// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
Two-Tier Encryption in the UK – Identical Apple Devices, Different Protection
Alice and Bill have identical Apple devices. Only one gets Apple’s strongest iCloud protection.
Here's something odd. Alice and Bill both live in the UK. Both have identical iPhones. Both use iCloud. Both pay Apple for the same services. Alice has Advanced Data Protection switched on, protecting the majority of her iCloud data. Bill doesn’t, and can’t switch it on. Alice enabled it before Apple withdrew the feature for new UK users in February 2025. Bill missed the window.
To understand how this happened, we need to go back over a decade to the aftermath of the Snowden/NSA revelations surrounding PRISM. In January 2014, Tim Cook was interviewed by David Muir for ABC News. Cook said, “We have a gag order on us right now,” but clarified, “there is no back door. The government doesn't have access to our servers. They would have to cart us out in a box for that… we feel that strongly about it."
Nearly two years later, on the 2nd of December 2015, Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik carried out the San Bernardino terrorist attack, killing 14 people and wounding 22. The FBI obtained the iPhone 5C that had been used by Farook. They had a warrant to search the iPhone, but they didn't know the passcode. The FBI obtained a court order to compel Apple to help them into the device. They wanted Apple to create a version of iOS that would remove or circumvent the iPhone's security protections (in particular the limits on passcode attempts). Apple demurred. In an open letter by Tim Cook, he said that the government was asking for something the company simply didn't have, and something it considered "too dangerous to create."
In another interview with ABC's David Muir, Cook gave an impassioned and at times angry defence of Apple's position, describing the requested software as the "equivalent of cancer." He argued that such a tool would function as a “master key” capable of unlocking hundreds of millions of devices, and that once built, there would be no way to guarantee it was only used against that one phone.
In a separate interview for CBS’ 60 minutes, Cook reiterated the underlying principle: "If you put a back door in, then that back door is for everybody. For good guys and bad guys.” James Comey, then Director of the FBI, told 60 Minutes that whilst he was committed to protecting the privacy of Americans, “the notion that we would market devices that would allow someone to place themselves beyond the law troubles me a lot.”
The FBI eventually obtained access using a third party (widely reported to be Cellebrite [1]) and withdrew its legal action against Apple.
Skip forward almost a decade, and on the 7th of February 2025, The Washington Post exclusively revealed that the UK government had ordered Apple to provide access to data protected by its strongest level of iCloud encryption. The UK has powers to make such requests under the Investigatory Powers Act 2016 — the centrepiece of the UK’s modern surveillance law. [2]
One of the mechanisms available under that legislation is called a Technical Capability Notice (a sanitised, bureaucratic euphemism if ever there was one). A Technical Capability Notice (TCN) is a legal instruction that requires a communications / technology provider to maintain or develop the capability to comply with certain requirements (the notice itself doesn’t authorise access to anyone’s data — it just ensures the capability exists for when a specific warrant or authorisation does). Before issuing a TCN, the government is obliged to consider things such as technical feasibility, cost, likely benefits and the number of users affected. A TCN requires approval from a Judicial Comissioner, and the recipient of a TCN is generally gagged from revealing its existence or contents without the UK Secretary of State's permission (the Home Office says it will generally neither confirm nor deny whether a particular TCN exists).
The Post reported that UK security officials had issued such a TCN, in secret, in January 2