US lawmakers press British tribunal to open Apple encryption case

Bipartisan letter accuses Home Office of trying to override Congress’s powers

Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon and Republican Congressman Warren Davidson of Ohio sent the letter to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal on Friday, arguing that Whitehall’s taste for secrecy was “needlessly” straining relations between the two allies. The letter, shared with the Guardian ahead of being sent, called on Britain’s “most secretive court” to stop hiding its handling of Apple’s fight against the UK government’s demand to break into encrypted customer data.

The dispute stretches 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 that Apple provide a mechanism to access encrypted iCloud backups worldwide. Apple responded in February 2025 by withdrawing its Advanced Data Protection feature — which had offered end-to-end encryption for iCloud backups — from UK users.

Apple’s challenge to the original order at the tribunal was later thrown out after the Home Office withdrew the notice and replaced it with a narrower one targeting only British users’ data. In August 2026, however, Apple lodged a fresh complaint at the tribunal challenging the government’s power to issue such notices at all. A case-management hearing on how that broader claim will proceed is now scheduled for this month — the very hearing the new US letter is aimed at.

In the letter, Wyden and Davidson wrote that it 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.” Article I of the Constitution vests legislative authority in Congress.

The lawmakers also signed an earlier letter to the tribunal in March 2025, alongside other members of Congress, pressing for the case to be heard in public. That intervention appeared to have an effect: weeks later the tribunal rejected the government’s attempt to keep the case entirely secret, ruling that the “bare details” of Apple’s claim — including the identities of the parties — could be made public after receiving representations that, the tribunal noted, “strongly argued in favour of open justice and against the proceedings taking place in secret.”

In the new letter, Wyden and Davidson argue that Congress “is not only a co-equal branch of government, it is the First Branch,” and that no government can be allowed to place “its demands beyond the reach of legislative inquiry.” 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 — but not lawmakers — about the dispute.

They argue that Britain’s own constitutional traditions hold that no government can place its actions beyond the reach of legislative scrutiny — the same principle, they say, the Home Office is now violating. “The UK government,” they wrote, “cannot champion legislative oversight at home while using administrative gag orders to kneecap the constitutional authority of the US Congress.”

The September hearing is expected to determine how Apple’s broader challenge to the Home Office’s underlying authority to issue technical capability notices will proceed. Apple lodged the new complaint in August after its earlier challenge to the original order was thrown out when the Home Office withdrew that notice and replaced it with a narrower version limited to British users.