Apple May Have To Stop Selling iPhone In The UK If Surveillance Law Passes

I know, that headline is quite the starting point, but stay with me here, there’s some real possibility in this. First, here’s the tweet from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales which inspired me to write this

                                         https://twitter.com/jimmy_wales

Here’s the deal. The UK government is trying to pass legislation that will prevent anyone from using strong encryption. What it means is “any encryption we can’t break is banned”. So Apple AAPL +0.82%, which has great security and makes it quite clear that it doesn’t want to see users data, will have to make a decision.

The options for Apple and WhatsApp, Facebook FB -0.98%, Snapchat and any other service that encrypts user chats will be the following:

• Let the UK government in through a back door
• Do not use encryption for messaging

• Do not allow UK citizens access to your product or service.
•  

To be quite clear, Apple can happily manage without the UK and barely notice a dent in its profits. Losing Europe would hurt, but the UK alone it could quite easily deal with. Europe, it seems, isn’t so interested in spying on its citizens. On the other hand,  I suspect losing Apple would damage the UK economy quite a bit, Apple employs a lot of people here and a good many of us use Apple products to get our work done.

Even if Apple did agree to restrict the access of UK citizens to secure, encrypted services, it would have to warn every other person about that. If a U.S. citizen was using iMessage with a UK citizen the US user would need to be warned that their chat was not secure, and could be read by law-enforcement officials. Bear in mind here that no court order is needed for this as the legislation stands currently, ministers can sign off on access with no judicial oversight.

Why is the government doing this? Well, it’s the same old chestnut, here’s what David Cameron said Monday on UK show This Morning: “As prime minister, I would say to people, ‘Please let’s not have a situation where we give terrorists, criminals, child abductors, safe spaces to communicate.”

This is, of course, misdirection. Terrorists, criminals and child abductors will simply encrypt their own data. This is so utterly basic that if the UK government can’t consider it, I really don’t know what hope we have. One VPN connection and you’re able to prevent your ISP from seeing what you do, and thus the government.

You simply can’t stop criminals from building their own systems to avoid the law. We’ve known this since the Enigma machine in WWII, and although the systems are more complicated now, they’re also available to all.

So will Apple stop selling the iPhone in the UK? Well, it strikes me it’s the most likely option. Giving UK law enforcement free reign to encrypted services would be incredibly unpalatable to Apple as it would affect US customers.

What the British people need is large tech companies to speak up now. We can’t allow technologically ignorant politicians to trample all over the right of privacy because they haven’t had the internet properly explained to them. If Apple were to speak with David Cameron and explain what’s at stake, perhaps that would be enough to reverse this madness.