Comment by perdomon

It is "just" the domestic intelligence agency ordering Apple to backdoor their own system be able to supply data for lawful interception. As I read the article, it's not a UK backdoor in the sense they can roam around in every users data. The domestic agencies still need to follow the rules of lawful interception, namely they need a warrant, and it is targeted at UK nationals only. At least that is how I read the article.

This isn't warrant-less, it's with a warrant. This isn't really a change the UK, it's the UK trying to adapt to the proliferation of E2E encryption - ten years ago, law enforcement could always access your messages, now the default if you're on whatsapp/iMessage is they can't because E2E is on by default. UK lawmakers aren't happy with a default position of the state being totally incapable of reading messages, no matter what the law says.

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

Labour Party was elected six months ago. It is doubling down on existing government surveillance policy as a cure-all weapon to investigate and chill opposition, and to humble foreign tech companies.

Nothing's changed, they just want the same access to people's data they've always had. They loved completely unencrypted text messages.

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.

This is part and parcel of the collapse of western capitalism (aka American empire). You get two main choices when capitalism fails - fascism or communism/socialism. It's clear that the UK has chosen fascism (either liberals like Labor or extreme right like Reform).

Uncontrolled immigration and terrorist threat, but also probably they want to look at people's nudes. Jolly lot.