American Legislators Call for Transparency in UK Court’s Apple Encryption Dispute

A bipartisan duo of U.S. lawmakers is urging Britain’s highly secretive court to reveal how it is handling Apple’s legal challenge to a government order that would compel the tech giant to break the encryption of its users’ data, cautioning that Whitehall’s penchant for secrecy is needlessly straining the transatlantic partnership.

The letter, which the Guardian obtained prior to its Friday delivery to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), bears the signatures of Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon and Republican Representative Warren Davidson of Ohio.

The dispute originated in January 2025, when the UK Home Office issued Apple a technical capability notice under the Investigatory Powers Act, obliging firms to aid law‑enforcement evidence gathering. The government demanded a backdoor enabling global access to encrypted iCloud backups; Apple responded by disabling its Advanced Data Protection feature for UK customers the next month. Although Apple challenged the order at the IPT, the tribunal dismissed the claim after the Home Office withdrew the original notice and replaced it with a more limited request covering only data belonging to British users.

They argued that it is wholly inappropriate for a foreign executive branch to try to dictate the allocation of powers within the U.S. government, and that secrecy provisions under the Investigatory Powers Act must not be used to undermine the Article I authorities granted to Congress by the U.S. Constitution.

The Home Office has been contacted for a response.

In August, Apple filed a new complaint with the tribunal contesting the government’s authority to issue such notices altogether, with a case‑management hearing scheduled for this month to determine how the claim will proceed—the same hearing the latest letter seeks to influence.

Wyden and Davidson had previously co‑signed a letter to the tribunal in March 2025, joined by other legislators, urging that the proceedings be held in public. That effort appears to have made an impact: a few weeks later the IPT overturned the government’s bid to keep the case wholly confidential, deciding that the basic facts of Apple’s claim—including the parties involved—could be disclosed after considering submissions that, the tribunal observed, “strongly advocated for open justice and opposed conducting the proceedings in secret.”

In the latest correspondence, Wyden and Davidson assert that Congress “is not merely a co‑equal branch of government; it is the First Branch,” and maintain that no government may shield its demands from legislative scrutiny. They accuse the Home Office of attempting to employ a foreign secrecy order to supersede the constitutional authority of the U.S. legislature, noting that Apple informed Congress it had been allowed to brief only the Attorney General, the Vice President and their staff—but not the lawmakers themselves—about the matter.

They contend that Britain’s own constitutional traditions insist that no government may exempt its actions from legislative oversight—the very principle, they argue, that the Home Office is now breaching.

They write that “the UK government cannot tout legislative oversight domestically while employing administrative gag orders to undermine the constitutional authority of the U.S. Congress.”

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