Closed on 9 September 2026 after the recipient account and one official judgment, including its publication landing page. The official record confirms proceedings existed in March 2025; the identified DFF grant was reported approved in June 2026. It therefore supports an existing challenge. These records do not establish how the case was initially financed, whether DFF supported it earlier, or whether the later grant reimbursed particular work.
Liberty's [13 March 2025 announcement](http[local research file] says legal complaints were filed that day by Liberty, Privacy International, Gus Hosein and Ben Wizner. It distinguishes challenges to the reported notice and the TCN process from an urgent request for an open hearing. The organisations instructed Leigh Day. Their account identifies the alleged notice power as section 253 of the Investigatory Powers Act 2016 and argues incompatibility with the statutory purpose, regulations, privacy and expression rights. Those arguments are the claimants' position, not findings of unlawfulness. The reported notice itself was not acquired.
They also sought coordination with Apple's proceedings, attendance, disclosure and public scrutiny. No original pleading was acquired, so the precise pleaded causes of action, full remedies and jurisdictional statutory provisions remain unverified beyond this account and the court's limited description. Do not equate the asserted notice power with the statutory route by which every claim was brought. Source scope: official-reader lines 48–96, retained in proceedings-liberty2025.reader.txt. The ordinary HTML GET returned 403; only its error body was captured, and that route is closed.
[Apple Inc v Secretary of State for the Home Department, [2025] UKIPTrib 1](http[local research file] case IPT/25/68/CH, is dated 7 April 2025, following a 14 March hearing. Paragraph 33 (PDF8) confirms that Liberty, Privacy International and two individuals filed their separate complaint the day before that hearing: 13 March 2025. It identifies potential overlap and invites case-management proposals, not completed joinder (§§33–35).
The tribunal dismissed the government's application to keep the basic case details private (§§32,42–43). It considered Liberty/PI's written arguments but kept the March hearing private (§37); intervention, pleading disclosure and future hearing arrangements remained unresolved (§§38,40). It also lacked power to grant US legislators' requested permission to discuss the alleged notice (§39).
This was a procedural ruling, not a decision that encryption-access powers were unlawful. The public judgment is a summary/extract of a fuller private judgment (§6), and expressly neither confirms nor refutes the media account (§20). Its procedural framework discusses RIPA 2000 section 69 and Tribunal Rule 7 (§§26–30); that is not the missing pleading's complete jurisdictional basis.
The judicial acknowledgment independently strengthens the initiation date; it does not independently prove a grant payment or DFF's causal role. The previously accepted DFF announcement and linked EUR 36,000 case listing remain the sources for the reported June 2026 allocation. They were not reacquired or counted as new corroboration here.
The useful distinction is support for continuing litigation, participation in a procedural contest, and success on that procedural question. It would be wrong to turn these into a claim that DFF initiated the March 2025 action, that Liberty obtained a merits victory over TCNs, or that every hearing became public. Multiple parties made open-justice arguments, so acknowledgment of Liberty/PI's submissions is not proof they alone caused the result. The historic decision is not a current docket or finality check.
The next discriminating record is the actual public Liberty/PI pleading or a later published tribunal disposition, if made available. That would establish the exact statutory claim route, pleaded remedies and any substantive ruling. No private judgment, secret notice, protected-party identification or further Apple chronology was sought.
The [Judiciary publication page](http[local research file] was captured as proceedings-judiciary.html; its actual PDF href led to proceedings-public-judgment2025.pdf, SHA-256 d19a2c0e350f5bb7f279c7d5cb8eb3d0563a46458a214fc4f327a905d2197f3b. Both ordinary GETs succeeded. The PDF reader returned zero text lines and local text extraction was empty. The nine PDF pages were all rendered and visually read, including the caption and paragraphs 1–43. Images are proceedings-judgment-p01.png through p09.png. The .derived.txt file contains only page markers and is not a substantive text source. No OCR transcript is claimed.
proceedings-captures.json records original/error/reader distinctions, hashes, access and precise page scopes. The source record excludes unrelated Liberty cases and indexed commentary. No second litigation instrument was necessary for this bounded result. No graph, forest, current-work, visual presentation, package, account or outreach changes were made. Acquisition is closed for root review.