(Feb 8): The UK government’s attempt to get Apple Inc to build a backdoor into customer data stored on its cloud system is alarming privacy advocates and US government leaders who warn that the move could expose users’ information worldwide.

British authorities asked Apple to circumvent the encryption it uses to secure user data stored in its cloud services as part of an undisclosed order in January, Bloomberg previously reported. The UK’s Investigatory Powers Act gives officials authority to compel companies to remove encryption.

US Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat and a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, warned on Friday that such access would be “an unmitigated disaster for Americans’ privacy and our national security.”

“Trump and Apple better tell the UK it can go straight to hell with its secret demand to access hundreds of millions of Americans texts, pictures and files,” he said in a statement to Bloomberg.

Apple declined to comment on the matter, but the company has a long history of fiercely protecting user privacy and has said it is “at the very heart of everything we do.” A spokesperson for the UK’s Home Office said the agency doesn’t “comment on operational matters, including for example confirming or denying the existence of any such notices.”

The Investigatory Powers Act also prohibits companies from revealing that the UK government has issued such an order to remove encryption. Andrew Crocker, surveillance litigation director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco, calls that provision one of the most terrifying aspects of the law.

“That raises the real risk of false reliance on a safety feature that isn’t there,” he said in a telephone interview.

Patrick Wardle, the chief executive officer of DoubleYou, a company focused on security for Apple devices, said he hopes Cupertino, California-based Apple continues its tradition by fighting the UK order “tooth and nail.”

Wardle, a former hacker for the US National Security Agency, said he’s familiar with government’s desire to crack into encrypted communications. But those wants, he said, need to be balanced with privacy.

“This is an idea that always backfires,” he said.

Crocker was among those who spent a decade pressing Apple to give iPhone users the option of encrypting their cloud storage. He worries that Apple complying with the UK order could send the company down a slippery slope.

“Once you build it for one government, every other government will demand it,” Crocker said. “There’s no way to give this just to the good guys.”

The UK order stands to ripple across Apple’s systems in other countries, American Civil Liberties Union attorney Jennifer Stisa Granick said.

“It’s basically the UK dictating security for the entire world, including people living under oppressive regimes,” said Granick, the nonprofit’s surveillance and cybersecurity counsel. She called the order “incredibly dangerous.”

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UK orders Apple to open up users' encrypted cloud data — paper

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