Issue 384  8th February 2025

Today the Home Secretary brought together policing leaders, the National Crime Agency, the Mayor of London and leading tech companies to drive new action to tackle mobile phone thefts and secure a collective effort to grip this criminality. The summit comes as street crime has soared by 43% nationwide, driven by a significant rise in snatch theft, including of mobile phones. For too long crimes like these have been neglected, which is why as part of the Government’s Plan for Change, the Home Secretary says she will legislate where necessary to ensure police have the powers they need to treat this with the seriousness it warrants, and police are expected to agree to step up enforcement activity nationwide. This will include better use of intelligence to drive more hotspot policing and targeted operations, particularly around high-risk periods such as Christmas and when a new phone is released. The Home Secretary urged companies including Apple, Google and Samsung, and law enforcement to join forces to build on existing anti-theft security measures and help design out and disincentivise phone theft, by making phones effectively worthless to criminals. She called for a much deeper dive on all available sources of data and intelligence to build a much more comprehensive diagnosis of the problems and scale of the criminal market, to drive joint solutions...

A clampdown on the "industrial-scale" crime of mobile phone-snatching across London has resulted in 230 people being arrested by the Metropolitan Police in the past week. In its battle against the "scourge of mobile phone crime", the force said it had also seized more than 1,000 handsets. The Met has deployed plain-clothed officers in "hotspot" areas, including the West End and Westminster, and is also using tracking technology to recover phones and catch criminals. It said its work had been "ramped up" to deal with the £50m-a-year trade in stolen phones across the capital, with those responsible for thefts, handling, and onward criminal supply all being targeted...

The Met's Cdr Owain Richards said: "We are seeing phone thefts on an industrial scale, fuelled by criminals making millions by being able to easily sell on stolen devices either here or abroad. By intensifying our efforts we're catching more perpetrators and protecting people from having their phone stolen in the capital." He added that there were calls for other agencies and the government to do more, and for tech companies to make stolen phones unusable. The force wants the phone industry to prevent stolen handsets from being reconnected to cloud services...

Children will be protected from the growing threat of predators generating AI images and from online sexual abuse as the UK becomes the first country in the world to create new AI sexual abuse offences. AI tools are being used to generate child sexual abuse images in a number of sickening ways including by ‘nudifying’ real-life images of children or by stitching the faces of other children onto existing child sexual abuse images. The real-life voices of children are also often used in this sickening material, meaning innocent survivors of traumatic abuse are being re-victimised. Perpetrators are also using those fake images to blackmail children and force victims into further horrific abuse including streaming live images. AI tools are being used to help perpetrators disguise their initial identity and more effectively groom and abuse children online.

To better protect children against this sickening abuse the Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has today (2 February) revealed the UK will be the first country in the world to:

• make it illegal to possess, create or distribute AI tools designed to generate child sexual abuse material (CSAM), punishable by up to 5 years in prison
• make it illegal for anyone to possess AI ‘paedophile manuals’ which teach people how to use AI to sexually abuse children, punishable by up to 3 years in prison

At the same time, the Home Office will:

• introduce a specific offence for predators who run websites designed for other paedophiles to share vile child sexual abuse content or advice on how to groom children, punishable by up to 10 years in prison
• give Border Force the necessary powers to keep the UK safe and prevent the distribution of CSAM which is often filmed abroad by allowing officers to compel an individual who they reasonably suspect poses a sexual risk to children to unlock their digital devices for inspection, punishable by up to 3 years in prison, depending on the severity

All 4 measures will be introduced as part of the Crime and Policing Bill when it comes to Parliament. The bill will support the delivery of the government’s safer streets mission to halve knife crime and violence against women and girls in a decade and increase confidence in policing and the wider criminal justice system to its highest levels.

The UK government has demanded to be able to access encrypted data stored by Apple users worldwide in its cloud service. Currently only the Apple account holder can access data stored in this way - the tech giant itself cannot view it. The demand has been served by the Home Office under the Investigatory Powers Act (IPA), which compels firms to provide information to law enforcement agencies. Apple declined to comment, but says on its website, external that it views privacy as a "fundamental human right". Under the law, the demand cannot be made public. The news was first reported by the Washington Post, external quoting sources familiar with the matter, and the BBC has spoken to similar contacts. The Home Office said: "We do not comment on operational matters, including for example confirming or denying the existence of any such notices"...

The demand applies to all content stored using what Apple calls "Advanced Data Protection" (ADP). This uses something called end-to-end encryption, where only the account holder can access the data stored - even Apple itself cannot see it. It is an opt-in service, and not all users choose to activate it. This is because, while it makes your data more secure, it comes with a downside - it encrypts your data so heavily that it cannot be recovered if you lose access to your account. It is unknown how many people choose to use ADP...