> Apple did not respond to a request for comment. “We have never built a back door or master key to any of our products, and we never will,” Apple said in February.
This must be some "technically correct" weasel words bullcrap, as without at least equivalent access there is no chance Apple would be operating in China.
Basically, there is no backdoor. The front door is wide open, the government just needs to ask. Or not even that -- just take whatever they need themselves.
Is it a big deal though? Context matters. Everyone knows you don't do business in China without bending a knee to the government in all things. If you don't you are shut down completely if you're lucky, imprisoned if not. Of course CCP has access to every device in China approaching very close to 100%
> This must be some "technically correct" weasel words bullcrap
Is that even necessary? A gag order means they can't reveal backdoors, and their entire stack is so locked down that discovering them is hard and unlikely.
Gag order cannot force them to lie. A lie like that can be illegal even.
If there's a gag order, then companies say "we have a gag order". Like Google and Twitter did back in the day when asked. And then immediately started releasing Transparency Report to show how many of the gag orders they receive, so gov't couldn't say "we don't request anything".
I mean they just disabled advanced data protection which allowed normal law enforcement requests to access the data since they are not e2e encrypted if you don't use advanced data protection. I really don't think they needed to implement a new backdoor. They would just need implement a procedure that would fast track UK requests.
That didn’t placate the UK government, because it didn’t just want access to British users’ data – it wanted access to any Apple user’s data from anywhere in the world.
I suspect that disabling advanced data protection in the UK was meant to let Apple say it was complying as far as it could while fighting the main order.
Apple didn't disable advanced data protection for those who had enabled it. Rather they removed the ability for new users to turn it on in the first place.
A future update was going to ask users themselves to disable it in order to continue backing up their phones to iCloud.
AKA "fuckin...england fucking chill, don't blow this. You're FVEY mate, why you go scaring everyone when you know I got this. Just relax, you really think TAO don't got this? The Equation Group? We got this, in there like swimwear."
I don't get why the UK always does this. it's like GSM encryption all over again. Is it a particularly snoop-ey culture stemming from GCHQ or something?
UK citizens don't have a constitutional right to free speech, which tends to bleed over in unhealthy ways to the government prioritizing its own interests over citizens'.
There is freedom of speech if you are a MP speaking in Parliament (Parliamentary privilege) but outside of there, things have been on a steady decline since the 1980s.
particularly snoopy culture, yes, stemming from GCHQ, no idea. our government has always felt entitled to breach our privacy and we are equal parts spineless and stupid. average take on this is either "why would you care unless you have something to hide" or "that's a shame, but there's nothing we can do about anything ever."
regrettably the latter one may be correct but it'd be nice to see at least some pushback every time this happens.
> The UK official added, this “limits what we’re able to do in the future, particularly in relation to AI regulation.” The Labour government has delayed plans for AI legislation until after May next year.
I assumed they’d only have asked for it if they’d already OKed it with the US, and that it was probably part of a plan to give US access too via 5-eyes sharing.
I think if we'd had a "normal" administration, this probably would have been pushed by the US government. The US services have been gunning for this for decades. But we have an administration that seems extremely disjointed in what it wants to do and why it wants to do it. I'm kind of curious about the internal conversations that must be happening on the other side of 5-eyes nations services as they're trying to accomplish their ends with such an unpredictable ally.
For better or for worse, JD Vance is extremely online, and no one in his cryptocurrency-hoarding right-libertarian tweetsphere thinks government backdoors are a good idea.
I don't think there is much disjoint if you see Trump as a fairly clean break with the cold-war era GOP. The thing is that no one in the US remembers the cold war with pride. The left thinks the cold war was US imperialism. The right kind of agrees, and has moved on to other issues anyways. And Europe nudges, saying: "Hey, you're America. You love fighting cold wars! Remember?"
Too many Europeans are Chomsky-brained and believe that US foreign policy is controlled by the CIA. The reality is that US grand strategy is incoherent and has been for decades. The US doesn't have any actual strategic imperatives at the moment, and it's being pulled in too many different directions. I believe George Friedman argues that this is a recurring pattern in US history, where US foreign policy alternates between listlessness, and maniac focus on some objective (most recently in the wake of 9/11).
For me it's not so much a conspiracy as the natural flow as a society becomes more fascist (as most Western government are leaning) and more "police state". It's inevitable, they want to be able to spy on every aspect of our lives and keep it recorded indefinitely as technology and public sentiment will allow. Cops want to make their jobs as easy as possible, politicians want to be able to get as much dirt on everyone as they can.
> they have neither leverage nor negotiating talent.
The Brexit negotiations proved to me that the UK government will simply assume they have leverage and try to assert it even when they have none. Combined with the lack of negotiating talent during a high stakes deal created a perfect storm.
I really sort of expected that by the time I reached my age that we'd have more policy makers that understood tech a little better. I feel like in the last say 25 or more years ... the needle hasn't moved.
This article is explicitly about how J.D. Vance (age 40) & others at the White House are forcefully advocating for preserving E2E encryption. Arguably not for the right reasons, but still.
I'm not sure what you mean by "more" but what you are asking for is in fact happening.
Hey, even the worst person in the world is owed their right to privacy. Determining if someone is doing evil with their right necessarily undermines privacy for everyone.
> In a combative speech at the Munich Security Conference in February, Vance argued that free speech and democracy were threatened by European elites.
> Trump has also been critical of the UK stance on encryption. The US president has likened the UK’s order to Apple to “something... that you hear about with China,” saying in February that he had told Starmer: “You can’t do this.”
> US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has also suggested the order would be an “egregious violation” of Americans’ privacy that risked breaching the two countries’ data agreement.
UK has a hx of pushing this - OP probably referring to efforts by the brits to put backdoors in comm standards like GSM and others back in the 80's and 90's
It's possible that their advocacy is well thought out but not based on the stated reasons. Say, Apple is actually under the control of the NSA and there are hidden back doors in the form of exploitable weaknesses as per Crypto AG. Then preventing the introduction of public backdoors would preserve the value of the current setup where Apple is widely considered trustworthy with respect to their customers.
He's proven himself to be more of an asshat than I'd hoped (see the Zelenskyy meeting), but he did come up in Silicon Valley venture capital. There's a lot about this administration that causes concern, but I'm glad to see him on the right side of encryption.
because Vance and his colleagues are breaking federal law for the retention of government records and as long as they don’t invite anymore journalists into the group chat they will get away with it
They're arguing with foreign countries. Meanwhile the federal government continuously working consolidate all data available under groups like DODGE or ICE or Palantir. Arguing to preserve a tech in a given situation but with other goals ... not sure the first part matters at that point.
Perhaps he likes the idea of E2E, but just for himself and his friends. I duno, but whatever it is, it's not about the important things after the fact.
I think this is a very dangerous deception. They understand.
When politicians say "we need a special key for police to stop child abuse" it's not that they don't know this means "a backdoor with no technological way to limit its use". On the contrary, they know it very well and it's exactly what they want to achieve under the guise of children protection. It's the public at large that don't understand it -- or so they hope.
Sadly, UK Parliament is made up of political careerists and art students, which is probably similar to most Western democracies. There's a saying 'those who can do, those who can't teach', it probably needs a final 'and those that can't teach, go into politics'.
Every time ukgov tries to make some sort of tech policy, it's embarassingly wrong, or naive, or both.
This comes from a country that effectively gave away ARM.
I'm a principal software engineer with a degree in history. You don't need a science degree to understand most of these issues sufficiently to legislate them. But you need humility and a willingness to learn. That, sadly, is lacking in too many governments and civil services.
Also, the people pushing for these measure (e.g., the U.K's equivalent of the NSA, GCHQ and most national-level police departments) understand these issues perfectly well.
The leader of the opposition studied computer engineering (before going on to law). Sadly she used the knowledge gained to hack the website of the deputy leader of Labour Party.
I don't think it is a matter of really understanding the tech. It has to do more about how you envision the society regarding privacy and individual rights. It is indeed a political point of view on how much you want to control everything.
The people in office now were already old by the time the Internet and especially Mobile took off.
But it’s not like many young adults today who grew up with mobile phones understand computers either. At 51 growing up with computers in the 80s, I find myself explaining what I think should be simple computer concepts to both my parents generation and my adult children.
My 80 year old mom is not a stereotypical old person who doesn’t know how to use a computer. She is a retired math teacher and has actively been using computers since we had an Apple //e in the house running AppleWorks in the mid 80s.
When she was tutoring teenagers mostly as volunteer work after she retired, she had to teach them how to use Office/Gsuite.
There was a very idealistic move in education to believe that younger students would be "digital natives" and self taught on typing, computer programs, etc. So we deemphasized classes on this, and now kids grow up on consumption oriented devices and can't type again. So it goes in circles I guess
They're just against EU asserting any kind of control over American companies.
Reminder that he's funded by Thiel and friends with Curtis Yarvin, which goals include the end of democracy and the federal state and replace the system with tech CEO kings over feudal states.
I feel like the federal government continuously consolidating all data available under groups like DODGE or ICE or Palantir is about as anti privacy as it gets.
I don't think it's that nefarious. I mean, for some of them it might be, but for MOST of them they see a "law & order" issue that will resonate with stupid people ("cops can't get access to terrorist data / child molester info / human trafficking communications!"), and they just run with it without regard to downstream effects.
It has always been politics, not technology. Politicians and bureaucratic always want more power, and they rarely relinquish power they gained temporarily.
It has nothing to do with their technical knowledge. It has everything to do with human nature.
If you want to push back, the law is not on your side.
We've had a serious problem with policy-making in this country for a loooooong time, stretching right back to when RIPA was drafted, nearly three decades ago.
I think the ironic thing is that although everyone uses powerful technology on a practically constant basis, it is sooooo much more complicated that less and less people have even a clue. How many adults would know how to change their oil today versus back in the 70s? Changing spark plugs used to be a 30 minute task but now you have to take apart half the engine just to even gain access. Even though of us who make our living in tech are not immune. How would we verify that there isn't spyware or similar in the firmware or hardware on the computer we use daily?
I thought this too, but I think we misunderstood the extent to which various calls for censoring and regulating the internet where driven by a lack of understanding of the technology...
The scary thing about the UK regulators is that they seem to understand the stupidity of what they're doing, but believe it's worth it. You see this attitude everywhere in the UK – in our hate speech laws, our blasphemy laws, mass surveillance – the argument isn't that these things don't limit freedom and personal privacy. They'll agree that they do, their argument is that you shouldn't care.
With this encryption backdoor most wouldn't deny that it could be compromised, they just didn't think you should worry about it because they thought the benefits were worth it.
I think people on the internet in the 90s and early 00s were just weird people to be honest. We're very libertarian for whatever reason, and we wrongly assumed people our age were all as pro-freedom as us.
Policy makers change frequently and often radically. Federal lawmakers less so, but lawmakers are a small subset of policymakers, and not the ones who create international pressure; those are political appointees in the executive branch, and they change frequently.
> before we started getting people who know tech
reply
The politicians might not know tech, but the NSA, GHCQ, etc. that push for these anti-encryption laws most definitely do know technology, and is the main lobby against encryption.
It goes beyond just getting politicians that understand tech. We need politicians willing to rein in the intelligence apparatus put in safeguards, and checks and balances on their power.
I mean, yes many policymakers still struggle with the nuances of modern tech, but claiming that "the needle hasn't moved" in 25 years is an exaggeration. In the late 90s/early 2000s, encryption debates featured lawmakers who barely understood email. Since then, there are committees focused specifically on tech policy, even some lawmakers with backgrounds in CS or cybersecurity... and far more nuanced public debates about encryption, surveillance, and privacy.
I recently listened to some clips from a hearing with questions about zero-knowledge proofs, algorithmic transparency, etc...this was pretty unthinkable two decades ago. Some agencies and legislative bodies also now have technical staffers and some advisory boards with technologists. So, yeah it it slow and sometimes frustrating, but it's not static.
They understand the tech and so their advisers. You are assuming they want to do some do gooding in some sorts of naive and clumsy matter. No. They want control and they know perfectly well the implications.
I don't see why you think they don't understand the tech.
This is going to be heresy here, but honestly I think it's a reasonable position. Not one I would take, but reasonable.
For the first time in human history there can be large scale communication it is mathematically impossible for governments to have any access to. If you believe that governments are doing the job of protecting their citizens (and many do), it's entirely reasonable for them to want this type of access.
They have it with the postal service, and analogue phones and the world didn't collapse, and many criminals got caught.
But also for the first time in human history, it's possible to do large-scale surveillance without large-scale human effort. The power of the network goes both ways.
Phone wiretapping (until recently I suppose) and mail inspection required a human to take some action to listen in; you couldn't just monitor everyone's communications. Now you can.
The analogue systems had fundamental limits on how many people could be surveilled, and still we had abuses of the system. The digital system makes you choose between "surveil absolutely everyone all of the time" and "surveil nobody".
Note that you mention the postal service. Remember the Horizon Post Office scandal, where there was a huge swathe of wrongful prosecutions?
Your subtle idea that the comprehension and understanding is the shortcoming of political apparatus is overlooks the million issues as basic healthcare not being addressed. The problem is not understanding, I can assure you of that.
In the distant past technical skill and knowledge was increasing as more and more people used personal computers. Then Steve Jobs invented the smartphone. This caused the world to get dumber and dumber.
>Then Steve Jobs invented the smartphone. This caused the world to get dumber and dumber.
Preposterous. Did the invention of the calculator make people dumber? A smartphone is another tool. Not Steve Jobs's fault people use it for TikTok or gooning instead of studying programming, math, medicine or whatever. Stupid people are gonna be stupid with or without smartphones.
Plus, we already had smartphones before Jobs, they were Pal OS, Windows Mobile or Symbian based.
Readit News
This must be some "technically correct" weasel words bullcrap, as without at least equivalent access there is no chance Apple would be operating in China.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/apple-moves-to-st...
The feature is not named "back door" or "master key". It's a feature of iMessage with various names such as "zero click".
Also note they have created features before that provides law enforcement access to data at different stages of a pipeline.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMessage#Security_and_privacy
Apple (and many other organizations) contracts work out for liability reasons, this is not the first instance of it.
Also note the language - specifically a “back door” or “master key”. If you call it something else, literally anything else, the statement holds up.
Is that even necessary? A gag order means they can't reveal backdoors, and their entire stack is so locked down that discovering them is hard and unlikely.
If there's a gag order, then companies say "we have a gag order". Like Google and Twitter did back in the day when asked. And then immediately started releasing Transparency Report to show how many of the gag orders they receive, so gov't couldn't say "we don't request anything".
https://transparencyreport.google.com/user-data/overview
I suspect that disabling advanced data protection in the UK was meant to let Apple say it was complying as far as it could while fighting the main order.
A future update was going to ask users themselves to disable it in order to continue backing up their phones to iCloud.
They do.
The UK has an uncodified constitution, and this includes the Human Rights Act, which guarantees freedom of expression to UK citizens.
regrettably the latter one may be correct but it'd be nice to see at least some pushback every time this happens.
What did they mean by this
They've been looking to use AI for consumer surveillance; AI user monitoring essentially.
"We can't have a backdoor so we can't use AI to monitor the user"
Turns out it was not 4D chess after all…
I don't think there is much disjoint if you see Trump as a fairly clean break with the cold-war era GOP. The thing is that no one in the US remembers the cold war with pride. The left thinks the cold war was US imperialism. The right kind of agrees, and has moved on to other issues anyways. And Europe nudges, saying: "Hey, you're America. You love fighting cold wars! Remember?"
Too many Europeans are Chomsky-brained and believe that US foreign policy is controlled by the CIA. The reality is that US grand strategy is incoherent and has been for decades. The US doesn't have any actual strategic imperatives at the moment, and it's being pulled in too many different directions. I believe George Friedman argues that this is a recurring pattern in US history, where US foreign policy alternates between listlessness, and maniac focus on some objective (most recently in the wake of 9/11).
It never is. I'm guilty of thinking there's a secret master plan sometimes and there never is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor
The response was essentially: "Why? You are nothing". Britbongs stay losing.
The Brexit negotiations proved to me that the UK government will simply assume they have leverage and try to assert it even when they have none. Combined with the lack of negotiating talent during a high stakes deal created a perfect storm.
I'm not sure what you mean by "more" but what you are asking for is in fact happening.
The position of the US executive on encryption is well summarized by the Lavabit case.
> Trump has also been critical of the UK stance on encryption. The US president has likened the UK’s order to Apple to “something... that you hear about with China,” saying in February that he had told Starmer: “You can’t do this.”
> US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has also suggested the order would be an “egregious violation” of Americans’ privacy that risked breaching the two countries’ data agreement.
I think that’s exactly why I want encryption.
Perhaps he likes the idea of E2E, but just for himself and his friends. I duno, but whatever it is, it's not about the important things after the fact.
When politicians say "we need a special key for police to stop child abuse" it's not that they don't know this means "a backdoor with no technological way to limit its use". On the contrary, they know it very well and it's exactly what they want to achieve under the guise of children protection. It's the public at large that don't understand it -- or so they hope.
Every time ukgov tries to make some sort of tech policy, it's embarassingly wrong, or naive, or both.
This comes from a country that effectively gave away ARM.
https://studee.com/media/mps-and-their-degrees-media
The most popular subjects for MPs who won seats in the Dec 2019 election
Also, the people pushing for these measure (e.g., the U.K's equivalent of the NSA, GCHQ and most national-level police departments) understand these issues perfectly well.
Rupert Murdoch is 94.
"Das Internet ist für uns alle Neuland" Angela Merkel (2013) during a press conference with Obama.
"The internet is uncharted territory for us"
But it’s not like many young adults today who grew up with mobile phones understand computers either. At 51 growing up with computers in the 80s, I find myself explaining what I think should be simple computer concepts to both my parents generation and my adult children.
My 80 year old mom is not a stereotypical old person who doesn’t know how to use a computer. She is a retired math teacher and has actively been using computers since we had an Apple //e in the house running AppleWorks in the mid 80s.
When she was tutoring teenagers mostly as volunteer work after she retired, she had to teach them how to use Office/Gsuite.
Reminder that he's funded by Thiel and friends with Curtis Yarvin, which goals include the end of democracy and the federal state and replace the system with tech CEO kings over feudal states.
It has nothing to do with their technical knowledge. It has everything to do with human nature.
If you want to push back, the law is not on your side.
With a few notable exceptions, the level of knowledge, expertise and understanding amongst government advisers and policy makers is abysmally low. c.f. https://jackgavigan.com/2015/11/23/how-well-advised-was-the-...
The scary thing about the UK regulators is that they seem to understand the stupidity of what they're doing, but believe it's worth it. You see this attitude everywhere in the UK – in our hate speech laws, our blasphemy laws, mass surveillance – the argument isn't that these things don't limit freedom and personal privacy. They'll agree that they do, their argument is that you shouldn't care.
With this encryption backdoor most wouldn't deny that it could be compromised, they just didn't think you should worry about it because they thought the benefits were worth it.
I think people on the internet in the 90s and early 00s were just weird people to be honest. We're very libertarian for whatever reason, and we wrongly assumed people our age were all as pro-freedom as us.
The politicians might not know tech, but the NSA, GHCQ, etc. that push for these anti-encryption laws most definitely do know technology, and is the main lobby against encryption.
It goes beyond just getting politicians that understand tech. We need politicians willing to rein in the intelligence apparatus put in safeguards, and checks and balances on their power.
I recently listened to some clips from a hearing with questions about zero-knowledge proofs, algorithmic transparency, etc...this was pretty unthinkable two decades ago. Some agencies and legislative bodies also now have technical staffers and some advisory boards with technologists. So, yeah it it slow and sometimes frustrating, but it's not static.
Deleted Comment
This is going to be heresy here, but honestly I think it's a reasonable position. Not one I would take, but reasonable.
For the first time in human history there can be large scale communication it is mathematically impossible for governments to have any access to. If you believe that governments are doing the job of protecting their citizens (and many do), it's entirely reasonable for them to want this type of access.
They have it with the postal service, and analogue phones and the world didn't collapse, and many criminals got caught.
Phone wiretapping (until recently I suppose) and mail inspection required a human to take some action to listen in; you couldn't just monitor everyone's communications. Now you can.
The analogue systems had fundamental limits on how many people could be surveilled, and still we had abuses of the system. The digital system makes you choose between "surveil absolutely everyone all of the time" and "surveil nobody".
Note that you mention the postal service. Remember the Horizon Post Office scandal, where there was a huge swathe of wrongful prosecutions?
Preposterous. Did the invention of the calculator make people dumber? A smartphone is another tool. Not Steve Jobs's fault people use it for TikTok or gooning instead of studying programming, math, medicine or whatever. Stupid people are gonna be stupid with or without smartphones.
Plus, we already had smartphones before Jobs, they were Pal OS, Windows Mobile or Symbian based.