The United Kingdom has a problem with the U.S.: It’s that pesky Bill of Rights and our refusal to surrender our rights to Britain’s censorship and due-process-busting domestic spying schemes.
Enter, stage right: Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.
I reported earlier this week that 4chan’s notorious internet pranksters hired a couple of big-name law firms, after Britain threatened the American-based company with a £20,000 fine, followed by hefty daily fines, if the group failed to impose Britain’s censorship rules on 4chan’s users everywhere in the world — including in the U.S.
4chan’s representation called the actions of Britain’s Office of Communications (Ofcom) an “illegal campaign of harassment against American technology firms.”
But Britain’s censorious Online “Safety” Act of 2023 isn’t the only foreign threat to American freedoms. They also have their Orwell-inspired Investigatory Powers Act, which pitted His Majesty’s Craptaculent Government up against one of the biggest companies in the world: Apple.
And Another Thing: I was as shocked as anyone to learn that 4chan is incorporated.
Back in February, Britain ordered Apple to create a backdoor in its iPhone operating system, allowing British authorities to snoop on the entire contents of anyone’s iPhone, anywhere in the world — without a warrant, without notification, without nothin’.
Arguably worse, under the Investigatory Powers Act, Apple was forbidden to even tell British users that their privacy was compromised by force of law. Apple calls its end-to-end iPhone encryption — that means nobody can see your data but you — Advanced Data Protection (ADP), and they weren’t about to have some Limeys break it for a billion users around the world.
Britain’s hope was that Apple would quietly corrupt user privacy without anyone being the wiser, but rather than destroy user privacy, Apple did what I called “the best wrong thing.” Instead of giving London the key to every iPhone in the world, in February the company warned British users that they would soon lose ADP and their privacy, too.
Apple explained that it would no longer offer ADP “to new users and current UK users will eventually need to disable this security feature.” That’s a terrible thing to have to do, but at least UK users weren’t lied to about the security of their cloud and on-device storage.
“We are gravely disappointed that the protections provided by ADP will not be available to our customers in the UK,” the company explained, “given the continuing rise of data breaches and other threats to customer privacy. Enhancing the security of cloud storage with end-to-end encryption is more urgent than ever before.”
President Donald Trump and Apple CEO Tim Cook have worked closely together in the past, despite some yuge political differences. So it came as no surprise that the administration stood (and still stands) firm alongside Cupertino in protecting Americans’ rights against British predations — with echoes of 1776.
Trump sicced Tulsi on the Brits. Wisely, after months of wrangling behind closed doors, the Brits finally caved.
“Neither the U.S. nor U.K. governments have made any formal announcement about the matter,” Apple Insider reported, but “given the secretive way the U.K. has tried to handle the matter, there may not even be any confirmation on that side of the Atlantic.”
We don’t yet know what went on between Trump, JD Vance, Gabbard, and their UK counterparts, but we can see the result.
“Over the past few months, I’ve been working closely with our partners in the U.K., alongside POTUS and VPOTUS,” Gabbard posted to X yesterday, “to ensure Americans’ private data remains private and our Constitutional rights and civil liberties are protected.”
“As a result, the UK has agreed to drop its mandate for Apple to provide a ‘back door’ that would have enabled access to the protected encrypted data of American citizens and encroached on our civil liberties.”
With that out of the way, Apple might be able to re-enable ADP for UK users, although that part remains unclear at the time of this writing.
Regardless, Americans got a big win today, courtesy of Cupertino and the Trump White House.
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