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Comment by robbomacrae | Hacker News Reader

“Kier Starmer seemed to actually be doing OK” as someone who voted for his Labour I was immediately regretting it when they tried to force Apple to open a backdoor and they are still trying! https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/10/uk-still-trying-backdo...

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Your single-issue concerns are valid, but most people view an executive office's performance as a holistic union of their stances on issues.

I’m not a single issue voter but the sheer incompetence of this particular decision is just too damning. It rightly caused friction with our 5 eyes partners. I would expect readers of hackernews to appreciate how dumb and impossible the request was.

> "It rightly caused friction with our 5 eyes partners"

That is such a weird take. "It rightly caused friction with Privacy International" might be a better position to take ;)

We were demanding the ability to spy on the citizens of our closest allies.

That is the entire point of FiveEyes. That is a feature.

The US is technically not allowed to spy on it's own citizens. However, legally speaking, if the UK spies on your citizens and forwards whatever is interesting, it's not the US spying on it's own citizens.

You say this like the FBI hasn't asked Apple for a back door before here in the US

Then why (and I'm not saying I like the guy) did JD Vance come out so publicly against it? I mean you could certainly argue that was all theater and the UK was indeed doing the US's bidding but at some point you have to apply Occam's razor. The end result is Apple don't offer Advanced Data Protection (encryption) to UK users iCloud backups so its not like that "feature" has worked out.

> I mean you could certainly argue that was all theater

It was all theatre.

Privacy concerns have pretty broad opposition in the UK, unfortunately.

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