Court rules UK Home Office’s legal battle with Apple over data must be conducted in public – SiliconANGLE

The U.K.’s Investigatory Powers Tribunal today rejected a bid from the Home Office to keep an ongoing case against Apple Inc. over iPhone users’ encrypted data away from the eyes of the public.

The Home Office is fighting to access information secured by Apple’s Advanced Data Protection (ADP) system, citing the Investigatory Powers Act, which it hopes will force Apple to open a technical “backdoor.” This has drawn criticism from privacy advocates and a handful of U.S. politicians.

The U.K. government had said that the case is sensitive and should be conducted in private, citing national security issues. Judges Rabinder Singh and Judge Jeremy Johnson didn’t see it that way, stating that keeping the case behind closed doors would have interfered with the 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,” they explained. “For the reasons that are set out in our private judgment, 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.”

The Home Office didn’t comment on the proceedings but doubled down on previous claims that backdoors are required to investigate terrorists, pedophiles, and other serious criminals. Governments in Europe have for a long time been critical of tech firms’ end-to-end encryption, believing it helps criminals evade detection.

Since the U.K. introduced the Investigatory Powers Act 2016, the government has been able to request data through a Technical Capability Notice. As a result, Apple was forced to remove ADP from the U.K., but said that it has “never built a backdoor or master key to any of our products or services and we never will.”

“This is bigger than the U.K. and Apple,” said Jim Killock, Executive Director of Open Rights Group. “The Court’s judgment will have implications for the privacy and security of millions of people around the world. Such an important decision cannot be made behind closed doors and we welcome the IPT’s decision to bring parts of the hearing into the open so that there can be some public scrutiny of the UK government’s decisions to attack technologies that keep us safe online.”

Photo: Unsplash