‘That’s something you hear about with China’. Trump criticizes UK’s plan for an iCloud backdoor

United States President Donald Trump isn’t too keen on the United Kingdom’s demand for disabling Apple’s iCloud end-to-end encryption feature, and says it’s something you’d expect from Beijing.

Last Thursday, President Trump and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer met at the White House to discuss the war in Ukraine and negotiate a bilateral trade agreement.

Another topic that popped up during the talks was the UK government’s order to force Apple to create a backdoor to access users’ end-to-end encrypted iCloud backups. To do that, Apple would have to disable a security feature called Advanced Data Protection (ADP).

In an interview with political magazine The Spectator, Trump reacted surprised to the British Prime Minister’s demand.

“We told them you can’t do this… We actually told him [Starmer]… That’s incredible. That’s something, you know, that you hear about with China.”

Recently, Apple decided to disable ADP for new users in the United Kingdom, saying it would never build a backdoor or master key to any of its products or services. “Apple remains committed to offering our users the highest level of security for their personal data and are hopeful that we will be able to do so in the future in the United Kingdom,” the company stated.

Meanwhile, Tulsi Gabbard, the U.S. director of national intelligence, has announced an investigation into possible violation of the CLOUD Act by the UK government.

The CLOUD Act is a bilateral agreement the U.S. has agreed upon with several countries, including the United Kingdom, offering U.S. intelligence agencies the opportunity to request data from U.S. citizens that is stored in other countries, and vice versa.

“Our intelligence relationships with foreign partners are of vital importance to our national security, however, my obligations as Director of National Intelligence include protecting both the security of our country and the God-given rights of the American people enshrined in the U.S. Constitution,” Gabbard wrote in a letter addressed to Senator Ron Wyden and Representative Andy Biggs (R-AZ).