Senator Ron Wyden has been a fierce advocate for opposing secret surveillance orders. To make sure his message got out, he wrote an open letter to former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, clarifying his opposition. The Washington Post was first to report the unusual correspondence. It eventually made its way to TechCrunch, calling on Gabbard to disclose information about outlined secret surveillance court orders that affect tech companies.
Note that Wyden is a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee. He is especially worried by what the U.K. government’s recent actions might foreshadow. Under current U.K. law, technology companies like Apple are prohibited from revealing the specifics of any secret surveillance court orders they may receive. That would require Apple to help the U.K. government build a secret backdoor so it could access customer data around the world. This demand raises significant privacy concerns.
Things really heated up when the U.S. government went on the record to criticize the U.K.’s call for a backdoor. According to The Washington Post, the U.K. Home Office sought a secret court order to access end-to-end encrypted cloud data, which would include information stored on iPhone and iPad backups belonging to users globally.
The UK government is backtracking As this controversial story breaks, reports suggest that the British government is backing down. They’re retreating from their call for a backdoor to encrypted services. Despite this latest order, tech companies are still mum on the topic of whether or not they’ve received any order from the U.K. government.
“We have never built any mechanism or ‘backdoor’ to circumvent end-to-end encryption in our products. If we say a product is end-to-end encrypted, it is.” – Karl Ryan
As of last week, at least one major technology firm had publicly confirmed that it has not yet received any such orders from the U.K. Others have decided not to answer questions about potential yields. Specifically, Wyden is seeking to find out whether other companies, including Google, have accepted similar backdoor requests from the U.K. government. He is keen to solicit further information regarding this area.
Google has not responded to our question regarding whether it has received any such demands for a backdoor. This absence of guidance does little to assuage many urgent questions. This silence contributes to the further murkiness of what is already a twisty web of privacy and surveillance rights.
Meta has also weighed in on the matter, stating it has “not received an order to backdoor our encrypted services, like that reported about Apple.” This response from Meta is indicative of a larger outcry from the tech community at-large about the protection of users’ privacy and government overreach.
Calls for transparency are reaching a boiling point. Perhaps most compelling will be the clear, important tension between tech companies’ need to comply with government requests while protecting user privacy.
