Two senior Republican lawmakers are demanding answers from the British government about its secret order forcing Apple to break its own encryption. The UK has until March 11 to respond.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan and Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Brian Mast sent a joint letter on Wednesday to Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, pressing for a formal briefing on the Technical Capability Notice (TCN) served on Apple under the UK’s Investigatory Powers Act.
We obtained a copy of the letter for you here.
It’s the latest move in a surveillance fight that began over a year ago and has rattled the US-UK relationship at the highest levels.
In January 2025, UK security officials secretly ordered Apple to build a backdoor into iCloud that would allow them to decrypt any user’s data, anywhere in the world. Not just suspected criminals, not just UK citizens. Everyone.
The order targeted Apple’s Advanced Data Protection (ADP) feature, the optional end-to-end encryption that ensures even Apple can’t read iCloud backups. Apple’s response was to pull ADP from the UK market entirely in February 2025, stripping strong encryption options from roughly 35 million iPhone users rather than comply with a demand it couldn’t legally discuss.
UK law makes it a criminal offense for companies to confirm or deny the existence of such orders, even to their own government.
Apple couldn’t tell the US Department of Justice that the order existed. The DOJ couldn’t verify whether it complied with the CLOUD Act, the bilateral agreement governing how the two countries share access to digital evidence. That agreement explicitly states it “shall not create any obligation that providers be capable of decrypting data.” The UK’s order appears to do exactly that.
The reaction in Washington was bipartisan. Senator Ron Wyden and Congressman Andy Biggs slammed the order as “effectively a foreign cyber attack waged through political means.”
President Trump compared the UK’s conduct directly to China’s. Speaking to the Spectator after meeting Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Trump said: “We actually told [Starmer] . . . that’s incredible. That’s something, you know, that you hear about with China.” DNI Secretary Tulsi Gabbard called any attempt to compel Apple to create security weaknesses an “egregious violation” of privacy and confirmed legal and intelligence teams were assessing the implications.
Hellbound and Down 