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  • April 2025 newsletter

    April 2025 introduction – key to the door (21)

    Welcome to my April 2025 newsletter, this newsletter marks my 21st issue.

    21 marks a transition to full adulthood in various countries, hence ‘keys to the door’ in bingo slang. In Chinese numbers, symbolism is often down to phrases that numbers sound like. 21 sounds like “easily definitely fine” – indicating an auspicious association with the number.

    For some reason this month I have had Bill McClintock’s Motor City Woman on repeat. It’s a mash-up of The Spinners – I’ll be Around, Queensrÿche – Jet City Woman and Steely Dan – Do it Again. It’s a bit of an ear worm – you’re welcome.

    New reader?

    If this is the first newsletter, welcome! You can find my regular writings here and more about me here

    Strategic outcomes

    Things I’ve written.

    • Cleaned up copy of an interview I did as a juror for the PHNX Awards. More here.
    • From the challenges faced by Apple Intelligence to drone deliveries and designing in lightness.
    • I thought about how computing tends towards efficiency along the story arc of its history and its likely impact on our use of AI models.

    Books that I have read.

    Currently reading
    • The Leftover Woman by Jean Kwok. The book is a complex thriller. The story is straight forward, but the books covers complex, fraught issues with aplomb from misogyny, the male gaze to the white saviour complex.
    • The Tiger That Isn’t by Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot focused on the use of numbers in the media. But it’s also invaluable for strategists reading and interrogating pre-existing research. As a book is very easy-going and readable. I read it travelling back-and-forth to see the parents.
    • A Spy Alone was written by former MI6 officer Charles Beaumont. I was reminded of the dreary early 1970s of George Smiley’s Britain in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by the tone of the book. However A Spy Alone is alarmingly contemporary, with oblique references to UK infrastructure investments in the UK attached to a hostile foreign power, private sector intelligence, open source intelligence a la Bellingcat, nihilistic entrepreneurs and a thoroughly corrupted body politic. Beaumont’s story features a post cold-war spy ring in Oxford University echoing the cold war Cambridge spy ring. Beaumont touches on real contemporary issues through the classic thriller, in the same way that Mick Herron uses satire.

    Things I have been inspired by.

    Big brand advertising isn’t as digital as we think.

    Trends in TV 2025 by Thinkbox threw up some interesting data points and hypotheses.

    • Advertising is eating retail property. A good deal of search and social advertising gains is not from traditional advertising, but traditional retailing, in place of a real-world shop front. This is primarily carried out by small and medium-sized enterprises. I imagine a lot of this is Chinese direct-to-consumer businesses. 80% of Meta’s revenue is not from the six largest advertising holding companies.
    • Viewership across video platforms both online and offline have stabilised in the UK. (Separately I heard that ITV were getting the same viewership per programme, but it’s been attenuated with the rise of time-shifted content via the online viewership.

    World views

    WARC highlighted research done by Craft Human Intelligence for Channel 4 where they outlined six world views for young adults. While it was couched in terms of ‘gen-z’, I would love to see an ongoing inter-cohort longitudinal study to see how these world views change over time in young people. This would also provide an understanding of it it reflects wider population world views. BBH Labs past work looking at Group Cohesion Score of gen-Z – implies that this is unlikely to be just a generational change but might have a more longitudinal effect across generations to varying extents.

    Anyway back to he six world views outlined:

    • ‘Girl power’ feminists. 99% identified as female. About 21% of their cohort. “While they’re overwhelmingly progressive, their focus tends to be on personal goals rather than macro-level politics. They underindex heavily on engagement with UK politics and society.”
    • ‘Fight for your rights’. 12% of cohort, 60% female, educated and engaged with current affairs. “Although they consider themselves broadly happy, they believe the UK is deeply unfair – but believe that progress is both necessary and achievable.”
    • ‘Dice are loaded’ are 15% of their cohort. 68% female. “Feeling left behind, they perceive themselves to lack control over their future, and are worried about finances, employment, housing, mental health, or physical appearance.”
    • ‘Zero-sum’ thinkers comprise 18% of their cohort. Over-index at higher end of social-economic scale, gender balanced. “…they lean toward authoritarian and radical views on both sides of the political spectrum.”
    • ‘Boys can’t be boys’ are 14% of the cohort and 82% male. Supporters of traditional masculinity.
    • ‘Blank slates’. 20% of their cohort, all of them male. “They aren’t unintelligent or unambitious, but they pay little attention to matters beyond their own, immediate world. While some follow the news, their main focus is on just getting on with life”.

    More here and here.

    FMCG performance

    At the beginning of March, Unilever abruptly replaced its CEO. Hein Schumacher was out, and in the space of a week CFO Fernando Fernandez became CEO. That showed a deep internal dissatisfaction with Unilever’s performance that surprised shareholders AND the business media. Over the past decade Unilever has leaned hard into premium products and influencer marketing.

    “There are 19,000 zip codes in India. There are 5,764 municipalities in Brazil. I want one influencer in each of them,” Fernandez said. “That’s a significant change. It requires a machine of content creation, very different to the one we had in the past . . . ”

    Fernandez wants to lean even harder into influencer marketing. But I thought that there was a delta on this approach given his goal to have higher margin premium brands that are highly desirable.

    “Desirability at scale and marketing activity systems at scale will be the fundamental principles of our marketing strategy”

    Meanwhile Michael Farmer’s newsletter had some datapoints that were very apropos to the Unilever situation.

    “…for the fifty years from 1960 to 2010, the combined FMCG sales of P&G, Unilever, Nestle and Colgate-Palmolive grew at about an 8% compounded annual growth rate per year. The numbers associated with this long-term growth rate are staggering. P&G alone grew from about $1 billion (1960) to $79 billion in 2010. Throughout this period, P&G was the industry’s advocate for the power of advertising, becoming the largest advertiser in the US, with a focus on traditional advertising — digital / social advertising had hardly begun until 2010. Since 2010, with the advent of digital / social advertising, and massive increases in digital / social spend, P&G, Unilever, Nestle and Colgate-Palmolive have grown, collectively, at less than 1% per year, about half the growth rate of the US economy (2.1% per year). They are not the only major advertisers who have grown below GDP rates. At least 20 of the 50 largest advertisers in the US have grown below 2% per year for the past 15 years. Digital and social advertising, of course, have come to dominate the advertising scene since 2010, and it represents, today, about 2/3rds of all advertising spend.”

    Mr Fernandez has quite the Gordian knot to try and solve, one-way or another.

    Automated communications and AI influencers

    Thanks to Stephen Waddington‘s newsletter highlighted a meta-analysis of research papers on the role of automation and generative AI in communications. What’s interesting is the amount of questions that the paper flags, which are key to consideration of these technologies in marketing and advertising. More here.

    LinkedIn performance

    Social Insider has pulled together some benchmarking data on LinkedIn content performance. It helps guide what good looks like and the content types to optimise for on LinkedIn. Register and download here.

    Chart of the month. 

    The FT had some really interesting data points that hinted at a possible longitudinal crisis in various aspects of reasoning and problem solving. There has been few ongoing studies in this area, and it deserves more scrutiny.

    reasoning and problem solving

    In his article Have humans past peak brain power, FT data journalist John Burn-Murdoch makes the case about traits which would support intelligence and innovation from reading, to mathematical reasoning and problem solving have been on a downward trends. The timing of this decline seems to correlate with the rise of the social web.

    If true, over time this may work its way into marketing effectiveness. My best guess would be that rational messages are likely to be less effective in comparison to simple emotional messages with a single-minded intent over time. This should show up in both short term and long term performance. A more cynical view might be that the opportunity for bundling and other pricing complexities could facilitate greater profit margins over time.

    Things I have watched. 

    Akira Kurosawa’s Stray Dog is a film that I can watch several times over despite the film being over 75 years old now. Detective Murakami’s trek through the neighbourhoods of occupation-era Tokyo and all the actors performances are stunning. The storytelling is amazing and there are set pieces in here that are high points in cinema history. I don’t want to say too much more and spoil it for you, if you haven’t already seen it.

    Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex – Solid State Society – this is a follow on to the original GiTS manga and anime films touches directly on the challenges faced looking after Japan’s aging society. Central to the story is the apparent kidnapping over time of 20,000 children who can’t remember who their parents are. The plot is up to the usual high standard with government intrigue, technical and societal challenges.

    The Wire series one – I stopped and started watching The Wire. Films better suited my focus at the time. I finally started into series one this month. The ensemble cast are brilliant. The show is now 22 years old, yet it has aged surprisingly well. While technology works miracles, the slow methodical approach to building a case is always the same.

    How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr Foster – is a fantastic documentary covering the career of architect Sir Norman Foster. I remember watching it at the ICA when it originally came out and enjoyed watching it again on DVD. Foster brings a similar approach to architecture that Colin Chapman brought to his Lotus cars. When we are now thinking about efficiency and sustainability, their viewpoints feel very forward-thinking in nature.

    Useful tools.

    Fixing the iOS Mail app

    You know something is up when media outlets are writing to you with instructions on how they can remain visible in your inbox. The problem is due to Apple’s revamp of the iPhone’s Mail.app as part of its update to iOS 18.2.

    So how do you do this?

    Open Mail.app and you can see the categorised folders at the top of your screen, under the search bar.

    Find each tab where an a given email has been put. Open the latest edition. Tap the upper right hand corner. Select ‘Categorise Sender’. Choose ‘Primary’ to make sure future emails from this sender are in your main inbox view.

    That’s going to get old pretty soon. My alternative is to toggle between views as it makes sense. Apple’s inbox groupings are handy when you want to quickly find items you can delete quickly. Otherwise the single view makes sense.

    Fixing mail app

    Inspiration for strategists

    Questions are probably the most important tool for strategists. 100 questions offers inspiration so you can focus on the right ones to ask for a given time.

    The sales pitch.

    I have been worked on the interrogation process and building responses to a couple of client new business briefs for friends (Red Robin Ventures and Craft Associates) and am now working a new brand and creative strategy engagement as part of an internal creative agency at Google.

    now taking bookings

    If you’re thinking about strategy needs in Q4 (October onwards) – keep me in mind; or discussions on permanent roles. Contact me on YunoJuno and LinkedIn; get my email from Spamty to drop me a line.

    More on what I have done here.

    bit.ly_gedstrategy

    The End.

    Ok this is the end of my April 2025 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and onward into spring, and enjoy the May bank holidays.

    Don’t forget to share if you found it useful, interesting or insightful.

    Get in touch if there is anything that you’d like to recommend for the newsletter.

  • Apple Intelligence delayed + more

    Apple Intelligence delayed.

    Apple announced that features showcased during the 2024 WWDC enhancing Siri would be delayed. Apple Intelligence delayed represents a serious breach of trust for Apple’s early adopters and the developer community. On its own whilst that’s rare from Apple, it’s survivable.

    Sad Mac icon

    Apple has made other FUBARs: the Newton, some of the Performa model Macintosh computers in the 1990s, the Apple Pippin, Apple QuickTake cameras and the Apple Cube computer from 2000.

    The most recent game-changing product has been the AirPod series of headphones which have become ubiquitous on the tube and client video calls. But there has been a definite vibe shift around perceptions at Apple.

    • Recent product upgrades to the MacBook Air were given a muted welcome. Personally I think Apple came out with a banger of a product: the M4 processor in the MacBook Air M1 form-factor at the Intel MacBook Air price of $999.
    • The Vision Pro goggles are at best a spoiler on the high-end market for Meta’s VR efforts, and an interesting experiment once lens technology catches up with their concept. At worst they are a vanity project for Tim Cook that have a very limited audience.
    • Conceptually Apple Intelligence told a deceptively good story. Let others develop the underlying LLMs that would power Apple Intelligence. This solution is partially forced on Apple due to the mutually exclusive needs between China and its other markets. But it also meant that Apple had a smaller AI challenge than other vendors. On-device intelligence that would work out the best way to solve a problem and handle easier problems without the latency of consulting a cloud service. More complex problems would then be doled out to off-device services with privacy being a key consideration. The reality is that Apple Intelligence delayed until 2027 because of technical challenges.

    Key commentary on the Apple Intelligence delay:

    Chungking Express.

    One of my most loved films is Chungking Express directed by Wong Ka wai. It was one of the reasons that I decided to take up the opportunity to live and work in Hong Kong. This YouTube documentary cuts together some of the oral history about the making of the film. The story of the production is nuts.

    Drone deliveries

    Interesting documentary by Marques Brownlee on the limited use cases and massive leaps in innovation going into drone delivery systems.

    Effective Marketing for Financial Services

    Les Binet presents a financial services-specific view on marketing effectiveness. It has some interesting nuances, in particular how brand building is MORE important in subscription services.

    Tony Touch set

    Tony Touch did a set for Aimé Leon Dore. It’s an impeccably programmed set.

    LUCID Air focus on efficiency

    It’s rare to hear the spokesperson for an American car company quoting Colin Chapman’s design philosophy – which he shared with Norman Foster.

  • PHNX awards jury interview

    I am fortunate to be an awards juror for the second time. This is for the Adforum PHNX advertising awards which attracts entries from around the world.

    Proud to be a juror again this year for Adforms PHNX awards

    As part of the process I responded to some interview questions. I hope that my old gaffer Tony Gresty appreciated my quoting of him decades later and was surprised that there wasn’t pushback about my assertion of a ‘post-social’ marketing era.

    What motivates you to be part of the PHNX Jury, and what do you hope to bring to the judging process?

    Before I worked in advertising, I served an apprenticeship in plant process engineering. My old gaffer who was responsible for me had a few sayings. One of which was practice sharpens skill. By being a judge, I hope that I am helping people within the industry around the world to sharpen their skill. Seeing great challenging work and asking myself how it fits the customer and client needs in turn, helps further sharpen my skill as a strategist. TL;DR (too long; didn’t read) altruist generosity?

    PHNX has always been about celebrating creativity in all its forms. What new perspectives or disciplines do you think deserve more recognition in award shows today?

    Strategy has the Effies, BUT its focus is larger than creativity with a major focus on efficiency and effectiveness rather the creative process. Strategy always provides the ‘assist’ with single-minded insight and creative JOTBD (job to be done), but is never the ‘goal scorer’ to use an American sports stats metaphor. I think that creativity is not only about the creative, but also the context where the creative is placed – which brings in the disciplines of project management’s orchestration, production’s craft and media planning. I think this is going to become far more important as we go towards a post-social era.

    Which countries or regions do you think are leading the creative field right now? And which emerging markets should we look out for?

    A really interesting question. Leading is probably the wrong phrase to use, but there are markets that are under-estimated. Thailand and the Philippines have well-deserved reputations for emotional storytelling. Year-after-year when I look at lunar new year adverts Malaysia hits well above its weight given the size of the market. 

    Japan has been consistently delighting advertising folk for the past five decades. 

    Probably a better question to ask me after I have been through this year’s award entries.

    What trends or cultural shifts do you think will define the most impactful creative work this year?

    With everything that’s going on, I think we’ll need more humour. Trends within the advertising industry are also leaning towards a better mix of formats. As an industry we over-index on social vs. attention, efficiency and effectiveness for large brands. So we’ve seen a renaissance in OOH amongst other formats.

    There is also a return to basics: creative consistency, fluent objects, the power of storytelling and humour. Finally consumers are more interested in consuming more longer form audio and video content, so what a creative execution might look like I hope is very different.

    If you could give one piece of advice to agencies and creatives submitting their work, what would it be?

    Be single-minded in terms of category consideration. My biggest criticism of last year’s PHNX award entries was not about the quality of the work per se. Many of the entries had a given creative was put in for consideration for the wrong category. And it was the same entries doing it over-and-over again. If it isn’t relevant it’s just going to get ignored or get under the skin of the judges. In the same way that a poorly-placed ad that is slapped all over the place without consideration would have a similar effect in the real world.

    Rant over: I wish everyone the best of luck, finally don’t be disheartened. All of the work was of a high standard, choosing winners is hard.

    Which creative minds are inspiring you the most right now?

    In the widest creative sense I am working my way through veteran Hong Kong film director Johnnie To‘s back catalogue; some of his works like Breaking News feel like exceptionally contemporary given our media environment. A couple of creatives using AI in a really smart way are Omar Karim aka @arthur_chance on instagram and the Dor Brothers. Agency work-wise VCCP’s immersive installation for Transport for London and a small Malaysian shop called Days Studios (whose bread-and-butter work is usually weddings!), yet, did a fantastic job producing a Chinese New Year ad for a cosmetic treatment clinic Aglow Studio – not what you’d call a big client yet it felt like a bigger production than many large brands. Go Google the ad ‘hiss of prosperity’ and watch it on YouTube.

    It’s your last chance to enter for free here.

  • DeepSeek & more things

    DeepSeek

    I decided to pull together some of the better resources I could find on DeepSeek. It distracted and disrupted my writing calendar as I was researching a post what will be called Intelligence per Watt, once i have it published.

    John Yun’s take on DeepSeek is well researched and thoughtful rather than a hot take trying to explain why the sky fell in on Nvidia’s share price.

    ChinaTalk have put together a large amount of expert opinions on DeepSeek.

    DeepSeek FAQ – Stratechery by Ben Thompson

    With DeepSeek, China innovates and the US imitates | FT

    DeepSeek displaces ChatGPT as the App Store’s top app | TechCrunch

    Advances by China’s DeepSeek sow doubts about AI spending | FT

    DeepSeek cost tough for Nvidia but great for corporate world | Axios

    Consumer Behaviour

    Going gaga over Labubu – by BBH Culture Studio – Bleats – Chinese toymaker POPMART is the Bearbrick of the 2020s

    We Asked 12 Young Men Across America How They Feel About Trump, Masculinity, and Money. | Esquire

    Everyone’s done with dating apps | Doomscrollers

    FMCG

    Health

    Rapid trials prompt deals rush for Chinese ‘super me-too’ drugs | FT

    More than one in 10 women are taking weight-loss jabs, survey finds | The Telegraph – Concerns around those who are a healthy weight obtaining injections privately, as well as distribution of fake pens

    Study: 67% Of Gen Zs Want To Take Charge Of Their Health But Face Gaps In Communication | Provoke Media – Despite being known as the digitally native generation, Gen Z is skeptical of online health information and even telehealth appointments. In fact, eight in 10 Gen Zs say they’ve encountered false or misleading health information online and more than 60% say prioritizing in-person visits over virtual ones is important to feeling respected by healthcare providers.

    Innovation

    Have America’s industrial giants forgotten what they are for? | FT – Critics say fragmented ownership, weak culture and a fixation on financial results have harmed innovation. The ghost of Jack Welch and Chicago School of Economics continues. But all this isn’t a new idea Judy Estrin’s book Closing The Innovation Gap laid all this out back in 2008.

    Legal

    “Torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn’t feel right”: Meta emails unsealed – Ars Technica

    Luxury

    Louis Vuitton APAC strategy: Inside the luxury brand’s Asian success | Jing Daily“Given the economic downturn and competitive luxury market in China, Louis Vuitton has been seen adjusting its strategy to appeal to more diverse audiences, i.e. launching more affordable bag styles, participating in pricing games (points collecting, coupons refund), and launching cross-over marketing activities,” says Yu.

    This year alone, the house has hosted its exclusive four-hands dinner at its Michelin-starred restaurant, The Hall, alongside Chengdu’s Latin American Michelin one-star restaurant, Mono; launched ultra-limited-edition diamond bracelets and a serpent-inspired timepiece for the Year of the Snake; rolled out its highly anticipated Murakami collaboration; and unveiled a new men’s store at Shanghai’s IFC Mall.

    “[Louis Vuitton’s] strategy is rooted in consistency,” says Xuan Wang, activation director and partner at Tong Global and luxury PR veteran. “It has embraced a more localized approach — granting its Chinese team greater creative autonomy — while not losing the essence of the brand.”

    Breitling to add a third watch brand? | Professional Watches – I am not sure that this is going to work out that well.

    Marketing

    How Beats navigates being at the forefront of culture, not culture wars | The Drum

    Materials

    Interesting video on carbon fibre fabrication and how it has evolved over time, from an artisanal process to mass manufacturing.

    Media

    Apple asks court to halt Google search monopoly case | The Verge

    Online

    The Death of Social Media – by Jonathan Stringfield

    Social media is dead – Boundless Magazine

    Retailing

    Japan’s Costco Resale Shops Struggle to Distinguish Themselves – Unseen Japan

    Technology

    Antiqua et nova. Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence (28 January 2025) – the Holy See on generative AI

    Reckitt: Don’t use AI to increase efficiency at the expense of recruiting junior talent

    Kaspersky finds hardware backdoor in 5 generations of Apple silicon – Robby Pedrica’s Tech Blog

    Tools

    AI prompts for communication and PR | Gemini for Workspace | Google Demini – useful for strategists as well

    Web-of-no-web

    The mainstreaming of AI glasses starts today | Machine Society

    endless.downward.spiral – is this the beginning of the end of What3Words? – Terence Eden’s Blog

    Meta’s CTO said the metaverse could be a ‘legendary misadventure’ if the company doesn’t boost sales, leaked memo shows – probably not that likely.

  • Technical capability notice

    The Washington Post alleged that the British government had served a technical capability notice against Apple in December 2024 to provide backdoor global access into encrypted Apple iCloud services. The BBC’s subsequent report appears to support the Post’s allegations. And begs philosophical question about what it means when the government has a copy of your ‘digital twin’?

    DALL-E surveillance image

    What is a technical capability notice

    A technical capability notice is a legal document. It is issued by the UK government that compels a telecoms provider or technology company that compels them to maintain the technical ability to assist with surveillance activities like interception of communications, equipment interference, or data acquisition. When applied to telecoms companies and internet service providers, it is usually UK only in scope. What is interesting about the technical capability notice allegedly served against Apple is extra-territorial in nature. The recipient of a technical capability notice, isn’t allowed to disclose that they’ve been served with the notice, let alone the scope of the ask.

    Apple outlined a number of concerns to the UK parliament in March 2024:

    • Breaks systems
    • Lack of accountability in the secrecy
    • Extra-territoriality

    Tl;DR – what the UK wants with technical capability notices is disproportionate.

    Short history of privacy

    The expectation of privacy in the UK is a relatively recent one. You can see British spy operations going back to at leas the 16th century with Sir Francis Walsingham. Walsingham had a network that read couriered mail and cracked codes in Elizabethan England.

    By Victorian times, you had Special Branch attached to the Metropolitan Police and related units across the British Empire. The Boer War saw Britain found permanent military intelligence units that was the forerunner of the current security services.

    By world war one the security services as we now know them were formed. They were responsible to intercept mail, telegraph, radio transmissions and telephone conversations where needed.

    Technology lept forward after World War 2.

    ECHELON

    ECHELON was a cold war era global signals intelligence network ran by Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the US. It originated in the late 1960s to monitor the military and diplomatic communications of the Soviet Union and its Eastern Bloc allies during the Cold War, the ECHELON project became formally established in 1971.

    ECHELON was partly inspired by earlier US projects. Project SHAMROCK had started in 1940 and ran through to the 1970s photographing telegram communications in the US, or transiting through the US. Project MINARET tracked the electronic communications of listed American citizens who travelled abroad. They were helped in this process by British signals intelligence agency GCHQ.

    In 2000, the European Commission filed a final report on ECHELON claimed that:

    • The US-led electronic intelligence-gathering network existed
    • It was used to provide US companies with a competitive advantage vis-à-vis their European peers; rather like US defence contractors have alleged to undergone by Chinese hackers

    Capenhurst microwave tower

    During the cold war, one of the main ways that Irish international data and voice calls were transmitted was via a microwave land bridge across England and on to the continent.

    Microwave Network

    Dublin Dame Court to Holyhead, Llandudno and on to Heaton Park. Just next to the straight line path between Llandudno and Heaton Park was a 150 foot tower in Capenhurst on the Wirral. This siphoned off a copy of all Irish data into the British intelligence system.

    Post-Echelon

    After 9/11, there were widespread concerns about the US PATRIOT Act that obligated US internet platforms to provide their data to US government, wherever that data was hosted. After Echelon was exposed, it took Edward Snowden to reveal PRISM that showed how the NSA was hoovering up data from popular internet services such as Yahoo! and Google.

    RAMPART-A was a similar operation taking data directly from the world’s major fibre-optic cables.

    US programme BULLRUN and UK programme Edgehill were programmes designed to crack encrypted communications.

    So privacy is a relatively new concept that relies the inability to process all the data taken in.

    Going after the encrypted iCloud services hits different. We are all cyborgs now, smartphones are our machine augmentation and are seldom out of reach. Peering into the cloud ‘twin’ of our device is like peering into our heads. Giving indications of hopes, weaknesses and intent. Which can then be taken and interpreted in many different ways.

    What would be the positive reasons to do a technical capability notice?

    Crime

    Increasing technological sophistication has gone hand in hand with the rise of organised crime groups and new criminal business models such as ‘Klad’. Organised crime is also transnational in nature.

    But criminals have already had access to dedicated criminal messaging networks, a couple of which were detailed in Joseph Cox’ Dark Wire . They use the dark web, Telegram and Facebook Marketplace as outlets for their sales.

    According to Statista less than six percent of crimes in committed in the UK resulted in a charge or summons in 2023. That compares to just under 16 percent in 2015.

    Is going after Apple really going to result in an increased conviction rate, or could the resources be better used elsewhere?

    Public disorder

    Both the 2011 and 2024 riots caught the government off-guard. Back in 2011, there was concern that the perpetrators were organising over secure BlackBerry messaging. The reality that the bulk of it was being done over social media. It was a similar case with the 2024 public disturbances as well.

    So gaining access to iCloud data wouldn’t be that much help. Given the effort to filter through it, given that the signals and evidence were out there in public for everyone to see.

    The big challenge for the police was marshalling sufficient resources and the online narrative that took on a momentum of its own.

    Paedophiles

    One of the politicians strongest cards to justify invasion of privacy is to protect against nonces, paedos and whatever other label you use to describe the distribution of child sexual abuse images. It’s a powerful, emotive subject that hits like a gut punch. The UK government has been trying to explore ways of understanding the size of abuse in the UK.

    Most child abuse happens in the home, or by close family members. Child pornography rings are more complex with content being made around the world, repeatedly circulated for years though various media. A significant amount of the content is produced by minors themselves – such as selfies.

    The government has a raft of recommendations to implement from the The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse. These changes are more urgently needed like getting the police to pay attention to vulnerable working-class children when they come forward.

    Terrorism

    The UK government puts a lot of work into preventing and combating terrorism. What terrorism is has evolved over time. Historically, cells would mount terrorist attacks.

    Eventually, the expectation of the protagonist surviving the attack changed with the advent of suicide tactics. Between 1945 and 1980, these were virtually unheard of. The pioneers seem to have been Hezbollah against UN peacekeepers in Lebanon.

    This went on to influence 9/11 and the London bombings. The 9/11 commission found that the security services didn’t suffer from a lack of information, but challenges in processing and acting on the information.

    More recently many attacks have been single actors, rather than a larger conspiracy. Much of the signs available was in their online spiral into radicalisation, whether its right-wingers looking to follow the example of The Turner Diaries, or those that look towards groups like ISIS.

    Axel Rudakubana’s actions in Southport doesn’t currently fit into the UK government’s definition of terrorism because of his lack of ideology.

    I am less sure what the case would be for being able to access every Apple’s cloud twin of their iPhone. The challenge seems to be in the volume of data and meta data to sift through, rather than a lack of data.

    Pre-Crime

    Mining data on enough smartphones over time may show up patterns that might indicate an intent to do a crime. Essentially the promise of predictive crime solving promised in the Tom Cruise dystopian speculative future film Minority Report.

    Currently the UK legal system tends to focus on people having committed a crime, the closest we have to pre-crime was more intelligence led operations during The Troubles that were investigated by the yet to be published Stalker/Sampson Inquiry.

    There are so many technical, philosophical and ethical issues with this concept – starting with what it means for free will.

    What are the negative reasons for doing a technical capability notice?

    There are tensions between the UK government’s stated opinion on encrypted services and the desire to access the data, outlined in Written testimony of Chloe Squires, Director National Security, Home Office.

    The UK Government supports strong encryption and understands its importance for a free, open and secure internet and as part of creating a strong digital economy. We believe encryption is a necessary part of protecting our citizens’ data online and billions of people use it every day for a range of services including banking, commerce and communications. We do not want to compromise the wider safety or security of digital products and services for law abiding users or impose solutions on technology companies that may not work within their complex systems.

    Extra-territorial reach

    Concerns about the US PATRIOT Act and PRISM saw US technology companies lose commercial and government clients across Europe. Microsoft and Alphabet were impacted by losing business from the likes of UK defence contractor BAE Systems and the Swedish government.

    The UK would likely experience a similar effect. Given that the UK is looking to biotechnology and technology as key sectors to drive economic growth, this is likely to have negative impact on:

    • British businesses looking to sell technology services abroad (DarkTrace, Detica and countless fintech businesses). They will lose existing business and struggle to make new sales.
    • Britain’s attractiveness to inbound investments be it software development, regional headquarter functions or infrastructure such as data centres. Having no exposure to the UK market may be more attractive to companies handling sensitive data.
    • You have seen a similar patten roll out in Hong Kong as more companies have moved regional headquarters to Singapore instead.

    The scope of the technical capability notice, as it is perceived, damages UK arguments around freedom-of-speech. State surveillance is considered to have a chilling effect in civilian discussions and has been criticized in the past, yet the iCloud backdoor access could be considered to do the exactly same thing as the British government opposes in countries like China, Hong Kong and Iran.

    Leverage

    The UK government has a challenge in terms of the leverage that it can bring to bear on foreign technology multinationals. While the country has a sizeable market and talented workforce, it’s a small part of these companies global revenues and capabilities.

    They can dial down services in the UK, or they can withdraw completely from the UK marketplace taking their jobs and infrastructure investment with them. Apple supports 550,000 jobs through direct employment, its supply chain, and the iOS app economy. In 2024, Apple claimed that it had invested over £18 billion over the previous five years.

    In terms of the number of people employed through Apple, it’s a big number, let me try to bring it to life for you. Imagine for a moment if every vehicle factory (making cars, tractors,, construction vehicles, race cars and wagons), parts plant, research and development, MOT station, dealership and repair shop in the UK fired half their staff. That is the toll that Apple leaving the UK would have on unemployment.

    Now think about how that would ripple through the community. Less goods bought in the supermarket, less pints poured in a pub or less frequent hair cuts given.

    Where’s the power in the relationship between the tech sector and the government?

    Precedent

    Once it is rumoured that Apple has given into one country’s demands. The equivalent of technical capability notices are likely to be employed by governments around the world. Apple would find it hard not to provide similar access to other 5is countries, China, India and the Gulf states.

    Even if they weren’t provided with access, it’s a lot easier to break in when you know that a backdoor already exists. A classic example of this in a different area is the shock-and-awe felt when DeepSeek demonstrated a more efficient version of a ChatGPT-like LLM. The team had a good understanding of what was possible and started from there.

    The backdoor will be discovered, if not by hackers then by disclosure like the Capenhurst microwave tower that was known about soon after it went up, or by a Edward Snowden-like whistle-blower given the amount of people that would have access to that information in allied security apparatus.

    This would leave people vulnerable from around the world to authoritarian regimes. The UK is currently home to thousands of political emigres from Hong Kong who are already under pressure from the organs of the Chinese state.

    Nigel Farage

    From a domestic point-of-view while the UK security services are likely to be extremely professional, their political masters can be of a more variable quality. An authoritarian populist leader could put backdoors allowed by a technical capability notice to good use.

    Criminal access

    The hackers used by intelligence services, especially those attributed to China and Russia have a reputation for double-dipping. Using it for their intelligence masters and then also looking to make a personal profit by nefarious means. Databases of iCloud data would be very tempting to exploit for criminal gain, or sell on to other criminals allowing them to mine bank accounts, credit cards, conduct retail fraud.

    Vladimir Putin

    It could even be used against a country’s civilians and their economy as a form of hybrid warfare that would be hard to attribute.

    Xi Jinping

    In the past intelligence agencies were limited in terms of processing the sea of data that they obtained. But technology moves on, allowing more and more data to be sifted and processed over time.

    What can you do?

    You’ve got nothing to hide, so why worry? With the best will in the world, you do have things to hide, if not from the UK government then from foreign state actors and criminals – who are often the same people:

    • Your bank account and other financial related logins
    • Personal details
    • Messages that could be taken out of context
    • I am presuming that you don’t have your children’s photos on your social media where they can be easily mined and fuel online bullying. Your children’s photos on your phone could be deep faked by paedophiles or scammers.
    • Voice memos that can be used to train a voice scammer’s AI to be good enough
    • Client and proprietary information
    • Digital vehicle key
    • Access to academic credentials
    • Access to government services

    So, what should you do?

    Here’s some starting suggestions:

    • Get rid of your kids photos off your phone. Get a digital camera, have prints made to put in your wallet, a photo album book, use an electronic picture frame that can take an SD card of images and doesn’t connect to the web or use a cloud service.
    • Set up multi-factor authentication on passwords if you can. It won’t protect you against a government, but it will make life a bit more difficult for criminals who may move on to hacking someone else’s account instead – given that there is a criminal eco-system to sell data en-masse.
    • Use the Apple password app to generate passwords, but keep the record off them offline in a notebook. If you are writing them down, have two copies and use legible handwriting.
    • You could delete ‘important’ contacts from your address book and use an old school filofax or Rolodex frame for them instead. You’re not likely to be able to do this with all your contacts, it wouldn’t be practical. If you are writing them down, have two copies and use legible handwriting.
    • Have a code word with loved ones. Given that a dump of your iCloud service may include enough training data for a good voice AI, having a code word to use with your loved ones could prevent them from getting scammed. I put this in place ages ago as there is enough video out there on the internet of me in a public speaking scenario to train a passable voice generative AI tool.
    • Use Signal for messaging with family and commercially sensitive conversations.
    • My friend and former Mac journalist Ian Betteridge recommended using an alternative service like Swiss-based Proton Cloud. He points out that they are out of the legal jurisdiction of both the US and UK. However, one has to consider history – Crypto AG was a Swiss-based cryptography company actually owned by the CIA. It gave the intelligence agency access to secure communications of 120 countries including India, Pakistan and the Holy See. Numerous intelligence services including the Swiss benefited from the intelligence gained. So consider carefully what you save to the cloud.
    • if you are not resident in the UK, consider using ‘burn devices’ with separate cloud services. When I worked abroad, we had to do client visits in an authoritarian country. I took a different cellphone and laptop to protect commercially sensitive information. When I returned these were both hard reset by the IT guy and were ready for future visits. Both devices only used a subset of my data and didn’t connect to my normal cloud services, reducing the risk of infiltration and contamination. The mindset of wanting to access cloud services around the world may be just the thin end of the wedge. Countries generally don’t put down industrial and political espionage as justifications for their intelligence services powers.

    What can criminals do?

    Criminals already have experience procuring dedicated secure messaging services.

    While both dark web services and messaging platforms have been shut down, there is an opportunity to move the infrastructure into geographies that are less accessible to western law enforcement: China, Hong Kong, Macau or Russia for instance. A technical capability notice is of no use. The security services have two options to catch criminals out:

    • Obtain end devices on the criminal:
      • While they are unlocked and put them in a faraday cage to prevent the device from being wiped remotely.
      • Have an informant give you access to their device.
    • Crack the platform:
      • Through hacking
      • Setting the platform up as a sting in the first place.

    If the two criminals are known to each other a second option is to go old school using a one-time pad. This might be both having the same edition of a book with each letter or word advancing through the book .

    So if you used the word ‘cat’ as the fourth word on line 3 of page 2 in a book you might get something like 4.3.2, which will mean nothing if you don’t have the same book and if the person who wrote the message or their correspondent don’t use 4.3.2 to signify cat again. Instead they would move onwards through the book to find the next ‘cat’ word. A sleuthing cryptographer may be able to guess your method of encryption by the increasing numbers, but unless they know the book your feline secret is secure from their efforts.

    NSA DIANA one time pad

    Above is two pages from an old one-time pad issued by the NSA called DIANA.

    The point is, those criminals that really want to evade security service understanding their business can do. Many criminals in the UK are more likely to rely on a certain amount of basic tactics (gloves, concealing their face, threatening witnesses) and the low crime clearance rate in the UK.

    Instead of a technical capability notice, these criminals are usually caught by things like meta analysis (who is calling who, who is messaging who, who is transferring money etc.), investigative police work including stings, surveillance and informers.

    Why?

    Which begs the questions:

    • Why Apple and why did they choose to serve it in December 2024?
    • What trade-offs have the UK government factored in considering the potiential impact on its economic growth agenda and political ramifications?
    • The who-and-why of the leak itself? Finally, the timing of the leak was interesting, in the early days of the Trump administration.

    I don’t know how I feel about the alleged technical capability notice and have more questions than answers.

    More information

    European Commission Final Report on Echelon  and coverage that appeared at the time of the report’s release: EU releases Echelon spying report • The Register

    Patriot Act und Cloud Computing | iX – German technology press on the risks posed by the Patriot Act

    US surveillance revelations deepen European fears | Reuters – PRISM negatively impacted US technology companies

    NSA’s Prism surveillance program: how it works and what it can do | guardian.co.uk

    The strange similarities in Google, Facebook, and Apple’s PRISM denials | VentureBeat

    Tech Giants Built Segregated Systems For NSA Instead Of Firehoses To Protect Innocent Users From PRISM | TechCrunch

    Computer Network Exploitation vs. Computer Network Attack | Schneier on Security

    EXPLANATORY MEMORANDUM TO THE INVESTIGATORY POWERS (TECHNICAL CAPABILITY) REGULATIONS 2018