The United Kingdom has issued a secret order to Apple. It wants the corporation to build a backdoor for Britain’s security services that it could use to access the cloud accounts of any iPhone user across the planet.
As first reported by The Washington Post, Britain issued the order in secret last month. The U.K. isn’t looking to root around in a specific account for a specific security reason. No, it wants free access to all a user’s encrypted material, full stop. The U.K is making the demand under a 2016 law called the Investigatory Powers Act, derisively known as the Snooper’s Charter.
That’s weird coming from the UK. Expect that to be an American thing.
When the Snowden Revelations came out, the US rolled back some of the surveillance, whilst in the UK which had even more invasive surveillance than the US, they got the editor of the newspaper which brought out the Revelations fired and passed a law to retroactively make all those practices legal.
This is now at all weird coming from the UK, quite the contrary - it’s totally expected since they’re worse than the US.
Maybe you’re confusing the much higher quality of image management of the UK (in the country that created the word “posh”, projecting the right appearance is traditionally a speciality of the upper classes over there) than in the US with the reality of Britain when it comes to civil society surveillance and democratic practices in general - Britain is pretty close the Stasi East-Germany when it comes to the established powers keeping an eye on the riff-raff.