Hello, boys and girls.

Welcome back to the tech policy podcast.

I'm Corbyn Barthold.

Scheduling a podcast can actually be quite tricky.

You never know what will happen with your guests. They have

busy lives themselves and things happen to them. And then you find yourself like I am here,

by myself with you today. It's just me, but I think it'll work out for the best because it gives me a chance to return to a topic on the show that I've wanted to get back to for quite some time.

End-end encryption seems like it is always threatened.

But right now, several governments are really putting the screws to this technology at what seems like the absolute worst possible moment for them to be doing so.

So let's dive right in.

On February 7th, the Washington Post dropped an article.

UK orders Apple to let it spy on users' encrypted accounts.

And let's start just straight with the lead from that piece,

which really was quite earthshaking to those of us in this space.

Quote, security officials in the United Kingdom

have demanded that Apple create a backdoor,

allowing them to retrieve all the content

any Apple user worldwide has uploaded to the cloud.

British government's undisclosed order issued last month,

so that would have been in January,

requires blanket capability to view

fully encrypted material, not merely assistance in cracking a specific account, and it has no

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