U.K. surveillance laws drew scrutiny from House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, June 5 amid warnings they could expose communications of officials and American citizens, according to reports.
The concern centered on the U.K.’s use of secret Technical Capability Notices under the Investigatory Powers Act, which critics say could make U.S. companies weaken encryption or create “backdoors” that weaken encryption while preventing firms from disclosing requests without U.K. government approval.
Critics have argued this could undermine privacy, create vulnerabilities and limit congressional oversight, with one former intelligence official warning of a “standing invitation to Beijing.”
“We have already seen how this ends,” former Department of Defense official Andrew Badger told Fox News Digital.
“There are legitimate privacy concerns here, and those have been well aired. The less examined issue is national security,” Badger said.
“A backdoor compelled by one ally becomes a standing invitation to Beijing, Moscow and Tehran. So, once one government can quietly compel access, others will demand the same, and a one-off concession hardens into a permanent vulnerability,” he warned.
According to The Telegraph, a June 5 letter sent by Jordan to U.K. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, showed the Trump ally had called for a review.
The report said Mahmood’s decision had been to deny a U.S. company permission to speak with Congress about an alleged encryption backdoor notice.
Jordan was also said to have warned that a lack of bilateral coordination raised concerns about the “trust and effective partnership between our two countries.”
“Five Eyes works because every partner trusts the others not to weaken the systems they all depend on,” said Badger, co-author of “The Great Heist: China’s Epic Campaign to Steal America’s Secrets.”
“If Washington also concludes that U.K. surveillance powers could inadvertently expose Americans and American officials to espionage, it puts real strain on the relationship and makes future cooperation on intelligence and cyber harder to sustain.”
US SPIES URGED TO REFOCUS EFFORTS ON AMERICA’S BACKYARD, NEW HOUSE INTEL CHAIR SAYS
On the encryption issue, Badger noted that mainstream encrypted platforms now function as “de facto infrastructure for sensitive communication well beyond the consumer market.”
“Any access point built into them becomes a permanent target. It is not a private key the requesting government gets to keep to itself,” he said.
U.S. and British cyber officials have also repeatedly warned that an axis of hostile states — including Russia, China and Iran — poses threats to Western security and infrastructure.
As previously reported by Fox News Digital, cyberespionage by groups such as Salt Typhoon, linked to China, has carried out operations targeting sensitive communications.
“China is actively running one of the largest state-backed cyberespionage operations ever uncovered. The Salt Typhoon campaign has targeted hundreds of organizations in roughly 80 countries and, through those intrusions, gained access to sensitive communications and networks used by senior Western officials,” Badger warned.
“Chinese state hackers didn’t defeat encryption. They walked straight through the lawful-intercept systems telecom providers had built, reaching the communications of senior officials and even information about surveillance targets.”
Reports also surfaced that U.K. Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper used a burner phone during a recent trip to Beijing, raising further concerns about state-sponsored espionage.
Badger noted that the episode reflects a broader pattern of Chinese targeting of British democratic institutions, including the “hacking of senior Downing Street officials’ phones and an Electoral Commission breach that exposed the data of roughly 40 million voters,” he said.
“The telling thing is that no one issues burner phones for a trip to Sweden or Germany,” he said.
“The precaution is itself an admission of the threat environment. The working assumption — correctly — is that anything digital taken into China should be treated as potentially compromised.”
The systemic vulnerability also highlights a fundamental contradiction in Western diplomatic strategy, according to Badger.
“This case perfectly underscores the contradiction at the heart of the U.K. Labour government’s China policy: chasing positive economic relations and expanded trade with Beijing on one hand, while being forced to take elaborate precautions against a state whose core interests remain fundamentally at odds with its own on the other,” Badger said.
“You can’t simultaneously treat China as a trusted economic partner and a hostile intelligence threat. It’s a fundamental contradiction. The need to use burner phones symbolically underscore this.”
