The British Defense Ministry accidentally exposed personal information in 2022 about more than 18,000 Afghans who worked with it before the Taliban retook power in Afghanistan. The government then suppressed public disclosure of the data breach for two years through a stringent court order.
The extraordinary lapse in security, which the government acknowledged for the first time on Tuesday, led Britain to set up a secret program to resettle thousands of people believed to be at risk of retribution. While that program spirited many people to safety, the episode has thrown a spotlight on a messy period in British foreign policy, and it has raised questions about a troubling lack of transparency.
When the Conservative government at the time, led by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, discovered the breach in 2023, it kept the error secret from most lawmakers and the public by obtaining a “super injunction” from the courts, which prohibited journalists, several of whom had been tipped off about the breach, from reporting it.
Super injunctions are legal mechanisms in Britain that prevent news organizations from publishing a report on a topic or even from referring to the fact that a court order has been granted. In this case, critics said, the government’s initially legitimate interest in protecting the safety of Afghans was supplanted over time by a desire to avoid an embarrassing headline during an election year.
In a statement to Parliament on Tuesday, John Healey, the defense secretary for the current government, which is led by the Labour Party, said, “I am closing this resettlement route; I’m disclosing the data loss and confirm that the court order was lifted at 12 noon today.”
Mr. Healey described the injunction, to which he was also subjected, as unprecedented, adding that he had been “deeply concerned about the lack of transparency to Parliament and the public.”
The personal data of thousands of Afghans, Mr. Healey said, was accidentally disclosed in an email from a defense official that was sent outside authorized channels in 2022. The scale of the breach was only discovered in August 2023, when details of nine individuals surfaced on social media.
Alarmed by the disclosure, the Conservative government created a secret resettlement plan, called the Afghan Response Route, which has so far relocated 4,500 Afghans to Britain at a cost of about $537 million. A further 600 people and their immediate families are still to arrive, and the cost could rise to a total of around $1.13 billion.
Mr. Healey said that after he came to office following last year’s election, he commissioned an independent report on the matter, which was published on Tuesday. Compiled by a former senior civil servant, Paul Rimmer, the report concluded that there was little evidence that the Taliban were intent on a campaign of retribution or that the exposed spreadsheet would prompt them to act against Afghans who had worked with the British.
“Given the nearly four years since the Taliban takeover,” the report said, “posing a current threat or resistance to Taliban rule is likely to be a far more persuasive factor in the threat faced by individuals in Afghanistan, rather than former affiliations.”
The breach began, Mr. Healey said, when an unnamed employee in the Defense Ministry emailed a file about an existing resettlement scheme, known as the Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy, which was intended for those who had worked for, or with, British forces in Afghanistan. The email was sent outside authorized systems, and it contained the names and information of those applying mainly to that program, as well as the personal details of some family members.
“This official mistakenly believed that they were sending the details of 150 applicants. However, the spreadsheet in fact contained personal information associated to 18,714 Afghans,” Mr. Healey said, apologizing for what he called a serious error.
The government’s decision to seek an injunction was swiftly approved by a High Court judge in September 2023, soon after journalists learned of the data breach. It was upheld in two later rulings, though in a third hearing, Justice Martin Chamberlain ordered it to be lifted because it was likely that the Taliban already had the names of the Afghans. The government appealed his ruling, however, and it was overturned, leaving the super injunction in place.
The data disclosure stirred awkward memories of Britain’s fraught exit from Afghanistan, which many blamed on the United States. President Trump had negotiated a deal with the Taliban during his first term that set a timetable for the pulling out of American troops. President Joseph R. Biden Jr. then presided over the chaotic, bloodstained withdrawal as Taliban fighters swept into a defenseless Kabul, the capital.
But Britain’s government was harshly criticized as well. Dominic Raab, then the foreign secretary, lingered on vacation in Crete even as Kabul was falling, contributing to the portrait of an out-of-touch government.
The prime minister at the time, Boris Johnson, was accused of favoring pets over people after emails surfaced which suggested that he pushed for the evacuation of cats and dogs by a British animal charity. He denied the accusations.
The disclosure about the data breach comes at a time when immigration is a sensitive issue in British politics, after a surge in legal migration under the previous government and the arrival of thousands of asylum seekers from France on small boats. Mr. Healey said that although the relocation program had been kept secret, the numbers of those admitted to Britain had been disclosed in official immigration statistics.
Lewis Goodall, a correspondent for the News Agents podcast who learned of the data breach in August 2023, said that the previous government’s rationale for preserving the gag order shifted over time. To him, that suggested ministers were less worried about the security of the Afghans, many of whom by then had already been relocated, than about the political cost of revealing the mistake during an election year.
“We do not have a First Amendment like the United States,” Mr. Goodall said, referring to the super injunction. “Press freedom is already more limited in Britain. If this starts to be used more frequently in other cases, it would pose a profound threat to our parliamentary system.”
Stephen Castle is a London correspondent of The Times, writing widely about Britain, its politics and the country’s relationship with Europe.
Mark Landler is the London bureau chief of The Times, covering the United Kingdom, as well as American foreign policy in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. He has been a journalist for more than three decades.
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