A bipartisan pair of American politicians is telling Britain\u2019s most secretive court to stop hiding its handling of Apple\u2019s legal fight against a government demand to break into its customers\u2019 encrypted data, warning that Whitehall\u2019s taste for secrecy is \u201cneedlessly\u201d straining relations between the two allies.<\/p>\n
The letter<\/a>, shared with the Guardian ahead of being sent to the investigatory powers tribunal (IPT) on Friday, is signed by the Democratic senator Ron Wyden of Oregon and the Republican congressman Warren Davidson of Ohio.<\/p>\n The row dates back to January 2025, when the Home Office served Apple with a technical capability notice under the Investigatory Powers Act, which requires companies to assist law enforcement in providing evidence. The UK government demanded<\/a> that Apple provide a mechanism to access encrypted iCloud backups worldwide, a call the company met by withdrawing its Advanced Data Protection encryption feature from UK users the following month. Apple\u2019s challenge to that order at the IPT was later thrown out after the Home Office withdrew the original notice and issued a narrower one targeting only British users\u2019 data.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is wholly inappropriate for a foreign executive body to attempt to dictate the distribution of powers within the US government, nor should it be permitted to use secrecy directives under the Investigatory Powers Act to frustrate Article I powers under the US Constitution,\u201d the pair wrote.<\/p>\n In August this year, Apple lodged a fresh complaint<\/a> at the tribunal challenging the government\u2019s power to issue such notices at all, with a case-management hearing on how that claim will proceed now listed for this month \u2013 the very hearing the new letter is aimed at.<\/p>\n Wyden and Davidson also signed an earlier letter to the tribunal in March 2025, alongside other lawmakers, pressing for the case to be heard in public. That intervention appears to have had an effect: weeks later the IPT rejected<\/a> the government\u2019s attempt to keep the case entirely secret, ruling that the \u201cbare details\u201d of Apple\u2019s claim, including the identities of the parties, could be made public after receiving representations that, the tribunal noted, \u201cstrongly argued in favour of open justice and against the proceedings taking place in secret\u201d.<\/p>\n In the new letter, Wyden and Davidson write that Congress \u201cis not only a co-equal branch of government, it is the First Branch\u201d, and argue that no government can be allowed to place \u201cits demands beyond the reach of legislative inquiry\u201d. They accuse the Home Office of trying to use a foreign secrecy order to override the constitutional powers of the US legislature, after Apple told Congress it had been permitted to brief only the attorney general, the vice-president and their staff \u2013 but not lawmakers \u2013 about the dispute.<\/p>\n They argue that Britain\u2019s own constitutional traditions hold that no government can place its actions beyond the reach of legislative scrutiny \u2013 the same principle, they say, the Home Office is now violating.<\/p>\n