Keenan and Veale on Surveillance Practices
Dr Bernard Keenan and Dr Michael Veale convene meeting on surveillance practices in the UK.
23 April 2025
On 23 April 2025, GCDC’s Dr Bernard Keenan and Dr Michael Veale convened a meeting of academics, lawyers, technical experts, and journalists, including many veterans of past legal action against the UK government’s unlawful surveillance practices. The meeting focused on the Home Office’s Technical Capability Notice recently issued to Apple in relation to its encrypted cloud service, Advanced Data Protection, and Apple’s subsequent appeal to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal. The meeting also explored commercial, legal, and technical dimensions of the question of encrypted communications, and the negative implications for democracy, privacy, and free expression in the UK where secret requirements to produce ‘backdoors’ into encrypted communications are imposed. The meeting was conducted under the Chatham House Rule.