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Donald Trump’s national intelligence director has hit out at Yvette Cooper’s “egregious” order for Apple to develop an iPhone backdoor, opening a rift between the Home Office and the US security services.
Tulsi Gabbard said the secret UK order “could undermine Americans’ privacy” and put “civil liberties at risk” and threatened to “open up a serious vulnerability for cyber exploitation”.
She promised to press British officials about the order and said she would investigate whether it was legal under US-UK data sharing laws.
It is the first criticism of the Home Office’s actions to emerge from the Trump administration since the Home Secretary’s demands emerged earlier this month.
Apple removed its Advanced Data Protection (ADP) feature from British iPhones last week after the Home Office issued the company with a secret notice ordering it to develop a way to break the encryption that protects iCloud backups.
The company said it would rather remove the feature in Britain than build a backdoor, which would have allowed security services to access details of suspected criminals. It argues that complying with the notice would endanger the privacy of all users.
Responding to a letter from US politicians raising concerns about the move, Ms Gabbard wrote: “I share your grave concern about the serious implications of the United Kingdom, or any foreign country, requiring Apple or any company to create a backdoor that would allow access to Americans’ personal encrypted data.
“This would be a clear and egregious violation of Americans’ privacy and civil liberties and open up a serious vulnerability for cyber exploitation by adversarial actors.”
Ms Gabbard said she had not been made aware of the order by the UK Government or Apple itself and that she had directed a “senior intelligence community officer” to assess the order’s implications.
She added that lawyers were assessing the order’s compliance with the US-UK Cloud Act agreement, which restricts what data each country can request about the other’s citizens.
“Any information sharing between a government – any government – and private companies must be done in a manner that respects and protects the US law and the constitutional rights of US citizens,” she wrote.
ADP fully encrypts iCloud backups of content such as messages, photos and notes. This provides greater security but also means Apple is unable to hand that data over to law enforcement when requested.
The feature was an opt-in extra until Friday, when Apple said it was no longer able to offer it in the UK. Surveillance laws prevent the Home Office or Apple confirming the existence of a notice to access data.