What's there to do when the law gives you a choice between doing the wrong thing and doing something even worse? That's the conundrum Apple found itself in, trying to comply with Britain's Orwell-inspired Investigatory Powers Act — but there are even bigger issues at stake that I'll return to later in this column. 

What the British government wanted was a secret backdoor — how secret, I'll get to momentarily — into every iPhone in the world. What it's getting is Apple turning off Advanced Data Protection for its British users. Under the Investigatory Powers Act, encryption is essentially illegal without tech firms giving the government a key (aka, a backdoor) to unlock whatever it wants, without users knowing.

Apple's Advanced Data Protection (ADP) "protects iCloud data with end-to-end encryption, which means the data can only be decrypted by the user who owns it, and only on their trusted devices."

Apple explained that it can no longer offer ADP "to new users and current UK users will eventually need to disable this security feature."

Because it was either that or Apple could give users encryption that isn't any good because of the giant hole punched through user privacy by the Investigatory Powers Act. The worst part? Tech firms aren't allowed to tell users that their privacy protections in Britain are now the digital equivalent of a screen door when they used to have a bank vault.

Those are terrible choices, but at least UK users won't be lied to about the security of their cloud storage. 

"We are gravely disappointed that the protections provided by ADP will not be available to our customers in the UK," the company explained, "given the continuing rise of data breaches and other threats to customer privacy. Enhancing the security of cloud storage with end-to-end encryption is more urgent than ever before."

And Another Thing: Neither Google (which makes the popular Android operating system) nor Samsung (which is a huge global seller of Android phones) has had anything to say about Britain's privacy-busting law. Maybe that's because of the embedded gag order. Maybe that's because they're in full compliance, and now Samsung phones around the world are subject to Britain's backdoor. I have no idea which.

Apple says that encryption protections remain in place for certain services, specifically for iCloud Keychain (which shares your passwords across your devices), the Health app, Messages, and FaceTime. Everything else, from British users' cloud storage to photos and even bookmarks, will soon become fully readable by British authorities.

"We have never built a backdoor or master key to any of our products or services and we never will" is how Apple wrapped up its announcement. 

You might notice something is missing from that statement. Apple said nothing about the law that Britain forced it to comply with... because the Investigatory Powers Act forbids it from talking publicly about the Investigatory Powers Act. Convenient, eh? Nowhere in the world can Apple (or any other company affected by it) explain its compliance with the Investigatory Powers Act without facing sanctions in Britain.

London is, in effect, exporting censorship, just like His Majesty's government tried to force spyware into every iPhone.

Our special relationship with Britain  — despite Winston Churchill's wry joke about us being "two peoples separated by a common language" — was built on a shared culture of liberty. Americans began feeling all revolutionary when London trod on their English liberties. That shared foundational principle was the basis of Anglo-American relations for a century or more. Just last week, I warned that Europe's increasing authoritarianism is a genuine risk to our alliances, and nowhere is that more true than in Britain. 

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