google's servers.

> In January, Google said it would no longer cooperate with government censors after hackers based in China stole some of the company’s source code and even broke into the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights advocates.

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/23/technology/23google.html

They were working to reenter the China market on China's terms many years later, when Google employees leaked the effort to the press. Google eventually backed down.

Apple pulling ADP from UK users is similar - the UK has passed an ill-considered law that Apple doesn't think it can win a court case over, so they're complying in a way that minimally effects the security of people outside the UK. If, as someone outside the UK, I travel to the UK with ADP turned on, my understanding is it won't disable itself.

Would you have been more satisfied if Apple just pulled out of the UK entirely? Bricked every iPhone ever purchased there? Google doesn't seem to have made any stand for security ever - them pulling out of China feels more to do with it meaning they wouldn't have had access to Chinese users' data, which is what they really want.

The request/law would be rolled back in minutes in that case. They wouldn't dare though. (wouldn't even have to be bricking - just disable services like icloud)

I cannot see Apple completely shutting down in the UK, firing thousands of staff, selling off any property, and cancelling leases, just for a week long bargaining chip.

They adapt to the local rules of each region, much like they’re doing here in the UK.

It's not operated by an Apple subsidiary. It's operated by a government owned company. I'm not aware of any local laws that require this particular arrangement.

With Google, their services are way broader. Operating a hunk of their search business with a third party Chinese firm just isn’t viable for their services, which are way more complex.

I want to backup my data with a managed service.

I do NOT want these to be the same company.

The government, with anti trust laws, could easily force this issue. On the other hand, they really love how few places they have to go with FISA warrants to just take anyones data. This is the long tail of the American security state. So it's really ironic that China takes most of the blame.

Perhaps china has greater leverage over apple in this case...

China had been an important area of growth for many companies during the 2010s. Apple bent over backwards to cater to that market. It was discussed in every financial release, and they obviously made tons of concessions for iCloud.

The UK just comparatively isn't that much revenue, and not worth the fallout.

and it is the same with european car companies (like volkswagon). Look at where they are now.

I don't believe for a second, that china will not oust apple the moment there's a good reason to.

Apples revenue from china has been super dependent on new iPhone looking different, and has been steadily declining or flat for years, except for a few quarters when Huawei was sanctioned.

Chinese money was absolutely the forbidden temptress that continues to screw businesses. Luxury goods, cars, electronics, etc were all banking on china’s economic rise to grow their revenue, and post covid recovery saw all that money stay domestic.

China won’t oust Apple because twisting Tim Cook’s arm is way more useful. Same with Tesla and any other company that makes a big bet there. But they absolutely won’t be giving American companies an equal chance at success.

Apple is deeply embedded in China (manufacturing) and benefits from a decent (but shrinking) userbase in the country. China isn't asking for the keys to all iphone user data, just data stored in China.

But is that backup encrypted? If it's not, all they need is to access your data.

This is about having access to backups that are theoretically encrypted with a key Apple doesn't have?

> We're talking about the largest back door I've ever heard of.

Doesn't the US have access to all the data of non US citizens whose data is stored in the US without any oversight?

Totally agree. Having this discussion so US centred just makes us miss the forest for the trees. Apart from data owned by US citizens, my impression is that data stored in the US is fair game for three letter agencies, and I really doubt most companies would spend more than five minutes agreeing with law enforcement if asked for full access to their database on non-US nationals.

Also, remember that WhatsApp is the go-to app for communication in most of the world outside the US. And although it's end-to-end encrypted, it's always nudging you to back up your data to Google or Apple storage. I can't think of a better target for US intelligence to get a glimpse of conversations about their targets in real time, without needing to hack each individual phone. If WhatsApp were a Chinese app, this conversation about E2E and backup restrictions would have happened a long time ago. It's the same on how TikTok algorithm suddenly had a strong influence on steering public opinion and instead of fixing the game we banned the player.

Realistically we are talking about FISA here, so in theory if the FBI gets a FISA court order to gather "All of the Apple account data" for a non-us person, Apple would either hand over the encrypted data OR just omit that....

Based on the stance Apple is taking here, its reasonable to assume they would do the same in the US (disable the feature if USG asked for a backdoor or attempted to compel them to decrypt)

I think it's more likely that Apple would challenge it in US courts and prevail. Certainly a legal battle worth waging, unlike in the UK.

It's good that Apple refused them, but I wouldn't count that as evidence that the data is secure from the US government.

Apple's legal argument that the government's demand that they insert a backdoor into iOS was tantamount to compelled speech (in violation of the first amendment) was going over a little too well in court.

The Feds will often find an excuse to drop cases that would set a precedent they want to avoid.

I don't think messages should ever leave the device, if you want to migrate to a different device this could be covered by that user flow directly. Maybe you want to sync media like photos or videos shared on a group chat and I'm fine with that compromise but I see more risks than benefits on backing up messages on the cloud, no matter if it's encrypted or not.

Know your threat model and what actions your trying to defend against.

Typical humans need trusted vendors that put in actual effort to make themselves blind to your personal data.

Here a country that has no ties with most of apple's customers is just butting in and claiming access to all of them.

So what's next. Are we also giving access to everyone's data to Russia? Iran?

If the US is willing to build an entire data center in Outback Australia to allow warrantless access to US citizen data, why wouldn’t they be forcing WhatsApp backups to be unlockable?

So not hugely secure for most people if they use 4-6 decimal digits, but possible to make secure if you set a longer passphrase.

I don't know what Google's going to do about this UK business.

edit: Ah it looks like they have a Titan HSM involved as well. Have to take Google's word for it, but an HSM would let you do rate limits and lockouts. If that's in place, it seems all right to me.

It's not just Google saying it. Google Cloud encryption is independently verified

Er, no...? I'm not sure where you get that idea. Access requires a warrant, and companies are not compelled to build systems which enable them to decrypt all data covered by the warrant.

See, for example, the Las Vegas shooter case, where Apple refused to create an iOS build that would bypass iCloud security.

> See, for example, the Las Vegas shooter case

I am not in Las Vegas or anywhere else in the US. So as far as i know all the data about me that is stored in the US is easily accessible without a warrant unless it's encrypted with a key that's not available with the storage.

> companies are not compelled to build systems which enable them to decrypt all data covered by the warrant

Again, not what I was talking about.

I'm merely pointing out that your data is not necessarily encrypted, and that the "rest of the world" was already unprotected vs at least one state. The UK joining in would just add another.

> Google Maps is changing the way it handles your location data. Instead of backing up your data to the cloud, Google will soon store it locally on your device.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/6/5/24172204/google-maps-delet...

You can't be forced to hand over data on your servers that you don't have access to, warrant or no.

The UK wants to make this workaround illegal on an international basis.

But you can be forced to record and store that data even if you don't want to.

Compare Apple Maps and Google Maps.

Google initially hoovered up all your location data and kept it forever. They learned from Waze that one use case for location data was keeping your map data updated.

Apple figured out how to accomplish the goal of keeping map data updated without storing private user data that could be subject to a subpoena.

> “We specifically don’t collect data, even from point A to point B,” notes Cue. “We collect data — when we do it — in an anonymous fashion, in subsections of the whole, so we couldn’t even say that there is a person that went from point A to point B.

The segments that he is referring to are sliced out of any given person’s navigation session. Neither the beginning or the end of any trip is ever transmitted to Apple. Rotating identifiers, not personal information, are assigned to any data sent to Apple... Apple is working very hard here to not know anything about its users.

https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/29/apple-is-rebuilding-maps-f...

One more reason to prefer offline maps for those who value privacy.

Apple and Google are based in the US so are bound by the CLOUD Act to provide any and all data they have upon request, no matter where in the world it is being collected or stored.

Google had "created a system where they don't have access to your data on their servers" a couple of years BEFORE Apple. Android 10 introduced it in 2019.

See the story linked above.

They didn't announce that they could no longer access user location data on their servers to respond to geofence warrants until the last quarter of 2024.

Apple does its best not to collect personal data in the first place.

No, law enforcement needs a warrant to legally access any data. This is why Prism was illegal, and why companies like Google are pushing back against overly broad geofence search warrants.

The Dutch cracked and wiretapped it. It has been held not to be intercept evidence per RIPA so capable of being used in evidence.

Most went guilty because they caught red-handed in the most egregious criminality you've seen.

Encro was designed to enable and protect criminal communications. It had no redeeming public value.

Hypothetically, if Apple just provide a back door to the data they have on US Senators for instance, then providing that information may be considered treason by the US.

That's a totally made up example, and I have no idea, but it seems like it's possibly an issue.

Which is all about the issues around data sovereignty I suppose!

Well, it's defined, or bounded above, in the constitution. It's not exactly a high bar:

> Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.

So, if you happened to know Nicolas Maduro, thought he was looking stressed, and bought him some food, that would qualify as treason. There's no requirement that you act against the interests of the United States. The constitution will stop you from being prosecuted for treason for sleeping with Melania Trump. It won't stop you from being prosecuted for treason for completely spurious reasons.

But I'm sure local laws conflict heavily between countries yes. I'm often wondering how multinationals manage to navigate this maze. This is why we have such a big legal department I guess :) And the company I work for is a pretty honest one, I've never seen any skullduggery going on with eg privacy or media manipulation. In fact employees are urged to report such things and I have to do a course on responsible behaviour yearly. Probably a result of being purely B2B. But anyway I digress, just wanted to say that getting away with stuff does not seem to be the reason for us having a big legal dept.

But just look at the laws of e.g. the EU and Iran. Pretty diametrically opposed on many topics. There's no way to satisfy them both.

I think what helps to make this happen is that most countries don't try to push their laws outside of their jurisdiction. Which the UK is trying to do here.

A lot is posted about LEO's lying in the US, this seems worse.

Meta also said they would make a stand if a similar request comes for WhatsApp. I'm not going to hold my breath though.

Think about it for a second: you can re-establish your WA account on a new device using only the SIM card from your old device. SIM cards don't have a storage area for random applications' encryption keys, and even if they did, a SIM card cannot count as "end-to-end" anymore. Same goes for whatever mobile cloud platform those backups might be stored on. And you'd hope Apple or Google aren't happily sending off your cloud decryption keys to any app that wants them. Though maybe they are?

In any case, as soon as you start using WhatsApp on a new device, users in the chats you participate in will receive a message informing them that your encryption keys have changed.

I don't think the e2e icloud backup is problematic under existing legislation / before the TCN. While you can't disclose the key because it lives in the secure enclave, you can disclose the information that is requested because you can log into your apple account and retrieve it. IANAL, but I believe this to be sufficient (and refusing would mean jail).

The Investigatory Powers Act allows for technical capability notices, and the TCN in this case says (as far as we know) "allow us a method to be able to get the contents of any iCloud backup that is protected by E2EE for any user worldwide". This means that there is no need to ask the target to disclose information and if implemented as asked, also means that any user worldwide could be a target of the order, even if they'd never been to the UK.

Relevant info:

- https://wiki.openrightsgroup.org/wiki/Regulation_of_Investig...

For the latter, there are a lot of cases where jail isn't much a threat (e.g. the person is dead or not in the country).

The jail time for failure to comply with key disclosure is 2 years unless it is national security, then it is 5. But if you're organised crime and facing who knows what for being a snitch it might be better simply to do the time.

I can see why they want it. I just don't understand why the person I'm replying to said the feature (I think) was problematic. Not really a criticism, I'm just struggling to identify the tone and why 'too right' and 'more problematic than they let on'.

And yes, it's still pwnable this way, and happens regularly.

Everything in the cloud is not yours anymore, and you should always treat it like that.

Apples stand is false, they take with one hand and give with the other. There have been many times that Apple have been caught giving user data to governments at their request, lied about it, then later on admitted it once it had leaked from another source.

This whole 'we will never make a backdoor' is a complete whitewash marketing stunt, why do they need to make a backdoor when they are providing any and all metadata to any government on request.

https://www.macrumors.com/2023/12/06/apple-governments-surve...

In other words, Apple complies with legal government orders, as they are required to. The government can compel them with a warrant to hand over data that they have, and can prohibit them from talking about it. That's the whole reason for the push towards end-to-end encryption and for not collecting any data Apple doesn't need to operate the products. This also ties into things like photo landmark identification, where Apple designed it such that they don't get any information about the requests and so they don't have any information that they could be compelled to hand to the government.

https://politicalpulse.net/uk-polls/keir-starmer-approval-ra...

Dropping the functionality for a particular market hardly equals to making a stand. Sure they haven't added a backdoor that would give all user's data access to UK icloud user's data so in the end UK residents didn't win anything.

And who knows if they simply have an agreement with US gov to have a backdoor only available to them and not the other govs.

Sounds a lot like the godawful "assistance and access" laws that were rushed through in Australia a couple of years ago, right down to the name of the secret instrument sent to the entity who gets forced into to building the intercept capability.

Now that Apple has caved once, I expect to see other providers strongarmed in the same way, as well as the same move tried in other countries.

So you can eg. keep a backup on your own (secure) infrastructure. Transfer them when switching devices or even mirror on two different ones*. Extract your own secret enclave contents. Improve confidence they were generated securely. And depending on implementation, perhaps reduce the ease with which Apple might "accidentally" vacuum the keys up as a result of an update / order.

*Not sure how much these two make sense in the iOS ecosystem. I know on the Android side I'd absolutely love to maintain a "hot standby" phone that is an exact duplicate of my daily driver, so if I drop it in the ocean I can be up and running again in a heartbeat with zero friction (without need to restore backups, reliance on nerfed backup API's outside the ones Google uses, having to re-setup 2FA, etc. and without ever touching Google's creepy-feeling cloud).

If your phone company asked you to give them the key to your house, in perpetuity, how would you feel about that? (Particularly if they insisted you sign a 15 page Terms of Use first that disclaims all their liability if anything goes missing).

So the difference between Apple generating the key on device and storing it in the SE and the user generating it and storing it in the SE is that the user can use a known-secure key generation algo. If Apple generates the key you can't be sure it's cryptographically secure and doesn't have a backdoor.

At this point, the people who claim they can’t trust Apple’s key generation should also distrust Intel or AMD or any other vendor’s key generation as well. Might as well generate keys by hand.

If the backdoor is some other method of getting your key off the device then all bets are off.

No, it's much broader than that. The UK is asking for a backdoor to your data and backups in the cloud, not on your device. Why bother with searching physical devices when they can just issue a secret subpoena to any account they want?

It's actually pretty amazing that Apple made ADP possible for the general public. This is the culmination of a major breakthrough in privacy architecture about ten years ago.

Traditionally you had to make a choice between end-to-end encryption and data recoverability. If you went with E2EE, it's only useful if you use a strong password, but if you forget it then Apple can't help you recover your account (no password reset possible). So that was totally unsuitable for precious memories like photos for the average user.

Apple's first attempt to make this feasible was a recovery key that you print out and stuff in a drawer somewhere. But you might lose this. The trusted contact feature is also not totally reliable either, because chances are it's your spouse and they might also lose their device at that same time as you (for example in a house fire).

So while recovery keys and trusted contacts help, the solution that really made the breakthrough for ADP was iCloud Keychain Backup. This thing is low-key so cool and kind of rips up the previous assumptions about E2EE.

iCloud Keychain Backup makes it possible to recover your data with a simple, weak 6 digit passcode that you are virtually guaranteed never to forget, yet you are also protected from brute force attacks on the server. It is specifically designed to work on "adversarial clouds" that are being actively attacked. This is... sort of not supposed to be possible in the traditional thinking. But they added something called hardware security modules to limit the number of guesses an attacker can make before it wipes your key.

And crucially it ensures you don't forget this passcode because it's your device passcode which the OS keeps in sync with the backup key. This is part of the reason your iPhone asks you to enter your passcode now and then even though your biometrics work just fine.

It is a true secret that only you know and can keep in your brain even when your house burns down and nobody (hopefully) can derive from something they can research about you. This didn't really exist for the general populace until smartphones came along. And that ultimately was the breakthrough that allowed for changing the conventional wisdom on E2EE.

iCloud Keychain Backup came out about a decade ago and it has taken this long to gradually test the feasibility of going 100% E2EE without significantly risking customer data loss. The UK is kind of panicking but when people see how well ADP protects their most personal data from breaches, I think they will demand it. It just wasn't practical before.

My point was that there was already a clear chain in place that would give them access to the data of foreign nationals. It's not just a "UK problem", but actually the ramifications are further reaching.

Another thing to consider is that these cookie alerts on sites were for EU countries only, but ended up everywhere. If Apple were to comply, this cloud backdoor could end up in other countries too, with the keys sitting there ready for collection.

To make things more complex still, they would need to support dual/multi nationality. It probably ends up looking like a dual key E2E system where there is a unique key for the end-user and then a third party. Key revocation would likely be difficult, so it would likely be the cloud provided decrypting and re-encrypting the files per request, throwing E2E out the window entirely.

1) tech monopoly strong enough to stand up to G7 nation state demands

2) tech monopoly strong enough to remove itself from G7 nation state jurisdiction?

edit: s/monopoly/empire, apologies

Tech giants typically devolve local operations to small companies to avoid liability - think petroleum suppliers not owning gas stations (because those typically end up as superfund sites). Not sure if this analogy this works for Google Android and all the manufacturers that deploy it for their smartphones too.

So corporations have been doing this forever, trying to find legal loopholes where they can have their cake and eat it too.

> Let that sink in for a moment. We're talking about the largest back door I've ever heard of.

Codename 'Krasnov' is the largest backdoor I have ever heard of. And, we only need to look at his behavior.

These E2EE from USA can be tainted in so many ways, and FAMAG sits on so much data, that codename 'Krasnov' can abuse such to target whoever he wants in West. Because everyone you know is or has been in ecosystem of Apple, Google, or Microsoft.

Whataboutism! Fair. From my PoV, as European, the UK government is (still) one of the good guys who will protect Europe from adversaries such as those who pwn codename 'Krasnov'. Such protection may come with a huge price.

Meh, I don't know. I can still decide to not go the UK and be fine. I think the CLOUD Act is much worse because it's independent from where I am.

This got me thinking about MGS2 again and rewatching the colonel's dialogue at the end of the game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKl6WjfDqYA

> Your persona, experiences, triumphs, and defeats are nothing but byproducts. The real objective was ensuring that we could generate and manipulate them.

It's really brilliant to use a video game to deliver the message of the effectiveness of propaganda. 'Game design' as a concept is just about manipulation and hijacking dopamine responses. I don't think another medium can as effectively demonstrate how systems can manipulate people's behavior.

This is almost as bad as building a backdoor. This is leaving your customer in the rain.

Fortunately for Apple, most of them won't even know or realize it.

Dropping the feature that the UK was targeting allows their customers to use all the other ways that Apple does things. Leaving the UK altogether is the nuclear option denying their customers of everything. “Apple should just leave the UK/China” never takes into consideration the millions of customers that bought or might want to buy in the future. Nobody would better off if Apple withdraws from a country.

Yes, it would have been the nuclear option, but this is Apple. Probably most of the most influential people in the UK have an Apple phone. Just saying that you leave would cause an avalanche of influence targeted at this law. Maybe other companies would have joined them.

This, this is just cover dance and I wish they'd pay for this, but they won't and they know it. People locked into the Apple bubble only change if it REALLY hurts. This doesn't hurt the average Apple user, and those who really care moved onto a system they can control themselves.

vs. taking their phone away??? Idk if you're trolling or what but I would be incredibly pissed at Apple if they deprecated my phone over something like this.

But instead. They run away.

Selling this as "making a stand" is ridiculous. Nothing more.

It was the Clinton administration that pushed for the Clipper chip.

Are you talking about a 'day' before that time?

Apple today appear to be on the 'correct side of history', but even then you need to be swing consumer.

They are not making a stand. They roll over without a peep. And this is concerning users' privacy which they say is the core of the company.

Compare it to fighting every government tooth and nail over every single little thing concerning the "we don't know if it's profitable and we don't keep meeting records" AppStore

They didn't say anything loudly, or said it was illegal in the UK.

All they had was a single comment to a single (or perhaps a handful at most) comment to a media outlet that they disabled it.

They didn't even bother with a press release, or notify their users.

It's not even half a stand. It's a rollover

For example if I encrypt a file locally, a zip file containing images, am I not permitted to upload that zip file to a cloud service in the UK?

Even if the UK's demands were "access to encrypted cloud services", does that also mean encrypted files within encrypted storage? It all seems so messy. Anyone who really wants to hide their files, can do so regardless of demands for backdoors.

The question isn't about "anyone who wants". It's about "anyone, regardless of their technical skill"

What are you talking about? This is literally them doing the opposite, and there are multiple other public instances of them making a stand, not to mention in the design of their systems.

Truly curious how you see this that way.

It's not as much "making a stand" as telling a major government that you have substantial seizable assets under their jurisdiction who is a major market you want to be in, that you're not going to do the thing that their laws say you are required to do, but it's hardly simple compliance either, instead of doing what the government wants them to do, they are making sure there is blowback.

Whether to try to fight it in court likely depends on details of case law and the wording of the laws they'd be contesting, I imagine much of the delay in their response to the demand was asking their lawyers how well they think they would fare in court.

On the authoritarianism: these laws are always worded in such a way that they can be applied or targeted vaguely, basically to work around other legislation. They will stop thinking of the children as soon as the law is put into play, and it's hardly likely that pedo rings or rape gangs will be top of the list of priorities.

On the technical literacy: the government has the mistaken belief that their back door will know the difference between the good guys (presumably them) and the bad guys, and the bad guys will be locked out. However, the only real protection is security by obscurity: it's illegal to reveal that this backdoor exists or was even requested. Any bad guy can make a reasonable assumption that a multinational tech company offering cloud services has been compromised, so this just paints another target on their backs.

I've said it before, but I guarantee that the monkey's paw has been infinitely curling with this, and it's a dream come true for any black or grey hat hacker who wants to try and compromise the government through a backdoor like this.

Computer literacy 101: to err is human, to really foul up requires a computer.

They don't understand that by requiring the capability for going after domestic criminals, they've given a huge gift to their international adversaries' intelligence agencies. (And given this is about a computer vulnerability, "international adversaries" includes terrorists, and possibly disgruntled teenagers, not just governments).

If I'd known about the idea of "inferential gap" at the time, my own effort might not have been completely ignored… though probably still wouldn't have changed the end result as I still don't know how to show lawmakers that their model of how computers and software functions has led to a law that exposed them, personally, to hostile actors.

How even do you explain to people with zero computer lessons that adding a new access mechanism increases the attack surface and makes hacking easier?

The politicians seem to see computers as magic boxes, presumably in much the same way and for much the same reason that I see Westminster debates and PMQs as 650 people who never grew out of tipsy university debating society life.

(And regardless of if it is fair for me to see them that way, that makes it hard to find the right combination of words to change their minds).

You literally tell them that. That's it. As prominent tech leaders have been doing. They either choose to believe experts, or disbelieve them. Or they could get a CS major. They chose option #2. They ostensibly disbelieve experts because what they're hearing does not mesh with what they want.

But let's be honest with ourselves; it's not that they disbelieve them, or don't understand. It's that they don't care. You are giving these people way too much of a benefit of the doubt. They have the tools at their disposal to remove any ignorance.

As it's not working, QED not "that's it".

> You are giving these people way too much of a benefit of the doubt.

They're hurting their own interests in the process. If they were just hurting my interests, I'd agree with you. But this stuff increases the risk to themselves, directly. I may have even told them about https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2015-0204 given the timing.

Many politicians are individuals without any talent who desire power and control, politics is the only avenue open to people like that.

> they'll need control later on when they start doing seriously tyrannical things.

You mean like when they start jailing people for social media posts? Or when they are going to ban kitchen knives? Or when they're going to hide a massive gang rape scandal because it makes them look bad? Or when they would convict 900+ people on false charges of fraud because they couldn't admit their computer system was broken? Come on, we all know this is not possible.

I used to think it was illiteracy, but when you hear politicians talk about this you realise more often than not they're not completely naive and can speak to the concerns people have, but fundamentally their calculation here is that privacy doesn't really matter that much and when your argument for not breaking encryption based around the right to privacy you're not going to convince them to care.

You see a similar thing in the UK (and Europe generally) with freedom of speech. Politicians here understand why freedom of speech is important and why people some oppose blasphemy laws, but that doesn't mean you can just burn a bible in the UK without being arrested for a hate crime because fundamentally our politicians (and most people in the UK) believe freedom from offence is more important than freedom of speech.

When values are misaligned (safety > privacy) you can't win arguments by simply appealing to the importance of privacy or freedom of speech. UK values are very authoritarian these days.

I oppose that because end to end encryption is still possible by anyone with something to hide, it is trivial to implement. I think governments should just take the L in the interest of freedom.

Traditional warrants couldn't retroactively capture historical realtime communications because that stuff wasn't traditionally recorded to begin with.

> It isn’t necessarily about mass surveillance and the implementation could prevent mass surveillance but allow warrants.

The implementation that allows this is the one where executing a warrant has a high inherent cost, e.g. because they have to physically plant a bug on the device. If you can tap any device from the server then you can tap every device from the server (and so can anyone who can compromise the server).

Which is why the clients have to be doing the encryption themselves in a documented way that establishes the server can't be doing that.

  governments should just take the L in the interest of freedom

What is a "paternalistic state". I studied Latin so obviously I understand pater == father but what is a father-like state?

What on earth is: "authoritarian support across all parties".

The UK has one Parliament, four Executives (England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales) and a Monarch (he's actually quite a few Monarchs).

Anyway, I do agree with you that destroying routine encryption is a bloody daft idea. It's a bit sad that Apple sold it as an extra add on. It does not cost much to run openssl - its proper open source.

I suppose a paternalistic state functions to satisfy the needs of the people, and to define those needs. The people get what the state says is best for them.

All our main political parties have an authoritarian slant so these policies have rarely received long-lasting opposition. Literally every government in office for the past 30-odd years has presented legislation like this.

By the way, there is no 'England' executive; it's the government of the United Kingdom, which handles all matters not devolved, in England and the rest of the UK.

hopefully the US turning from leader of the free world to Russia's tool will give them the kick they need to realise that just because you trust the government now doesn't mean you trust the next government or the one after it.

However, Google did only start moving to protect location data from subpoenas after people started to worry that location data could be used as a legal weapon against women who went to an abortion clinic, so your larger point stands.

This is exactly like saying that President Trump has nothing to do with the actions of the executive branch agencies today.

when a clown moves into a palace, the clown doesn't become the king - the palace becomes a circus.

President Obama sold himself as a Constitutional scholar who would set right the civil liberties overreach of his predecessor.

You aren't going to convince sane people that his executive branch agencies sought to gut the fourth amendment without his being aware of it, despite months of extensive press coverage.

The demand for encryption just exploded, in a legal gray area (city, state, and federal laws seem to be in conflict here) it's just a question of whether governments allows the supply to follow.

So much humour in one short phrase.

Do you really believe your propaganda or is it just absentmindedly parroting pro permanent war talking points?

It's truly repulsive how imperialistic warmongerers like you pretend you're "the good guys".

I have a feeling the politicians already know partial cybersecurity isn't an option, and don't care. Certainly, the intelligence community advising them absolutely does know. We don't even have to be conspiratorial about it: their jobs are easier in the world where secrets are illegal than in the world where hackers actually get stopped.

In the world of cryptography it's... a bit harder to do something similar. In the best case they can come up with a key escrow system that doesn't suck too much, force you to use it, and hopefully they don't ever get the master keys hacked and stolen or leaked. But they're not asking for key escrow. They're asking for providers to be the escrow agents or whatever worse thing they come up with.

However, nothing prevents keys from being stolen by someone else. In a normal cryptosystem the security of the key is entirely up to you; but in a "law enforcement accessible" system now you have to worry about the feds getting hacked, too. And since the feds will have backdoor keys for many, many users; there is much more interest in stealing those keys.

Physical security has a different set of tradeoffs. Notably, you have to actually be physically present to manipulate and defeat a physical lock, which is what I was alluding to. Even then, it provides an example of how easily a backdoor can be compromised. The Travel Sentry system exists to allow TSA employees to unlock and inspect luggage. There are seven master keys in total; copies of which are spread around thousands of airports with tens to hundreds of TSA employees each. Suffice it to say, the master keys leaked decades ago and you can buy them off Amazon for a few bucks. Any such backdoor key will need similar levels of access to government employees and will likely leak for the same reasons as the TSA keys. Except that the consequence of an encryption backdoor key leaking will be much higher than someone being able to open luggage locks.

Politically, there is also an argument that we should be able to keep secrets from the state. Certainly, there is a reason why we have a 4th Amendment, and it is not because searches and seizures just so happen to be inconvenient.

As for age-of-consent checking, the problem is that existing age verification services would be able to track everyone who accesses an age-verified site. Which, given today's legal climate basically demanding age verification for everything[0], would give the verifier access to your whole browsing history.

Physical age verification is relatively privacy-preserving: I present my ID and that's that. The government that issued that ID does not learn where I presented it, because it's an offline credential. The people I'm doing business with do learn my identity, and they could sell that information, but that's something they didn't need an ID to do (so we should pass a law to prohibit that).

[0] There is also a political argument that the 1st Amendment precludes age verification on social media - aka "don't censor kids"

No, it doesn't. Now criminals just have to get the key. These schemes have been tried many times. They've been discovered by actors that shouldn't have access to them.

Please don't go around advising government leaders and organizations. This is exactly the problem solving capabilities of governmental leaders that security experts are decrying here in this thread.

I honestly though get you're comment was going to go along the lines of perfect physical security can only be perfectly secure from everyone, including the people it shouldn't be. We constantly see the hacking oh physical locations. The big things keeping some orgs from being attacked: redundancy, observability, and ENCRYPTION WITHOUT BACKDOORS!

This is a very good point, and in the recent months we have been witnessing that people in government, or aiming to become the government, are definitely not the good guys. So, even if what they are asking would be limited to just governments (which it wouldn't), they can't claim they are the good guys anymore.

This doesn’t justify his position (it’s stupid) but he doesn’t speak for the current government.

Head of state in the UK is a bit weird compared to countries that abolished or never had a monarchy.

Anyway, back on topic: this is a ridiculous law that is forcing services to erode their security while smart criminals can just use some nice free open-source software somewhere else for E2E communication. And a lot of this is definitely down to lawmakers not understanding technology.

And, to be fair, while I’m generally a small r republican, I’m seeing benefits of having a non politically aligned head of state after J6. While the monarch has limited power, booting out a PM that can’t command the confidence of Parliament is one of them. The question of whether Johnson would accept being dethroned a la Trump was always silly given his consent was never needed.

One of the benefits of a constitutional monarchy is the head of state did not campaign for the position.

It wraps ultimate power up in a contradiction, you have it but you can’t use it. Sure, technically you could but it would be your last act.

Another important aspect, the for and against is currently split between parties, so there’s somewhat of unification factor between parties on that divide as well.

It gets a lot of hate, because it is imperfect, but I don’t think it gets its fair shake. My views more of, if it ain’t broke is it really worth the risk changing it.

I guess the US equivalent is the leader of the house being unable to hold their majority together. In some ways the presidential election feels more democratic if a relative outsider (like Trump was) can win. But a 2 year lead up is crazy.

Obviously pedos on the interwebs are bad, but hey as long as it's just anime they're whacking off to I don't care too much. But the real abuse, that's done by - especially in the UK - rich and famous people like Jimmy Savile. And you're not gonna catch these pedos with banning encryption, that's a fucking smokescreen if I ever saw one, you're gonna catch them with police legwork and by actually teaching young children about their bodies!

In the UK if you're raped by someone famous you'd be an utter idiot to say anything unless you're loaded or have a massive amount of hard evidence. You couldn't have a me to movement in the UK because everyone who came forward would be sued into bankruptcy. This is why so many people knew about Savile but no one said anything.

They have a ceremonial role in confirming them. Like they do with every law that Parliament creates. If they ever actually practically exercised this theoretical power it would be the end of the monarchy.

The Members of Parliament choose the Prime Minister. The role of the monarch in confining them is purely ceremonial.

First, pedos know everybody hates them, so they take measures normal people wouldn't in order to avoid detection, and then backdooring the tech used by everybody else doesn't work against them because they'll use something else. But it does impair the security of normal people.

Second, there aren't actually that many pedos and the easy to catch ones get caught regardless and the hard to catch ones get away with it regardless, which leaves the intersection of "easy enough to catch but wouldn't have been caught without this" as a set plausibly containing zero suspects. Not that they won't use it against the ones who would have been caught anyway and then declare victory, but it's the sort of thing that's pretty useless against the ones it's claimed to exist in order to catch, and therefore not something it can be used effectively in order to do.

Whereas industrial espionage or LOVEINT or draining grandma's retirement account or manipulating ordinary people who don't realize they should be taking countermeasures -- the abuses of the system -- those are the things it's effective at bringing about, because ordinary people don't expect themselves to be targets.

Hmm? Hell has depths. Your yard might be a little too short to measure them? In that case, just think about this: rape is probably most common in prisons, where you will send innocents the moment this dragnet thing glitches.

That's an awfully generous assessment on your part. Kindly explain just what "technical literacy" has to do with the formulation you note. From here it reads like you are misdirecting and clouding the -intent- by the powerful here.

Also does ERIC SCHMIDT an accomplished geek (who is an official member of MIC since (during?) his departure from Sun Microsystems) suffers from "technical literacy" issues:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=983717

Thank you in advance for clarifying your thought process here. Tech illiteracy -> what you got to hide there buddy?

Is this clear?

>> Thank you in advance for clarifying your thought process here.

> The comment's clarity was not questioned.

My password manager vault isn't exactly something to hide in the political sense, but it's definitely something I would fear is exposed to heightened risk of compromise if there were a backdoor, even one for government surveillance purposes. And it's a reasonable concern that I think a lot of people aren't taking seriously enough due, in part, to a lack of technical literacy. Both in terms of not realizing how it materially impacts everyday people regardless of whether they're up to no good, and in terms of not realizing just how juicy a target this would be for agents up to and including state-level adversaries.

As for Eric Schmidt, he's something of a peculiar case. I don't doubt his technical literacy, but the dude is still the head of one of the world's largest surveillance capitalist enterprises, and, as the saying goes, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

> The crimes would be just as criminal had they been done in person at a local bar (or any other physical location).

I agree. Where the US differs is that because of the US's 1st amendment it's _not_ a crime to say those things even in a bar.

Anyway, all of that to say that americans are arrested for posting things on the internet, despite what people claim.

Meanwhile their country has slid into fascism. Sad and tragic.

The number of UK requests has ballooned in recent years: https://www.apple.com/legal/transparency/gb.html#:~:text=77%...

Much of this is likely related to the implementation and automation of the US-UK data access agreement pursuant to the CLOUD Act, which has streamlined this type of request by UK law enforcement and national security agencies.

    >Online privacy expert Caro Robson said she believed it was "unprecedented" for a company "simply to withdraw a product rather than cooperate with a government.

    >"It would be a very, very worrying precedent if other communications operators felt they simply could withdraw products and not be held accountable by governments," she told the BBC.

And they didn't just withdraw a product, they withdraw their entire business.

Not only their sales will reduce, but hey Chinese manufacturing cuts down. By how much? Will it be impactful? I would think so but wonder if it is quantifiable.

They make on average 60,000 ios devices there every hour, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

My numbers are a rough estimate from memory, but they’re not wildly off.

300M or 500M, the point remains: it’s an absolutely staggering scale and cannot be moved elsewhere in any short period of time. Setting up comparable production would take many years, just as it did the first time.

I imagine Apple/Foxconn have already begun this work. The unexpected shutdown or impediment of US/CN trade is a risk that must be accounted for, given the situation with Taiwan.

Anyway, so while I don't think we should condemn people based on such a single quoted sentence... I took a look at her website and the latest video reveals at 00:38 that she worked for the UK crime agency, which does sound like the one of the greatest possible conflicts of interest for someone called upon for privacy matters rather than crime fighting. Watching the rest of that interview, she approaches it fairly objectively but (my interpretation of) her point of view seems to be on the side of "even with this backdoor, a warrant needs issuing every time they use it and so there's adequate safeguards and the UK crime fighters and national security people should just get access to anything they can get a warrant for"

I believe in this however I think we are testing limits of this approach with scenarios like the one with encryption. Ideally privacy needs E2E encryption. But concerns on misuse of such technology that governments raise are also not without merit. I wonder if this tussle between regulators and companies can end in any way in which privacy is not compromised. Mathematically it doesn't seem that there is a way to be safe and private.

When society once again properly separates governmental powers, it will restore balance, and then companies will no longer need to fear "regulators."

In the US, businesses are supposed to be regulated by Congress. That way, if Congress does something foolish, we can vote them out.

But in the last 100 years or so, "administrative law"– that is, binding regulations created by the Executive branch– has become a huge part of law-making [1]. Widespread use of Administrative Law allows Congress to wash its hands of any real decision making.

It isn't supposed to be this way, and I think we will find our way out of it.

Your statement that companies are disadvantaged only rings true because Executive-branch regulators are not held to account. Lower-level staff generally do not rotate from administration to administration, and so they make tons of binding rules without oversight. Fortunately, SCOTUS recently overturned some of this [2].

The fundamental problem is that the separation of powers, which is where America's strength comes from, has been upended. Power has been collected, by parties on all sides, within the Executive branch. It's supposed to be, Congress writes law, Judiciary interprets law, and the Executive enforces law. The Administrative State, however, combines all three powers into one under the Executive. It gives itself executive agencies that can bind citizens, and its own courts (ALJs) to determine their fate. See [1] for a comprehensive review.

[1] https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/I/bo174366...

[2] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/22-451_7m58.pdf

This would actually be a very very very very VERY GOOD precedent if you ask me.

Facebook pulled something similar when Canada passed the Online News Act and instead of extorting facebook to pay the media companies for providing a service to them (completely backasswards way to do things), they just pulled news out of Canada. I despise Meta as a company, but I had to give them credit for not just letting the government shake them down.

Good riddance. Governments need to be reminded from time to time that they are, in fact, not Gods. We can and should, just take our ball and go play in a different park or just go home rather than obey insane unjust laws.

They re-emerged as "security feature" "add vulns to security features to make it an insecurity feature"

But I have a more pertinent question: how can you “pull” E2E encryption without data loss? What happens to those that had this enabled?

Edit:

Part of my concern is that you have to keep in mind Apple's defense against backdooring E2E is the (US) doctrine that work cannot be compelled. Any solution Apple develops that enables "disable E2E for this account" makes it harder for them to claim that implementing that would be compelling work (or speech, if you prefer) if that capability already exists.

Apple could just lock you out of iCloud until you do this.

This will be a "forced rotation", they just need to decide how to communicate to users and work out what happens to those who don't comply. Lockout until key rotation look like an option as someone said.

Thanks for opening the enclave, don't mind if I ship these keys back home.

No notification needed, Apple has root access.

You can’t. The article says if you don’t disable it (which you have to do yourself, they can’t do it for you, because it’s E2E), your iCloud account will be canceled.

I'm actually surprised that they didn't add more direct text in that screen. "We are unable to provide this service... BECAUSE OF YOUR GOVERNMENT 1984 STYLE REQUESTS. Contact your MPs here and here and oh, here's their unlocked icloud data, might want to add some choice pictures to their stash..." would have been a tad more on the nose...

Every product must make money on an ongoing basis, every month. That's why you get constantly spammed to subscribe to things on iOS.

Apple will never drop this anticompetitive practice of favoring their services until they are legally compelled to.

> In 2015 and 2016, Apple Inc. received and objected to or challenged at least 11 orders issued by United States district courts under the All Writs Act of 1789. Most of these seek to compel Apple "to use its existing capabilities to extract data like contacts, photos and calls from locked iPhones running on operating systems iOS 7 and older" in order to assist in criminal investigations and prosecutions. A few requests, however, involve phones with more extensive security protections, which Apple has no current ability to break. These orders would compel Apple to write new software that would let the government bypass these devices' security and unlock the phones.

https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple%E2%80%93FBI_encryption_...

> Conceptually, Advanced Data Protection is simple: All CloudKit Service keys that were generated on device and later uploaded to the available-after-authentication iCloud Hardware Security Modules (HSMs) in Apple data centers are deleted from those HSMs and instead kept entirely within the account’s iCloud Keychain protection domain. They are handled like the existing end-to-end encrypted service keys, which means Apple can no longer read or access these keys.

[0]: https://support.apple.com/guide/security/advanced-data-prote...

This is true for pretty much every “real” hsm on the planet btw. No one is sharing cutting edge enclave details, Apple isn’t unique in this regard.

Basically it's not a hack someone just throws on the internet for everyone to use, it's WAY too valuable to burn like that.

"It was naïve of the UK government to think they could tell a US technology company what to do globally"

Even simply developing a tool to coerce users out of E2E without their explicit consent to comply with local laws could be abused in the future to obtain E2E messages with a warrant on different countries.

A very difficult position to be in.

I think it’s really speech [0], which is why it’s important to user privacy and security that Apple widely advertises their entire product line and business as valuing privacy. That way, it’s a higher bar for a court to cross, on balance, when weighing whether to compel speech/code (& signing) to break E2EE.

After all, if the CEO says privacy is unimportant [1], maybe compelling a code update to break E2EE is no big deal? (“The court is just asking you, Google, to say/code what you already believe”).

Whereas if the company says they value privacy, then does the opposite without so much as a fight and then the stock price drops, maybe that’d be securities fraud? [2]. And so maybe that’d be harder to compel.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43134235

[1]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/12/google-ceo-eric-schmid...

[2]: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-26/everyt...

Is this actually a thing? Telecoms in the US are compelled to provide wiretap facilities to the US and state and local governments.

It’s really not "work” but speech. That’s why telecoms can be compelled to wiretap. But code is speech [2], signing that code is also speech, and speech is constitutionally protected (US).

The tension is between the All Writs Act (requiring “third parties’ assistance to execute a prior order of the court”) and the First Amendment. [1]

So Apple may be compelled to produce the iCloud drives the data is stored on. But they can’t be made to write and sign code to run locally in your iPhone to decrypt that E2EE data (even though obviously they technologically could).

[1]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/10/judge-doj-not-all-writ...

[2]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/remembering-case-estab...

They'll keep your data hostage and disable your iCloud account. Clever, huh? So they are not deleting it, just disabling your account. "If you don't like it, make your own hardware and cloud storage company" kind of a thing.

Indeed people only noticed this because Apple tried to do the right thing and now it's somehow also Apple's fault. No good deed goes unpunished, I guess.

I think there is a feeling the government power is so overwhelming that they are hoping maybe some trillion dollar corporation would help them out somehow.

We all lose.

In some jurisdiction, yes, legally, such evidence might not be probative, but you might still convicted because of it.

That’s quite different from turning disappearing messages on when you’re not explicitly under insteuctions to keep records.

Really, apps should encrypt their own storage with keys that aren't stored in the backups. That's how you get security/privacy back.

I think sender should just be able to send a recommended preference hint on retention and you could have an option to respect it or not.

This current demand isn't blanket access to your device, it's access to things uploaded to Apple's online storage service. Having to get a backdoor that works with every app's encryption takes a lot more work while running the data through an authenticated encryption algorithm is relatively trivial for a developer

I like signal and use it, but I already thought message retention was pointless. It seems at best a trusted informal protocol you can use with known parties but not something you can really rely on.

I don't want to share my contact details, but the second someone I know decides to opt in, I lose all rights to my own data as they've shared it on my behalf.

Maybe they have other info, such as birthday, home address, other emails or phone #s, etc. stored for me, which is all fair game, as well.

For Apple, privacy is one value prop. But seemingly smaller one than the UK market.

> "It would be a very, very worrying precedent if other communications operators felt they simply could withdraw products and not be held accountable by governments," she told the BBC.

Attributing this shockingly pro-UK-spy-agencies quote to an "online privacy expert" without pointing out she consults for the UN, EU and international military agencies is typical BBC pro-government spin. In fact, Caro, it would be "very, very worrying" if communications operators didn't withdraw a product rather than be forced to make it deceptive and defective by design.

I have strong views about privacy as a fundamental human right, but I don't know how to answer that question. I certainly don't want to make the world worse, but this feels like a lesser of two evils type of deal: either make it even harder to catch bad actors, such as child abusers, or make it plausible that your government take away your freedom forever.

Don’t give power over yourself to people with a proven history of misusing it, according to your values. You don’t have to look hard for examples.

Bad people flourish over the inaction of good people.

(but yes, there are always several who protect and argue for things risking their own and everyone's livelihood, exposing themselves to shady elements, along singled out and elevated thin aspects, cannot understood why)

This ADP feature has only existed for a couple of years, right? I understand people are mad that it's now gone, but why weren't people mad _before_ it existed? For like, a decade? Why do people treat iCloud as immediately dangerous now, if they didn't before?

Did they think it was fully encrypted when it wasn't? Did people not care about E2E encryption and now they do? Is it that E2E wasn't possible before? If it's such a huge deal to people now, why would they have ever used iCloud or anything like it, and now feel betrayed?

Lots of people called for E2EE on this stuff, but let's be real about one thing: encryption as a feature being more accessible means more people can be exposed to it. Not everyone can afford a rube goldberg machine to backup their data to a NAS and not make it easily lost if that NAS dies or loses power. It takes immense time, skill, and energy to do that.

And my fear isn't the government, either, mind you. I simply don't trust any cloud service provider to not be hacked or compromised (e.g., due to software vulnerability, like log4j) on a relatively long timescale. It's a pain to think about software security in that context.

For me, ADP solves this and enables a lot of people who wouldn't otherwise be protected from cloud-based attacks to be protected. Sure, protection against crazy stuff like government requests is a bonus, but we've seen with Salt Typhoon that any backdoor can be found and exploited. We've seen major exploits in embedded software (log4j) that turn out to break massive providers.

So, there were people upset, their concerns were definitely voiced on independent blogs and random publications, and now, we're back in the limelight because of the removal of the feature for people in the UK.

But, speaking as a user of ADP outside of the UK, I am happy that ADP is standing up for it, and thankful that it exists.

(To be clear: government backdoors, and government requests also scare me, but they aren't a direct threat to myself as much as a vulnerability that enables all user data to be viewed or downloaded by a random third-party).

Rolling out encryption takes time, so the best I can say is "finally it arrived," and then it was immediately attacked by the U.K. government and has now been disabled over there. I imagine that Apple is also now intimidated to further advertise the feature even here in the U.S. To me this indicates we (technical folks) should be making a much bigger deal about this feature to our non-technical friends.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/world/exclusive-apple-droppe...

Why were people not mad then? Do you think people would be angrier now, if HTTPS were suddenly outlawed?

Among other valid answers, removing rights and privileges generally makes people angrier than not having those rights or privileges in the first place.

Oh, we were. I am in the crowd who had been asking for generally used encryption since 1995. After all, we were already using SSH for our shell connections.

The first introduction to SSL outside of internet banking and Amazon was for many online services to use encryption only for their login (and user preferences) page. The session token was then happily sent in the clear for all subsequent page loads.

It took a while for always-on encryption to take hold, and many of the online services complained that enabling SSL for all their page loads was too expensive. Both computationally and in required hardware resources. When I wrote for an ICT magazine, I once did some easy benchmarking around the impact of public key size for connection handshakes. Back then a single 1024-bit RSA key encryption operation took 2ms. Doubling it to 2048 bits bumped that up to 8ms. (GMP operations have O(n^2) complexity in terms of keysize.)

simple solutions like Whatsapp, Signal and ADP brought this to the masses - which some governments have issues about - and this makes a massive difference to everybody including those who wouldn't be caught dead using an iphone anyway

if we could go back to the early 1990s when only professionals, Uni students, techies and enthusiasts used the internet I'd go in a heartbeat but that's not the world we're living in

One thing I've found concerning is that Apple had encrypted cloud backups ready to roll out years ago, but delayed releasing the feature when the US government objected.

> After years of delay under government pressure, Apple said Wednesday that it will offer fully encrypted backups of photos, chat histories and most other sensitive user data in its cloud storage system worldwide, putting them out of reach of most hackers, spies and law enforcement.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/12/07/icloud-...

So the UK government isn't the only government that has objected to users having real privacy protections.

It is like anything that gets better. Fight for the better. It is like aviation safety: who cares about a few crashes this year when people didn't complain in the 70s.

- e2e encryption is not ubiquitous yet, but awareness is ascending.

- distrust for government also is on the uptrend.

- more organized dissent to preserve privacy.

No people didn't assume data was encrypted.

Yes E2E has been possible for many decades, but businesses don't have privacy as a priority, sometimes even counter incentives to protect it. Personal data sells well.

Things have changed because more people are getting to understand why it matters, forcing the hand of companies having to choice but at least feign to secure privacy.

It's like when google suddenly decided that their on-device-only 2FA app Google Authenticator should get an opt-out unencrypted cloud backup.

It means people who don't pay a lot of attention can suddenly have much less protection than they were originally sold on.

I 100% treated iCloud as dangerous until they released it, and I cheered in the streets when they finally did.

In this situation, I agree that it is bad day for personal privacy/security

In fact, Apple began to adopt “privacy” first marketing due to this fallout. Apple even doubled down on this by not assisting FBI with unlocking a terrorist suspects Apple device in 2016. [2]

It was around that time I actually had _some_ respect for Apple. I was even a “Apple fanboy” for some time. But that respect and fanboi-ism was lost between 2019 and now.

Between the deterioration of the Apple ecosystem (shitty macOS updates), pushing scanning of photos and uploading to central server (CSAM scanning scandal?), the god awful “Apple wall”, very poor interoperability, and very anti-repair stance of devices.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants...

[2] https://money.cnn.com/2016/03/28/news/companies/fbi-apple-ip...

But basically yes, people are stupid and gave no shit but believed all f nonsense, the marketing frauds made them eating up their crap happy if it had pretty words and pictures, promising something halfway to Paradise. Like the Cloud mirage. Those of careful personality were cautious since the first time Apple and alike pushed on people giving up control over their own data for tiny comfort (or no comfort eventually due to all hostile patterns in the full picture) not putting all and every precious or slightly valuable stuff to some unknown server on the internet protected only by hundreds of years old method: password (so not protected at all essentially). Memories, contacts, schedules, communications, documents, clone of their devices in full, putting all into 'cloud' (much before secure online storage became a thing)? Many times to the very same one? Who are that much idiots, really?!

they tried this with me (NCA) but the judge wouldnt sign off as they had nothning on me or my device. this did however REALLY want to access it! fuck them. pricks

See how real life destroys your oPiNioN?

That doesn't help people who aren't technically capable, of course. But at least those who are can protect themselves.

Also is it not possible to set up my Apple account outside of the UK while living here?

Amusing when you consider the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC, a part of GCHQ), along with the Information Commissioners Office, both publish guidance recommending, and describing how to use, encryption to protect personal and sensitive data.

Our government is almost schizophrenic in its attitude to encryption.

Of course: it's not a monolithic entity. It's a composite of different parts that have different goals an interests.

It won't. The courts will refuse to force them to stop, and even if the courts attempt to force it, some government departments just won't listen, and be protected from the consequences.

This is another case of "the law applies to you, but not to me".

So that's NOT what the law says.

The law says that private sector entities cannot have effective encryption (so NOT government agencies). Why do I put it like that? Because it MUST be possible for the security services to get access to any data they can intercept in any way WITHOUT telling/alerting the participants. They must be able to ALTER those communications. Or to make it more practical: any software maker MUST be able to provide access to any data the security services physically intercept, encrypted hard drives, ssh capture ... anything. And no, there is no exception for open source software.

ANYONE who puts this in software is criminally liable, as well as any firm (director/...) of any firm that has software doing this:

    // we're done with the key for this session, erase the key
    key := 0

But there is one VERY specific limitation. Only the government gets to complain about this, and obviously, there is zero plans to enforce this equally. The government sure as hell is not planning to actually put in the effort to make the encryption they use compliant with this law. It's just to get at the contents of confiscated harddrives. It's just to force foreign companies to unlock phones that have been confiscated.

Oh and there's stricter punishments if you tell anyone you're complying with this. This law can be used to arrest Linus Torvalds until he backdoors encrypted loop devices, and threaten him with decades prison if he tells anyone he's done that.

And can I just say? If this law was put, properly explained, to the people of the UK, there's no way it would get 50% of the vote.

> And yet if I steal your money and refuse to give it back, or let you steal it back, you'll call that hypocritical.

That's a bad analogy.

> What does the size of an entity have to do with whether this is idiotic or not?

Because it's not about the size, and I said nothing about the size. It's about it being composed of different minds, organized into different organizations, focused on different goals.

It's just not going to behave like one mind (without a lot of inefficiency, because you'd need literal central planning), because that's not the kind of thing that it is.

Now we're probably just waiting for a law mandating encryption of cloud data. Let's see whether Apple will actually leave the UK market altogether or introduce a backdoor.

The US has problems (don't get me wrong, look at our politics, enough said); but the UK seems to be speedrunning a collapse. The NHS having patients dying in hallways; Rotherham back in the popular mind; a bad economy even by EU standards; a massive talent exodus (as documented even on HN regarding hardware engineers); a military in the news for being too run down to even help Ukraine; and most relevant to this story - the government increasingly acting in every way like it is extremely paranoid of the citizens.

Any personal thoughts?

> The NHS having patients dying in hallways

Sadly routine in winter. Nobody wants to spend the money to fix this. Well, the public want the money spent, but they do not want it raised in taxes.

> Rotherham back in the popular mind

The original events were between 1997 and 2013. The reason they're back in the mind is the newspapers want to keep them there to maintain islamophobia. Other incidents (more recently Glasgow grooming gangs) aren't used for that purpose.

> a bad economy even by EU standards

Average by EU standards. But stagnant, yes.

> the government increasingly acting in every way like it is extremely paranoid of the citizens.

They've been like this my entire life. Arguably it was a bit worse until the IRA ceasefire. Certainly the security services have been pushing anti-encryption for at least three decades.

I don't think anywhere in the EU really describes itself as Eastern Europe, though. That's Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova. So really just Romania, sometimes.

If it was an option, I would seriously look to emigrate again, but I honestly don't know where. The most appealing option for me is Australia, but my age works against me. I know everywhere has its issues, but I'm just so worn down by the horrible adversarial political system and gutter press in the UK right now. We seem unable to do anything of note recently. A train line connecting not very much of the UK has cost so much money, and in the end it hasn't even joined up the important part.

I don't know, life is good at a local level. I am privileged and live in a fantastically beautiful town, and life here is safe and friendly. If I ignored everything else for a while it would probably do me good.

Imagine hiring someone you didn't know had an Australian dual citizenship and two years later all your customers' data is leaked onto the net.

This UK request as reported would not be legal in Australia.

> Technical Capability Notices (TCNs): TCNs are orders that require a company to build new capabilities that assist law enforcement agencies in accessing encrypted data. The Attorney-General must approve a TCN by confirming it is reasonable, proportionate, practical, and technically feasible.

> It’s that final one that’s the real problem. The Australian government can force tech companies to build backdoors into their systems.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/09/australia-thr...

That blog's own reference points this out:

> Regular use of encryption as electronic protection, such as online banking or shopping, is not of primary concern in the Act. To reinforce this, the Act includes safeguards between government and industry, such as restricting backdoors and decryption capabilities, preventing the creation of systemic weaknesses, and accessing communication without proper jurisdiction, warrants, or authorisations.

So I can only assume that the author is either too lazy to bother reading their own reference in full (let alone researching the topic of their blog), or is being knowingly dishonest.

Are you also an immigrant to the UK? I suggest you embrace it.

The ability to turn on Advanced Data Protection does seem to be tied to your iCloud region (as of now I can still turn it on, and I’m in the UK but have an account from overseas).

They are not scared of people, but of working, doing their job, especially when it is difficult (catching criminals). They expect the job to be done for them by others, on the expense of everyone, while they collecting all the praise.

On sympathetic to Vance I did not really found a presentable reaction, would not find on any other accidentally agreeable sentence leaving his mouth (very low chance btw.). Talking a lot about all kind of things sooner or later will hit something acceptable, which will not yield an unacceptable and destructive to society figure sympathetic.

You also should be aware of practices and conducts the various US security services practice (and probably all governemnts out there), if not from news or law but at least from the movies. When we come to the topic of who is afraid of their own.

Basically instead of doing their jobs, the cops expect Apple, Meta et al to intercept all the data, then feed it into some kind of AI black box (not done by them but contracted out to someone else at the taxpayer's expense) that will then decide if you get arrested within the next 48H (I am exaggerating but only slightly)

What are the cops doing instead of doing their jobs? That's my question. Aren't they paid to go out and catch the criminals or do they simply expect to get the identity of people each day that need to be investigated?

It's certainly better than the opposite, where citizens and residents are scared of their government, which wields the power to deprive them of their freedom, possessions, and life.

A guillotine once in a while for some politicians/bureaucrats will do some good. There is a rich history of the French doing it. I'm not even trying to be funny.

I don't think it is "scared" as much as just the usual human desire to do whatever the task is ... without thinking of the consequences.

It's a very unwise position Vance takes.

The world would clearly be better run if all governments feared their people, than it would if all people fear their governments.

The UK can pull this kind of stuff precisely because they do not fear any consequences from their people.

Apple's only consolation prize is that its limited to UK users for now. But it seems inevitable that ADP will gradually be made illegal all around the world.

Every European government (even some non-EU ones) can grant any exception to anyone to the GPDR for any reason. And, of course, every last one has granted an exception to the police, to courts, to the secret service, their equivalent of the IRS, and to government health care (which imho is a big problem when we're talking mental health care), and when I say government health care, note that this includes private providers of health care, in other words insurances.

Note: these GPDR exclusions includes denying patients access to their own medical records. So if a hospital lies about "providing you" with mental health treatment (which they are incentivized to do, they get money for that), it can helpfully immediately be used in your divorce. For you yourself, however, it is conveniently impossible to verify if they've done this. Nor can you ask (despite GPDR explicitly granting you this right) to have your medical records just erased.

In other words. GPDR was explicitly created to give people control over their own medical records, and to deny insurance providers and the IRS access. It does the exact opposite.

Exactly the sort of information I would like to hide, exactly the people I would find it critical to hide it from. In other words: GPDR applies pretty much only to US FANG companies ... and no-one else.

So: if you don't pay tax and use that money to pay for a cancer treatment, don't think for a second the GPDR will protect you. If you have cancer and would like to get insured, the insurance companies will know. Etc.

Even though its making the media headlines today, 99% of UK citizens will forget this tomorrow and it will fade into the mists of time. Just like evey other security infringement that any government has imposed on its citizens.

There's a right to bear arms in the US and it doesn't seem to be helping them with their oppressive government.

Their biggest success as far as I know is starting free school lunches in the US, but that wasn't at gunpoint.

If they ever come to my door I'll either go postal or leave the country.

Its so bad here now.

When people want to revolt it doesn’t seem like the right to bear arms has much to do with it. Not having the right to bear arms certainly hasn’t stopped countless rebellions and revolutions across the world. It’s not like the French of the Russians had a right to bear arms before their successful revolutions.

Even in the UK, the lack of a right to bear arms didn’t stop Cromwell using firearms to defeat Charles II at the Battle of Worcester.

They're doing the worst cover up ever given grooming gangs and where they operate have been headlines in the UK for decades.

What they're not very good at is keeping the UK citizens at large well informed with a realistic sense of proportion given the scale of child sexual abuse far exceeds the activities of grooming gangs.

Yes, in a direct confrontation and an all out war, the populace stands no chance against the US military (assuming the military will unwaveringly side against the populace), no argument there.

But an all out war is not an option, the government wouldn’t be trying to pulverize an entire nation and leave a rubble in place. If you completely destroy your populace and your cities in an all-out direct war, you got no country and people left to govern. It is all about subjugation and populace control. You can’t achieve this with air strikes that level whole towns.

Similarly, if the US wanted to “win” in Afganistan by just glassing the whole region and capturing it, that would be rather quick and easy (from a technical perspective, not from the perspective of political consequences that would follow). Turns out, populace control and compliance are way more tricky to achieve than just capturing land. And while having overwhelming firepower and technological advantage helps with that, it isn’t enough.

Help me out - how can policing possibly work if no one is legally required to be policed? You just end up with murderers, rapists etc. expressing their right to "resist" with arms like in spaghetti westerns. It is totally symbolic, and would crumble at the first instance of serious government interest of arresting 'troublemakers', which would of course start with a well crafted PR campaign to get the rest of the public on their side. I think it's naive.

Imagine a dark future with a sudden military coup by a small faction of extreme radicals that 85% of the population opposes. could enough citizens rise up and stop them? Could the calculus of being that coup leader be changed by the likelihood that they will be assassinated in short order, by one of millions of potential assassins? Quite possibly. These are not everyday concerns, of course, but the concerns of dark and dangerous times. It’s a bit like buying life insurance: hopefully I never need it.

American police will shoot people dead in the streets with impunity, the military industrial complex engages in constant wars regardless of popular sentiment and the American government is currently being carved up by neo-nazis and oligarchs but you can legally be racist on the internet. I guess it truly is the land of the free.

Also... wait six months.

So, perhaps this is a bit of a dangerous precedent, but it was the least-bad option.

Being a business does not remove ethical considerations. And I’m an environment where corporations are considered people, it seems reasonable to expect some degree of alignment with normal citizens.

> Apple's goal is to make money. The government is a representation of your will.

The government is increasingly not a representation of the collective will, and is instead captured by those corporations.

I can’t help but feel the “but they exist to make money” line too often ignores the many ways this is not a sufficiently complex explanation of the situation.

People always get this wrong. Corporations are not people. They just have certain rights like owning property. Corporate personhood != full personhood.

Because Apple marketing keeps relentlessly bashing their customers skull that privacy is their advantage?

This play by Apple applies pressure to the UK government indirectly via its citizens, for free, rather than taking the risk and expenses of a lawsuit.

They could pull out of the UK, and to hell with the consequences, but then if the EU decide to do the same thing, or the US, or China says "hold my beer", then the problem becomes much larger.

Losing the UK market wouldn't impact Apple that much - it'd be a hit to the stock, of course, but as a fraction of worldwide business, it isn't that huge. Larger markets would be a bigger issue.

To my knowledge, Apple has always said that their response would be to withdraw affected services rather than break encryption.

> Apple has said planned changes to British surveillance laws could affect iPhone users’ privacy by forcing it to withdraw security features, which could ultimately lead to the closure of services such as FaceTime and iMessage in the UK.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jul/20/uk-survei...

Users in the UK do still have the option to perform an encrypted backup to their local PC or Mac.

The UK would still lose ADP (and then also just Apple products in general). A precedent would still be set.

Your posing a strictly worse third option. Sure, it's an option, I guess. Apple could also just close down globally, as a fourth option. Or sell off to Google as a fifth. But I was trying to present the least-bad option (turn off ADP), rather than an exhaustive list.

In this case, the UK is seeking to use local law to change what is allowable on an international basis.

That's a bit different than a nation controlling the law on their own soil.

But of course that is nonsense, and Apple could theoretically have a nation-specific backdoor (e.g. for accounts in a given country a separate sequestered decryption key is created and kept in escrow for court order).

I mean, Apple "complied" by disabling ADP just in the UK. They undermined their own "worldwide" claim, as ADP still works everywhere else, and the UK has no access.

Perhaps, if the UK continues to push, Apple will indeed pull out of the UK, but it'll make it as public as possible and tell the world who it was that forced its hand and what the consequences are - and I don't think the UK government is going to like that result.

Disagree. There is a difference between ADP being unavailable in one country and it working differently in that country. Implementing a backdoor would mean changing the way ADP works.

Did you vote for any single one of them?

If you did, then what you're supposed to do is stop voting for Tory-lite governments (such as the current one).

If you didn't vote for any of these governments (including this one), everything else that you could do would be dangerous nowadays.

That being said, they still have a lot of folk angry at them for allowing university fees to be introduced 15 years ago when they were in coalition government (a Tory policy!).

You fight the less draconian draconian law to avoid needing to fight the worse one.

I'm not quite sure what you are getting at with this, but I'd like to add some context for others.

There is no blanket restriction on alcohol consumption on public transport in the UK. Individual transport operators are allowed to prohibit drinking as a contractual requirement (very common for bus companies); alternatively, local councils can establish a bylaw to restrict it more generally. However, people can and do drink on the majority of British trains; some even sell alcoholic drinks on-board.

As for TV licences, the majority of households with residents who watch TV do indeed pay it. The evasion rate is estimated at around 10%: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...

Aspects of the UK investigatory powers act is close enough to US FISA [2] that I think this might have some influence, if brought up. IPA 2016 was known at the time of the original adequacy decision, but IPA was amended in 2024 . While some things might be improvements, the changes to Technical Capability Notices warrant new scrutiny.

Especially seeing this example where IPA leads to reduced security is of some concern, I should think. The fact that security can be subverted in secret might make it a bit tricky for the EU to monitor at all.

[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...

[2] ibid. Article 4

[3] FISA section 702 https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BILLS-110hr6304pcs/html/...

As a brit, I find that my government's stupidity is almost its only reliable attribute.

1. What happens if I have ADP enabled and then visit the UK? Will photos I take there still be E2E encrypted? If not, will I be notified? I realize that at the moment the answer is yes, that for now, they are only disabling ADP enrollment. But they are planning to turn it off for everyone in the UK in the future. So what happens then?

2. If they make an exception for visitors, such as by checking the account region, then obviously anyone in the UK who cares about security will just change their account region - a small inconvenience. Maybe this will be a small enough group that the UK government doesn’t really care, but it could catch on.

3. Is this going to be retroactive? It’s one thing to disallow E2E encryption for new content going forward, where people can at least start making different decisions about what they store in the cloud. It’s an entirely different thing for them to remove the protection from existing content that was previously promised to be E2E encrypted. When they turn off ADP for people who were already enrolled, how is their existing data going to be handled?

This is bad news and it is going to be messy.

The precedent here is China. I spent a few days in China and, as far as I know, my region is still and ADP is still active.

I have seen advice in big companies to only take a burner phone when going to China on business. Perhaps the same will apply to the UK.

It looks like you were using it so long for passive agressive arguing that it lost its original meaning for you completely!

I was asking.

The primary purpose of these agencies, despite what has been written down on paper, is NOT to protect the citizens of the countries that fund them. It is to protect the system that taxes those citizens.

While Apple did the right thing by refusing to give the UK government a backdoor, they are responsible for getting users in this situation in the first place.

I'm not familiar with the iPhone and maybe there is already an alternative to iCloud ADP, although that would make this whole situation completely nonsensical.

Microsoft wants to have a word with you regarding their Windows operating system that's installed on their device that you're renting.

A smartphone may be secure against malicious individual actors but its certainly not the most secure when it comes to your private data. Modern day smartphone is designed to maximize capturing your private information like location, communication patterns, activity and (sometimes) health information and pass it on to as many private players(a.k.a apps) as possible, even to governments without your knowledge. You don't have much control over it.

In that aspect it is less secure than your typical PC. A PC doesn't have that level of private information in the first place and whatever information it has will leak only if you opt-in or get infected by malware.(recent Windows versions without necessary tweaks may be considered a malware by some).

You can also manually transfer photos to the computer. Or you can enable a different app (Google Photos or Dropbox for example) to store copies of every picture you take, and then turn off iCloud Photos.

Note that neither Google nor Dropbox are E2E encrypted either though.

I have a NAS that is accessible through VPN. But I don't trust its encryption, thought it is in my controlled location.

That's why cloud backup was useful.

[edit: actually I mis-remembered this, it's "only" 2 years (or 5 if it's national-security-related) that they'll jail you for. "Only" carrying a lot of water there...]

To be fair this should be standard.

Keep in mind there are some risks with any E2EE service! You’ll need to store a backup key or nominate a backup contact, and there’s a risk you could lose data. Some web-based iCloud services don’t work (there is a mode to reactivate them, with obvious security consequences.) for what it’s worth, I’ve been using it for well over a year (including one dead phone and recovery) and from my perspective it's invisible and works perfectly.

On iPhone or iPad

    Open the Settings app.

    Tap your name, then tap iCloud.

    Scroll down, tap Advanced Data Protection, then tap Turn on Advanced Data Protection.

    Follow the onscreen instructions to review your recovery methods and enable Advanced Data Protection.

    Choose Apple menu  > System Settings.

    Click your name, then click iCloud.

    Click Advanced Data Protection, then click Turn On.

    Follow the onscreen instructions to review your recovery methods and enable Advanced Data Protection.

> Customers already using Advanced Data Protection, or ADP, will need to manually disable it during an unspecified grace period to keep their iCloud accounts. The company said it will issue additional guidance in the future to affected users and that it does not have the ability to automatically disable it on their behalf.

UK is ~3-4% of apples income. While I appreciate Apples actions here, I wish they would make a real stand here and pull completely out of the UK.

The UK has made it clear that Counter Terrorism legislation has no limits in UK law even if that means compromising all systems and leaving them vulnerable to state actor attacks.

MPs will continue to use encrypted messaging systems that disappear messages during any inquiries of course.

What are they going to say? That they won't release you until you magically unerase the phone? There's nothing to wait for.

Stop spreading incorrect FUD

Lowering the data protection of it's citizens in comparison to the rest of the world.

I was under the impression governments were supposed to protect their citizens.

This depends on whether you see "citizens" as individuals or as a group. In other words it's possible that to improve the security (and thus protect) the majority, the rights of individual citizens need to be eroded.

For example, to protect vulnerable citizens from crime (the cliche of child porn is useful here, but it extends to most-all crime) it's useful for prosecutors to be able to collect evidence against guilty parties. This means that the erosion of some privacy of those parties.

Thus the govt balances "group security" with "individual privacy". It has always been so. So to return to your original hypothesis;

>> Lowering the data protection of it's citizens in comparison to the rest of the world. ... and also, making it easier to detect and prosecute criminals, and thus protect the citizens from physical harm.

Now, of course, whenever it comes to balancing one thing against another, there's no easy way to make everyone happy. We all want perfect privacy, coupled with perfect security. Some will say that they'll take more privacy, less security - others will take more security and less privacy. Where you stand on this issue of course depends on which side you lean.

More fundamentally though there's a trust issue. Citizens (currently) do not trust governments. They assume that these tools can be used to harm more than just criminals. (They're not wrong.) If you don't trust the govt to act in good faith then naturally you choose privacy over security.

"also, making it easier to detect and prosecute criminals, and thus protect the citizens from physical harm."

Did this happen though? Whilst I agree with your philosophy, in reality the UK government are no closer to lawfully accessing our data, but our data are less protected from potential other threats (e.g. unlawful access to a data centre, rogue Apple employees).

It's what actually happened as opposed to the government intention that matters to the people affected.

So my statement "Lowering the data protection of it's citizens in comparison to the rest of the world" still stands, and I'd add "whilst the UK government achieved absolutely zero in its quest to lawfully access individual's data".

Question: Wouldn't it be better for Apple to build a UK-only encryption that is backdoored but is at least better than nothing? If Apple really cared about people's privacy, why just abandon them?

My position: No because this is a war, not a battle. Creating a backdoored encryption would immediately trigger every government on the planet passing laws banning use of non-back-doored encryption, which would ultimately lead us to a much, much worse world. Refusing to do it is the right thing IMHO.

> The UK government's demand came through a "technical capability notice" under the Investigatory Powers Act (IPA), requiring Apple to create a backdoor that would allow British security officials to access encrypted user data globally.

So to me, backdoor encryption seems like it defeats the whole point of ADP, no? But if not - even if there is some tiny marginal benefit - cryptography is extremely expensive to get right. It's doubtful that it makes financial sense to Apple to develop a new encryption workflow for a single country for very slight security benefits.

And it still wouldn't be complying with the UK's demands anyways. The UK demanded access to accounts worldwide. If Apple is going to be non-compliant, then they might as well be non-compliant the easy way.

The design of ADP is that even taking control of the data centre won't allow access to the information held within. Decentralising the service makes it significantly harder to write ham-fisted legislation that aims to prevent tech companies from offering secure products.

Additionally there isn't a technical need for ADP to interface with iCloud. Apple could feasibly release free software for DIY ADP.

My expectation is that either the UK will alter the law, or Apple will work around it. I don't think we're looking at the end of this.

If Apple can't get you to pay for it, it won't happen. They only pay as much lip service to privacy as they need for marketing purposes

I don't expect Apple to fight this like, say, the EU regulations. Without a profit incentive, it's hard to mobilize Apple to seek a solution.

I'd personally just trust the government variant more with my government ID data than a third party but that's up to the petitioners to weigh and decide

Whether the responses/parliamentary debates the person triggers end up being useful is up for debate.

She believes wrong. Google retreated from the Chinese market to not give in. Apple stayed in China and also banned VPNs on App Stores for Chinese customers. Kudos to Apple to not giving in to a backdoor in this case but some there companies took a even higher moral stand in some other situations, so there is precedent indeed.

Now if only the other companies who said they'd leave would grow a backbone...

Don’t expect Apple to rescue the UK citizens to from their own choices.

This is definitionally why a country is sovereign and a company isn't.

> They were not this soft in the San Bernardino case when FBI asked them to unlock a phone.

FBI has to follow the laws of the USA.

The UK writes the laws of the UK, which Apple (if they want to operate in the UK) has to follow.

Yes Apple follows the laws of every country it operates in just like any other company.

In the case of TikTok, the law was passed a year ago and the executive branch said they wouldn’t enforce it.

It would also partially validate the EU's regulation if they abandoned the UK but stayed in Europe. Apple very much doesn't want to feed either side a line.

It may have hurt Apple in the short term but helped in the long term.

We're losing the fight, and people are as apathetic as ever around privacy and security issues.

Besides, never trust E2EE where you don't control both ends, but everyone here should have already known that.

Hmmm how? How can they decrypt your already end-to-end encrypted and uploaded data without you entering the passphrase to do so? I can understand them removing the data from iCloud completely, or asking you to send the keys to Apple, but I don't understand how they can disable the feature for already uploaded data.

When a user turns off ADP in settings, their device uploads the encryption keys to Apple servers.

I can't imagine they'll cancel your iCloud+ subscription. ADP is not a feature of iCloud+ and iCloud+ has features beyond extra storage space. Nor can I imagine they'll delete your data preemptively as long as there's space to store it.

Hopefully they'll provide instructions on how to manually delete your iCloud data in case you don't want to use it any longer (I think you just turn off iCloud on all your devices).

These companies have to comply with so many laws and want cozy relationships with governments, so they play both sides. It likely does things differently, but if the keys are not secure, then its not secured

How is withdrawing the full encryption capability from UK users not condeding to the UK government?

They would lose some money on services, but would have been the better choice to stand up to the UK government and protect the UK users.

“Customers who are already using Advanced Data Protection, or ADP, will need to manually disable it during an unspecified grace period to keep their iCloud accounts, according to the report. Apple said it will issue additional guidance in the future to affected users and that it "does not have the ability to automatically disable it on their behalf."

In both cases it's encrypted in transit and at rest.

Would be a beautiful thing to see. Not sure how storage would work though since you cannot take payment (that would make it centralized), and storage would have to be distributed, but by who?

If this requirement increases the proportion of data on Apple's servers that is now unencrypted (or encrypted but which can be trivially unencrypted), that could be a huge plus to Apple; more data to use for ad targeting (or to sell to third parties), and more data to train AI models on.

They will have to send out messages 'You have 32465 hours before you account is deleted unless you decrypt'

This is NOT a good look.

It might not be cryptographically sensible, but it is responding to a real change in the strength of the state.

The rise of first-party end-to-end encryption has made life difficult for the security services so they just want to get rid of it.

Also historically the US government loved the UK doing all this spying because the US wasn't allowed to do a lot of it on their own citizens.

no one fought when the democrats called snowden or assange russian spys for revealing clinton corruption. they just blindly sided with their own corrupt political party and gave away freedom. just like previous govs censored trump, banned political opponents they created a precedent and opened the door to the end of freedom. its now beyond politics, we should fight for the last moments of freedom we have before its too late.

I always thought of “cloud” services to be a sham. I only trust them with transient data or junk data anyways (glorified temp storage, at best).

How is that not worse or at least equivalent to a back door?

It's bad for the citizens of the UK and better for everyone else on the planet with an iPhone. UK citizens should be angry with their government, not Apple.

Btw, as a European citizen, I always buy my devices in the USA. We can complain about the US as much as we want, but Europe is on another level.

*or any other gubments.

Of course, when the rubber truncheon comes out, I'd be happy to show my encrypted stuff. But until then, or without a warrant, I'd prefer not to.

Only time will tell.

I've already invested in USB storage :)

Ultimately Scotland is governed by the UK so any first party rounds are annulled before they get a chance by the UK.

Your comment history reeks of differentiated, sensible arguments...

Overall quite ironic as in plain sight to anyone reading the news in the last two years, almost all of Western Europe sees rising right wing and extreme right wing parties.

Here's hoping the inevitable regime change will be a peaceful one.

Now I don't see any reason why I shouldn't turn ADP on. Turning on now.

Again and again, 'Eu' is not pushing anything like that. A few Euparl MPs backed by those like Ashton Kutcher did.

> Eu isnt 'planning' anything like that. Some Euparl MPs backed by people like Ashton Kutcher tried to push a law to spy on all chat apps. Then when the dirty web of American-style regulatory manipulation was exposed, they backed off. It was a proposal for a law by some MPs. Not something 'Eu' did.

I can say that because that PROPOSAL at the European PARLIAMENT was brought by a number of MPs. Its not an official Eu thing, it is not pushed by any official Eu organ. Any MP can bring ANY proposal to Euparl. It does not mean that Eu is 'pushing something'.

> Nobody backed off, it's still on the agenda

Its not on 'the agenda'. The MPs who pushed it backed off after their links to the American 'NGOs' were exposed. They said that they would bring it up again at a later time. That doesn't mean that its on 'the agenda'. Any MP in the Euparl can bring any proposal at any time. That does not mean that Euparl is doing it and there is notable support behind it.

The EU has been pushing to pass the Chat Control law for the last 3 years which is even worse because at least in the UK the government would still need to get a warrant for the data they want whereas the EU wants to analyze your chat messages, emails and pictures in real time without cause or need to justify themselves.

The fact of the matter is that if the EU was, as it's been said, for privacy this proposal would not have been on the table in the first place. It should have been stopped 3 years ago but here we are again fighting for our rights and our privacy.

And it doesn't matter how many times it gets shot down by some of the countries in the EU, the commission changes a few words and starts the process all over again because they know that sooner or later they will get it through.

You can't have it both ways. You either are for privacy or you are not. If you are then this proposal should never have seen the light of the day and the people pushing for it should have been given a warning that this was off-limits.

Instead they are biding their time so that when the time is right they can come back with a slightly altered but still incredibly damaging proposal hoping that it will pass.

The EU pro-privacy stance is joke. They want access to the same data as the US except they don't have the courage to come out and say it so they wrap it in a nice little gift bag with the words "protect the children" on it.

This is hypocrisy in it's purest form. Then some governments in the EU have the gall to call out authoritarians regimes around the world when they crack down on dissent and free speech? Give me a break!

There is no official effort from the Eu related to this. Where are you pulling that out from. A proposal by a few MPs in the Euparl is not 'Eu pushing someting'. And that "Eu Going dark" group is not an official Eu organ.

How long do you think for governments to make it illegal to self host or backdoor Linux builds? They have already went too far by just asking backdoor to data of every single person on the planet. We should oppose such unethical laws rather than finding workarounds.

Probably never, it won't be worth the trouble because it's always going to be a fringe thing for the reasons you say :). One can hope anyways.

Also, if the government decides I'm a baddie, they can always just show probable cause to a judge and come physically get my hardware, so they have a more traditional path there to handle weirdos like me already :).

FWIW, I agree completely strong encryption in SAAS is necessary for privacy. But pragmatically, there's little hope laws like this won't eventually take root in more places. So the statement stands irregardless of the challenges: the cloud is just someone else's computer.

One final note: I don't think E2E means what most people think it means unfortunately - lots of companies imply that you're the only one with access to the encryption keys when E2E is on, but if you read the fine print, it often really just says is the data is encrypted in flight, not what the policy is for protecting the data on the other "end."

This is the awesome thing about ADP - they spell out the full policy in glorious detail.

Having said that, in practice to date the extraordinary powers the government has acquired are rarely used, eg to quell the race riots last year. It feels more like a risk for the future and that makes it harder to argue against now. One day this will hit the fan.

I’m very curious, however, to see Americans criticise our government for its (mostly theoretical) overreach, whilst simultaneously the constitution of America is being torn to shreds by the actions of Musk and Trump, with some in the tech community even cheering on DOGE.

What are people using when self-hosting services in the scope of iCloud nowadays? Nextcloud seems the closest comparable service.