Apple has mounted a new legal challenge to the UK government’s demand for access to its customers’ encrypted data, months after it stripped a security feature from British accounts rather than meet an earlier version of the same request.
The company lodged a complaint last month with the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, an independent court that hears allegations of unlawful conduct by UK intelligence agencies.
The question before the tribunal is whether the government can compel Apple to open up iCloud data protected by encryption strong enough that Apple itself cannot read it.
A court order records that the Home Office made a second attempt to obtain backdoor access to encrypted iCloud material belonging to British users.
From a global demand to a domestic one
Ministers retreated from their original demand last year following a bruising row with Washington. That first order, served under the Investigatory Powers Act in January 2025, reached across both UK and US customer data.
Officials then narrowed the scope, issuing a fresh “technical capability notice” later in 2025 that applied only to UK users. That is the order now under challenge.
Notices of this kind require companies to surrender information to law enforcement in cases including terrorism and child sexual abuse, encryption notwithstanding.
Apple’s argument
Apple has maintained for years that it will not engineer any form of compelled access into its products, arguing that once such a mechanism exists it endangers every user rather than only the subjects of a particular request.
After the original order arrived in February 2025, the company withdrew Advanced Data Protection from customers in the UK. The optional feature layers end-to-end encryption on top of iCloud’s standard protection, covering device backups, photos and notes, and secures data so completely that Apple has no means of reading it. Availability can be limited by account region and country settings, in the same way as other region-specific features.
A process conducted in the dark
Technical capability notices are legally secret. A company served with one is barred from confirming that it exists, and the government habitually refuses to discuss individual cases, pointing to national security.
That secrecy forms a large part of the case made by campaign groups, which contend that surveillance powers on this scale warrant far more public examination than the present legal framework permits.
