The reason they (the UK) dropped this mandate was because Israeli already had a "back door" into the iPhone OS/platform. There was an article several years ago (10+/-) about the FBI wanting access to a captured terrorist iPhone's encrypted data wherein Apple refused to cooperate. Unbeknownst to Apple, the Israeli's (Mossad) had broken Apple's encryption and had an exploit to recover data from any of their any of Apple's products. Apple was not happy about this and demanded Israel give them the exploit. Israel told Apple they should have cooperated with the US's request and did not provide their exploit.
When encryption is created, by a human, the coder always builds a "back door". This is intentionally done in order to get into it in the event something goes wrong with its operation. This is the coder's "failsafe". They usually will encode several back doors.
The reason they (the UK) dropped this mandate was because Israeli already had a "back door" into the iPhone OS/platform. There was an article several years ago (10+/-) about the FBI wanting access to a captured terrorist iPhone's encrypted data wherein Apple refused to cooperate. Unbeknownst to Apple, the Israeli's (Mossad) had broken Apple's encryption and had an exploit to recover data from any of their any of Apple's products. Apple was not happy about this and demanded Israel give them the exploit. Israel told Apple they should have cooperated with the US's request and did not provide their exploit. When encryption is created, by a human, the coder always builds a "back door". This is intentionally done in order to get into it in the event something goes wrong with its operation. This is the coder's "failsafe". They usually will encode several back doors.