Britain has dropped its demand for the iPhone maker Apple (AAPL.O) to provide a "backdoor" that would have enabled access to the protected encrypted data of American citizens, U.S. Director of Nation...

"As we have said many times before, we have never built a backdoor or master key to any of our products or services and we never will," Apple said at the time.

Governments and law enforcement agencies have long pushed for methods to break such encryption systems to assist with criminal investigations into terrorism and child sexual abuse.