The UK can’t keep its encryption battle with Apple secret, court says

The UK won’t be able to keep its fight with Apple over end-to-end encryption secret after all. As reported by the BBC, tribunal judges on Monday rejected the government’s request to keep details of the battle private, saying: “It would have been a truly extraordinary step to conduct a hearing entirely in secret without any public revelation of the fact that a hearing was taking place.”

The story started in February, when the UK government secretly ordered Apple to create a backdoor into iCloud encryption. Instead of complying with that order, Apple chose to remove its Advanced Data Protection feature in the UK. Other categories of iCloud data, however, remain end-to-end encrypted, such as passwords, health data, payment information, iMessage, and FaceTime. Throughout all of this, Apple has been unable to publicly address the UK’s demands under the rule of the law.

Apple took to the courts to file a complaint to the Powers Tribunal, seeking to challenge the UK’s order that it break end-to-end encryption. The hearing began in secret last month, despite pressure to make the proceedings public.

The government argued that it would “damage national security if the nature of the legal action” if the details were made public. The BBC now reports that this argument didn’t hold up to scrutiny:

In a ruling published on Monday morning, the tribunal judges rejected that request – pointing to the extensive media reporting of the row and highlighting the legal principle of open justice.”

It would have been a truly extraordinary step to conduct a hearing entirely in secret without any public revelation of the fact that a hearing was taking place,” it states.

For the reasons that are set out in our private judgement, we do not accept that the revelation of the bare details of the case would be damaging to the public interest or prejudicial to national security,” it later adds.

We should now expect more details of the battle to emerge to the public.

9to5Mac’s Take

There’s some irony in the UK trying to keep its encryption battle with Apple private while simultaneously fighting that iPhone users shouldn’t be able to keep the contents of their iPhone private.