Comment by ggm
16 days ago
Rather than break the security promises it made to its users everywhere, Apple is likely to stop offering encrypted storage in the U.K., the people said. Yet that concession would not fulfill the U.K. demand for backdoor access to the service in other countries, including the United States.
Considering that the UK and Aus are both countries that share all their data with the US, I'm surprised at the naivety of the comments here about this.
This is a well worn path for the CIA gather dirt without needing to break any rules on monitoring US citizens.
Jurisdiction, schmurisdiction. What's that, you know?
And that conversation will look something like this:
"If you want to sell phones in our country, you have to give us access to anyone we say is a criminal using your phones in any country".
"You are asking us to break the law in those other countries."
"Do you want to sell phones in our country, or not? We know you'll blink first."
(Will Apple blink? I don't know. But I am confident that the UK government is filled with people who assume they will).
It depends on whether other countries make or enforce conflicting laws. The UK order says they can't tell people after implementing the backdoor that Advanced Data Protection no longer provides the claimed level of security, which is a form of dishonesty that probably violates consumer protection laws in many countries.
And Apple argued to the UK Parliament when the relevant law was being enacted that it violates the right to privacy confirmed by the European Court of Human Rights, which other countries will still be bound by even if the UK follows through on its occasional threat to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights.
The UK doesn't have the geopolitical clout it once did, especially not after Brexit.
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