In 2025, tensions have intensified between people's rights to privacy and growing demands from governments to access people's personal data.
During the year, Computer Weekly was the first to publish several stories about the Home Office's attempts to order Apple to give the British government access to encrypted data stored in Apple's iCloud Advanced Data Protection (ADP) service.
Computer Weekly, along with other news publications and broadcasters, filed legal submissions to successfully argue that the hearing should be held in open court after it was revealed that Investigative Powers Tribunal (IPT) had cryptically listed the hearings into action.
Britain's intervention sparked an international row between US politicians, who were outraged that Britain technical capability notice (TCN) will give the UK government access to the private data of US citizens, which will ultimately force the UK to narrow its demands. Further court hearings are likely to take place next year. civil society groups without Apple's participation.
An attempt by the European Union (EU) to require technology companies providing encrypted chat and messaging services to install technology that scans messages before encrypting them has sparked a backlash from technology and security experts who warned it would weaken security. Further attempts by the EU to reintroduce the version Chat management expected in 2026.
We also reported Europol's attempts to develop artificial intelligence (AI) systems analyze huge amounts of data secretly seized during international police operations against cryptophone networks. EncroChat And Sky ECC. Our report highlights Europol's troubled relationship with European Data Protection Supervisor and expressed concern about the lack of transparency on the part of the political agency.
Computer Weekly also interviewed a GCHQ historian. Dave Abrutat And Dame Muffy Calderhead of the Regulator's Technical Advisory Panel (TAP), sheds light on previously overlooked aspects of intelligence gathering and oversight, both current and historical.
This described by critics as a data capture and surveillance strategy. Europol calls Strategic Goal 1: Become the EU's “crime intelligence hub” through a mass data collection strategy.
From 2021, The Hague-based EU law enforcement agency has embarked on an increasingly ambitious but largely secret mission to develop automated models that will impact policing across Europe.
Based on internal documents obtained from Europol and analyzed by data protection and artificial intelligence experts, the investigation raises serious questions about the implications of the agency's artificial intelligence program for people's privacy. It also raises questions about the impact of integrating automated technology into daily policing across Europe without adequate oversight.
In November, a London court heard that Security service MI5 made 'multiple' illegal bids for phone data in an attempt to identify the former BBC journalist's confidential sources.
An investigative tribunal has heard that MI5 unlawfully requested telephone records of reporter Vincent Kearney on “at least” four occasions between 2006 and 2009 while he was working for the BBC in Northern Ireland.
Jude Bunting CC, representing the BBC and Kearney, told the tribunal that MI5 must disclose whether it carried out further surveillance of Kearney and other BBC journalists for legitimate reasons.
In March IPT took unusual step of publishing notice of closed hearingA few days after the information was leaked, it was revealed that Apple intended to appeal the secret order.
Press and civil society groups later asked the tribunal, which rules on national security matters, to hold the hearing in open court given the important public interest involved in the case and the fact that the government order had been widely publicized.
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper's decision issue a TCN requiring Apple Giving UK law enforcement and intelligence agencies behind-the-scenes access to data stored by Apple customers on an encrypted version of its iCloud service has heightened tensions between the UK and the US.
In September we reported that a lawyer representing Hamas in a UK court case was seeking a judicial review to challenge North Wales police after he was stopped and questioned and his mobile phone was confiscated.
Lawyer Fahad Ansari, an Irish national, was detained for almost three hours after being stopped under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000, which allows police to seize and copy electronic devices at UK borders without reason to suspect.
By chance is meant For the first time, police used Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act to seize a phone belonging to a lawyer. in the UK.
Ansari filed a judicial review claim against the Chief Constable of North Wales Police and the Home Office.
US lawmakers criticize UK Home Office for “an attempt to silence” American companies preventing them from telling Congress whether they were subject to secret UK orders requiring them to hand over their users' data.
In an unprecedented intervention, five lawmakers from both sides of the US political divide, led by Senator Ron Wyden, wrote to the IPT in March accusing the British government of undermining congressional oversight and limiting the freedom of speech of US companies.
Their letter arrived as IPT was preparing to listen to Apple's arguments behind closed doorswhich challenged the notice seeking to expand existing UK law enforcement access to encrypted data stored by customers on Apple's iCloud service anywhere in the world to its ADP users who choose to store encryption keys privately on their devices.
In February, a little-known British government committee was asked to advise Home Secretary Yvette Cooper. on whether to comply with government demands that Apple provide British agents with a secret backdoor to hack the company's iCloud ADP system, allowing British spies to secretly copy and read users' personal data.
A government committee called the Technical Advisory Board (TAB) is tasked with reviewing secret legal orders given to Internet communications companies to surveil their users and copy their emails and files or monitor their calls and videos. Inquiries from Computer Weekly surprisingly revealed that the Home Office had not renewed the contracts of TAB members.
For Dame Muffy Calder and the small team of scientists, former spies and technology experts who advise Britain's intelligence watchdog on technology developments, their work is all about “trust”.
Calder, a distinguished computer scientist whose research interests include artificial intelligenceComputer Modeling and Automated Reasoning, is Chairman Technical Advisory Groupa group of six experts tasked with advising the UK watchdog.
TAP's role is to advise Investigative Powers Commissioner Office (IPCO)overseen by Brian Leveson in his role as Inquiry Commissioner, and nine judicial commissioners who provide independent oversight of the use of intrusive surveillance powers by police and intelligence agencies.
Could this small group of experts act as an effective counterweight to organizations such as GCHQ, MI5 and MI6, which had total budget £4.5bn in 2024-25?
The European Commission was accused of falsifying the selection process for the next European data protection watchdog in favor of its own candidate, according to a complaint lodged with the European Ombudsman and published in Computer Weekly.
The complaint, filed by privacy experts Maria Farrell, Dau Korff and Ian Brown, alleged “procedural irregularities” in the panel's process, including a lack of transparency regarding the selection criteria for shortlisted candidates, the identity of the selection committee and why certain decisions were made.
Canadian businessman Thomas Herdman awaits trial in France for his alleged role in the distribution of modified smartphones with the Sky ECC application installed.
The 63-year-old was arrested in June 2021 despite cooperating with US investigators over his involvement with encrypted communications firm Sky ECC. Since then he has spent 45 months in pre-trial detention.
Computer Weekly spoke with Herdman's daughter, Julie Kawai Herdman, who maintains her father is innocent, citing inaccuracies in the evidence and flawed legal processes.
During World War II, there were approximately 250 signals intelligence sites in Great Britain.from as far south as Cornwall to as far north as Orkney.
Many important sites are now in danger of disappearing: they will either be demolished for housing, or simply left to decay, their significance lost to history.
Dave Abrutat, GCHQ's official historian, is on a mission to preserve this history before it is lost and people's memories forgotten.
Abrutat estimates that since the First World War tens of thousands of people have worked in signals intelligence and communications security in organizations as diverse as the Post Office, the Admiralty, the Royal Signals Service and the Foreign Office, as well as at US Air Force installations such as Chicksands in Bedfordshire, famous for its elephant cage radio.
