On Feb. 13, Senator Ron Wyden and Congressman Andy Biggs—members of their houses’ intelligence and judiciary committees, respectively—wrote to newly installed Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard to ask her to tell the U.K. to retract its demand for full, worldwide user data stored by Apple. If the U.K. does not relent, the U.S. should respond by withholding intelligence sharing and cooperation, they say.
“If Apple is forced to build a backdoor in its products, that backdoor will end up in Americans’ phones, tablets, and computers, undermining the security of Americans’ data, as well as of the countless federal, state and local government agencies that entrust sensitive data to Apple products,” Wyden and Biggs write, the Washington Post reports. “The U.S. government must not permit what is effectively a foreign cyberattack waged through political means.”
“If the U.K. does not immediately reverse this dangerous effort,” they write in their letter to Gabbard, “we urge you to reevaluate U.S.-U.K. cybersecurity arrangements and programs as well as U.S. intelligence sharing with the U.K.”
