Beyond Chat Control: who can demand access to your encrypted data

In late 2024, US officials confirmed what security researchers had feared: a Chinese state-backed group nicknamed Salt Typhoon had burrowed deep into telecom networks. In December 2024, CISA's guidance for highly targeted people, such as senior government and political figures, recommended consistent use of end-to-end encrypted communications. In August 2025, the US and a dozen allies put out a joint technical advisory on the group, and the FBI's cyber chief told reporters it had hit at least 200 US companies and reached 80 countries, TechCrunch reported. Around the same time, British iPhone users were losing Apple's strongest iCloud encryption.

That contrast is today's story. This week we covered where the EU's Chat Control law stands and what scanning an encrypted chat would mean technically. Now let's zoom out: who can demand access to your encrypted data, and with which tools?

#Four ways governments seek access (plus one)

Governments rarely say "ban encryption." The digital rights network EDRi sorts the pressure into a few families, which we've expanded slightly:

• Client-side scanning. Your device inspects content before it's encrypted. Technically: a classifier or hash matcher reads plaintext on the endpoint and reports matches.
• Key escrow (or "key recovery"). A copy of the key is stored where officials can reach it. Technically: a master key, or one per jurisdiction, becomes a single point of catastrophic failure.
• "Ghost" proposals. The provider silently adds an extra, invisible participant to your chat. Technically: it abuses the provider's control over which devices are in a conversation. That's exactly what key verification and key transparency features exist to expose.
• Compelled vulnerabilities and state hacking. Firms are told to weaken products, or agencies break in themselves. Technically: any hole kept open for police is open for everyone else.
• Metadata retention. Content stays encrypted, but providers must log who talked to whom, when and from where. Technically: E2EE protects the envelope's contents, not the address on it.

#United Kingdom: secret orders and a missing feature

The UK's Investigatory Powers Act 2016, amended in 2024, lets the government serve Technical Capability Notices (TCNs). These are orders requiring a provider to be able to hand over data in readable form. They're secret, and recipients can't disclose them, reportedly not even to their own government.

Because of that secrecy, the details below come from press reports and court filings, not official confirmation. In February 2025, the Washington Post reported that a TCN demanded access to encrypted iCloud data for users worldwide. Apple's response was to stop offering Advanced Data Protection (ADP) in the UK. New users lost it in February 2025, and existing users were later asked to switch it off. With ADP, the encryption keys for things like backups and photos stay on your devices, and turning it on requires a recovery key or a recovery contact. Apple took the order to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT). In April 2025 the tribunal refused the Home Office's request to keep even the basic facts of the case secret, Tech Times recounts.

After heavy US pushback, the scope reportedly shrank. In August 2025, then-US intelligence chief Tulsi Gabbard posted that the UK had agreed to drop the demand as it affected Americans' data (also per Tech Times). A replacement order covering only British users' data was then reported in autumn 2025 (Lawfare, citing the FT, says September; the BBC says October). In 2026, Apple filed a fresh IPT complaint. On September 17, a procedural hearing argued over whether the government can keep refusing to confirm or deny the order exists. Press accounts say the hearing on whether the order is lawful won't come before 2027. ADP remains unavailable to new UK users.

Lawfare's analysis points out how messy a UK-only rule is. Does it cover citizens or residents? What about visitors and dual nationals? Both obvious fixes carry risk. Escrowing keys creates a honeypot, and geofencing ADP off is easy for a capable adversary to sidestep. The authors also look back to the Clipper Chip of the early 1990s, the US key-escrow scheme Washington finally backed away from late in that decade. Their point: escrow has been known to be impractical ever since. (Back in 1994, cryptographer Matt Blaze had already shown how users could get around Clipper's law-enforcement access field.)

#United States: the CLOUD Act as shield and lever

The US CLOUD Act (2018) lets partner countries with an executive agreement send data requests straight to US providers. Two agreements are in force: with the UK, since October 2022, and with Australia, since January 30, 2024. They come with two big limits. Partners can't target Americans, and under 18 U.S.C. § 2523(b)(3) the agreements can't impose any obligation on providers to be able to decrypt data.

Lawfare's July 2025 piece argues Washington should use that leverage. The US Justice Department can object to specific UK orders, threaten to end the agreement and make no-decryption terms a condition of future deals, including a possible US–EU one. The leverage has a date attached. The US–UK agreement runs for five years and expires in October 2027 unless both sides extend it. We found no public renewal yet.

Don't read this as US virtue, though. That clause limits agreements, not all of US law, and the US has its own long-running fights over surveillance programs such as FISA Section 702. It also has no general decryption mandate, which is the real point of contrast.

#European Union: beyond Chat Control

Chat Control is one front in a bigger plan. Under ProtectEU, its internal security strategy from April 2025, the Commission published a Roadmap for lawful access to data on June 24, 2025. It says about 85% of criminal investigations now rely on electronic evidence, and it sets out six workstreams:

• data retention
• cross-border lawful interception (the Commission says it will explore measures by 2027)
• digital forensics
• decryption
• standardization
• AI tools for police

On decryption, the Commission promised a Technology Roadmap on encryption in 2026 and wants Europol equipped with new-generation decryption tools from 2030. As of October 27, 2026, the roadmap isn't public. The Commission's encryption page still says its expert group will report during 2026, and France, in a statement entered in the Council's minutes in July (CM 3756/26), said the group's conclusions were expected in November.

Data retention is back too. The EU Court of Justice struck down the old Data Retention Directive in 2014 (Digital Rights Ireland), and later rulings narrowed what states may require. The EPRS briefing describes a patchwork of national rules. Austria, Romania, Slovenia and the Netherlands have no general retention obligation. Germany has had none since 2010, and its cabinet has proposed three-month IP address retention. The Commission's impact assessment was due in early 2026. As of late October we found no tabled proposal, though ministers discussed the topic on October 1, The European Post reports.

Why care if your chats are E2EE anyway? Metadata, meaning who you talk to, how often and from where, can reveal a lot even when every message is sealed.

Meanwhile, the e-Evidence Regulation has applied since August 18, 2026. It lets one EU country's authorities order providers in another to produce or preserve data.

#The map, side by side

The pattern: almost nobody bans encryption outright. Instead, the same app can be more or less secure depending on where you live, as UK iCloud users found out.

#What differs by region

Defaults do a lot of the work. Some messengers apply end-to-end encryption to every chat automatically, while others leave it as an option or limit it to certain chat types. Cloud backups are a separate layer: under Apple's standard iCloud protection, Apple can still recover much of the data, and only the opt-in ADP tier keeps those keys on the user's own devices.

That opt-in tier is where geography shows. ADP has been closed to new UK accounts since February 2025, and existing UK users were later asked to switch it off. Outside the UK, the reporting describes no comparable withdrawal, so ADP remains an optional setting there. Metadata is the other regional variable: as the table shows, whether it gets logged depends on national retention rules, not on the app's encryption.

People seem to care. In recent CDT Europe polling published for Global Encryption Day, 88% to 94% of respondents in France, Poland, Sweden and Ireland agreed they have a right to private conversations online.

For providers, the same map turns into design questions. A service with users in several jurisdictions faces TCN-style regimes in some places and the CLOUD Act agreement calendar in others. Security engineers often point to architectures in which the provider holds no decryption keys at all, with no key escrow, alongside published transparency reports and, where lawful, warrant canaries, as ways to limit what any single order can extract.

What to watch next:

• the Chat Control talks: the Council presidency's latest outcome note puts a seventh trilogue tentatively in December 2026 at the Parliament. Patrick Breyer's Chat Control page lists December 8, and the Brussels Record tracker, citing MLex, reports that national officials were due to examine compromise texts on November 3
• the EU's encryption Technology Roadmap
• the Apple case at the IPT
• the US–UK agreement's 2027 deadline

That's our encryption-under-pressure week. Subscribe to the policy feed and we'll track each of these as it lands. Which country's encryption rules should we map next? Tell us.