What's at stake?
Your photos of your kids. Your bank statements. Your payslips. Your CV. Should you be able to store these important items safely and securely in the cloud or should the Government be able to make us more vulnerable to criminals and hackers?
It’s nearly time for the UK’s Investigatory Powers Tribunal to answer that question when they hear Apple’s appeal against the government’s demands to weaken its products. The outcome will affect all of us, whether or not we use Apple products.
Background
The UK government demanded that Apple build a backdoor into its Advanced Data Protection service. Apple said no, preferring to remove advanced data encryption from UK users rather than weaken the security of their products. They also appealed to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), the court which hears complaints about government surveillance.
But this is not just a fight between a tech company and the Home Office. This affects us all. And it’s not just about Apple but all the online products and services that we use to stay secure.
We need to make sure that the voice of ordinary tech users are heard. We also need to stand up for small security and open source businesses who can’t take on the government in the same way that Apple can.
Thanks to us the hearing will be public
We’ve already had a win in this case. The Home Office wanted Apple’s appeal to happen behind closed doors. We asked the IPT to make it public and they agreed that it was too important to be held in complete secrecy. This is an important step as IPT hearings are normally held in private. But the public have a right to know what the government is trying to force Apple and other tech companies to do.
Can you help us have our say at the hearing?
ORG has brought together a coalition of civil society, open source and privacy tech companies to make sure that the concerns of the public and small ethical businesses are heard at Apple’s hearing.
We want to make it clear that human rights and civil liberties groups are aligned with ethical businesses on the dangers of undermining encryption, privacy and security.
We’re nearly there
We’ve raised most of the funds we need to make a legal intervention at Apple’s hearing.
We need a further £9,000 to cover our legal costs and make sure that our voice is heard at the hearing
Anything else that we raise will help us to campaign about the case. We'll use it to provide expert advice to the media and promote the benefits of encryption to the public on social media and other channels.
What do you get?
By donating to our campaign, you're helping to save encrypted services in the UK. You'll also get the following perks:
Donate £15 and you'll get a choice of laptop stickers.
Donate £50 and get stickers and your choice of ORG t-shirt.
Donate £100 and get stickers, a t-shirt and a signed copy of Cory Doctorow’s latest book Picks and Shovels (10 available)
Donate £250 and get stickers, a t-shirt and a free one-year NordVPN subscription of your choice, which can be connected to up to ten devices simultaneously. (20 available)
Donate £500 and get stickers, an ORG t-shirt and Redact Ultimate - Lifetime Access. Redact is the only platform that allows you to automatically clean up your old posts from services like Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, Discord, and more, all in one place. Redact believes that privacy is a universal right. Redact cannot see, store, or interact with your data or login information. All logins are securely handled directly by the platforms. which will allow you to mass delete your messages and content from all current and future social platforms supported by Redact, for life. (1 available)
Donate £1,000 and meet the team: Have dinner with some of the people involved in the legal case and our work to protect encryption.
