AINEWS
Apple's complaint at the UK's Investigatory Powers Tribunal, a closed surveillance court, marks the second round in a fight over encrypted iCloud backups, after the first order was dropped under US pressure.
Apple has gone to a closed UK surveillance court to fight a second secret government order demanding access to encrypted iCloud data, according to the Financial Times. The challenge lands roughly nine months after US diplomats helped kill the first one.
The complaint was filed at the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, or IPT, a venue that hears cases about government surveillance powers and has historically kept these disputes out of public view. The order Apple is contesting is a "technical capability notice," a classified instruction that can require a company to hand over user data even when that data is protected by end-to-end encryption. Apple declined to comment. The UK Home Office has not publicly addressed the filing.
The first technical capability notice arrived in early 2025 and targeted the same product: iCloud backups, and specifically the optional Advanced Data Protection setting, which makes those backups readable only by the user. After that order was issued, Apple pulled Advanced Data Protection for UK customers rather than build a way to comply with the demand. The UK government later withdrew the order, a reversal that reporting at the time tied to pressure from the Trump administration.
The second notice came in October 2025, more than six months after the first was dropped. Apple is pushing back through a different procedural lane. The new challenge uses the same legal pathway that Privacy International and Liberty used to force limited disclosure of the earlier dispute. A public judgment from the IPT, IPT-25-68-CH, is the first time the tribunal put its reasoning in the earlier case on the record, and it confirmed that the Home Office can issue these notices in secret and that affected companies are generally barred from disclosing them. That procedural backdrop is what makes round two legible to anyone outside the courtroom.
The recurrence matters because the diplomatic channel that resolved round one did not stop round two. Apple is now forcing a structural test in a venue that critics say was designed to avoid one. Security researchers and civil-liberties groups have long argued that technical capability notices function as de facto backdoors, because the only way to comply with a blanket order against end-to-end encryption is to weaken the encryption for everyone. The UK government has rejected that framing and says the notices are a proportionate law-enforcement tool. The two sides have now spent a year arguing past each other in public while the order itself stays classified.
Same-day coverage from the Guardian and AppleInsider confirms the basic chronology, including the October 2025 notice and the IPT filing, but neither outlet adds new details about which accounts or which categories of data the order targets. The operational scope of the second notice remains undisclosed, and the Home Office's near-silence on technical capability notices makes it unlikely to clarify that scope voluntarily.
Three things to watch: whether the IPT publishes a judgment that puts more of the dispute on the public record, whether the UK government withdraws the order under diplomatic pressure as it did in 2025, and whether Apple restores Advanced Data Protection for UK customers if that happens. Each outcome would reset the same fight, and each would tell readers something different about whether a Western democracy can run a closed legal process against a private company that holds the keys to its citizens' cloud.