Last month, the United Kingdom Home Secretary reportedly demanded access to user data of any Apple customer on the planet. Apple chose to degrade U.K. users' data protection instead of complying with the order. In a letter to the U.S. attorney general this week, Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) expressed concern about the order and requested information on any other recent orders.
"Recent reports suggest that authorities in the United Kingdom (UK) have issued an order to a U.S. company requiring access to all end-to-end encrypted materials of UK users," wrote Paul, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, in a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi. "This action raises significant questions about the integrity of U.S. user data in the context of the Cloud Act and UK statutes."
The Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data (CLOUD) Act, passed in 2018 as part of a 2,000-plus page omnibus spending bill, requires tech companies to provide information about customers to the government when asked, even if that information is stored outside the United States. The Department of Justice later entered into a data sharing agreement with the U.K. under the CLOUD Act.
