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. 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.
