Tulsi Gabbard, the head of US National Intelligence, says she was not informed in advance about the UK government's demand to be able to access Apple customers' encrypted data from anywhere in the world. In a letter, Ms Gabbard said she was seeking further information from the FBI and other US agencies.

U.S. officials are examining whether the UK broke a bilateral agreement by reportedly demanding that Apple build a "backdoor" allowing the British government to access backups of data in the company's encrypted cloud storage systems.

The Director of National Intelligence was apparently blindsided when the UK demanded that Apple open an encryption backdoor, and says that lawyers and other agencies are on the case.