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Title: US Legislators Complain About Secretive British Court and Apple
Encryption

Link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/09/11/1955...

Bruce66423 shares a report from The Guardian: A bipartisan pair of American
politicians is telling Britain's most secretive court to stop hiding its
handling of Apple's legal fight against a government demand to break into its
customers' encrypted data, warning that Whitehall's taste for secrecy is
'needlessly' straining relations between the two allies. The letter (PDF),
shared with the Guardian ahead of being sent to the investigatory powers
tribunal (IPT) on Friday, is signed by the Democratic senator Ron Wyden of
Oregon and the Republican congressman Warren Davidson of Ohio. The row dates
back to January 2025, when the Home Office served Apple with a technical
capability notice under the Investigatory Powers Act, which requires
companies to assist law enforcement in providing evidence. The UK government
demanded that Apple provide a mechanism to access encrypted iCloud backups
worldwide, a call the company met by withdrawing its Advanced Data Protection
encryption feature from UK users the following month. Apple's challenge to
that order at the IPT was later thrown out after the Home Office withdrew the
original notice and issued a narrower one targeting only British users' data.
"It is wholly inappropriate for a foreign executive body to attempt to
dictate the distribution of powers within the US government, nor should it be
permitted to use secrecy directives under the Investigatory Powers Act to
frustrate Article I powers under the US Constitution," the pair wrote. Wyden
and Davidson write that Congress "is not only a co-equal branch of
government, it is the First Branch," and argue that no government can be
allowed to place "its demands beyond the reach of legislative inquiry." "The
UK government," they write, "cannot champion legislative oversight at home
while using administrative gag orders to kneecap the constitutional authority
of the US Congress."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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