Right thing to do. Utterly stupid and, frankly, counterproductive b y UKGov. Annoy people for negligible security gain when, with a properly issue warrant, Apple will do all it can to help anyway.
with a properly issue warrant, Apple will do all it can to help anyway.
But isn’t the point that, with full encryption, Apple couldn’t do anything to help? So - whether you like it or not - it’s not true to call it pointless.
-------------------------------------------------------------- Obsession is the single most wasteful human activity Norman Mailer
Yep, the whole point of the advanced security option (that surely only a handful of people in the UK were using) was that Apple no longer holds any of the keys for the user's data. The keys only exist on the user's devices.
The only way that Apple would have been able to help when a warrant was served would have been somehow getting a updated and backdoor-ed copy of iOS onto the target's iPhone to grab the plaintext data from there or to swap out the keys. Which would have been challenging if the target phone was locked, unless they have an unpatched jailbreak up their sleeves in the version of iOS on the target's phone.
The advanced security option really does/did go out of its way to put the user's data beyond Apple's reach. And doing so makes a fair few convenient features no longer work, very few people will have jumped through the hoops and hassle to use it (no doubt a few journalists and other likely security service targets did though).