Hello and welcome to News Hour.
It's coming to you live from the BBC World Service studios in central London.
I'm Tim Franks.
We're beginning with news of a big data leak.
This one wasn't a hack.
It was a mistake.
These things happen.
They shouldn't of course, but they do.
The difference with this one is the scale of the potential harm.
That it could potentially have been lethal and that the British government tried to suppress news of the leak from coming out.
What happened was this.
In February 2022,
an official at the British Ministry of Defence sent out to thousands of people in Afghanistan the names of 19,000 Afghans who had applied for resettlement in the UK,
fearful that their previous work alongside British forces might put them at risk given that the Taliban were now in power.
It was only 18 months later that the MOD, the Ministry of Defence, became aware of the leak.
Officials tried to stem the damage in two ways.
First, by setting up a new scheme costing, we're told today,
more than a billion dollars to get the people whose names had been leaked into the UK and to do so secretly.
And secondly,
to issue a blanket injunction preventing anyone even reporting on the existence of the list or the leak.