Britain tried to force a backdoor into Apple’s encryption last year and lost. It has not given up. It has narrowed the demand, served it again, and Apple is back in a secret court to fight it.
Apple has filed a fresh challenge at the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, the closed UK court for secret-surveillance cases, the Financial Times first reported. The complaint targets a “technical capability notice,” a secret order that can force a company to strip encryption from its products. Apple confirmed the filing but, like the Home Office, cannot say more; the law forbids it. A hearing follows in September.
The fight began in early 2025. The Home Office ordered Apple to break the encryption on iCloud’s Advanced Data Protection, the setting that locks a user’s photos and backups so tightly that not even Apple can read them. That order reached beyond Britain to users worldwide, Americans included.
Rather than build the backdoor, Apple switched the feature off for UK users in February 2025.
The quieter second attempt
Then came a transatlantic row. US officials, among them Donald Trump and JD Vance, objected to a foreign government weakening an American company’s security.
Last August, Britain dropped the demand for Americans’ data. It did not drop the demand itself. It reissued the notice, aimed this time only at UK users, and that narrower order is what Apple is now challenging.
Trimming the order calms the diplomacy without solving the problem. A backdoor built for British users is still a backdoor. A lawyer at Withers put it plainly: restricting the notice to Britons may cool the US row, but it will not erase Washington’s concern about a foreign state forcing an American firm to weaken its own encryption.
And British data routinely holds Americans’ messages anyway.
The same argument, again
Apple’s line has not moved. “We have never built a backdoor or master key to any of our products or services, and we never will,” the company has said. The argument is technical, not sentimental. A door built for the government is a door that bad actors will eventually walk through too.
The Home Office frames it as balance. It “supports strong encryption,” a spokesperson said, but law enforcement must reach communications “when necessary and proportionate” to fight terrorism, serious crime and child sexual abuse. The Investigatory Powers Act, it says, carries independent judicial oversight.
The rights groups Liberty and Privacy International, both backing Apple, call the same system a regime of secret orders.
The secrecy is the fight. The government issues these notices in the dark and argues them in a closed court. Neither side may confirm the details. What is public is the pattern.
Britain wants into encrypted data. It keeps hearing the same answer: it cannot have that without breaking security for everyone. And it keeps asking in a quieter voice. It has already cost UK iPhone owners a security feature. The next ruling decides whether it costs them more.
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