The secret court that silenced The News Agents...until now

22:32Because at the beginning, we were observing in secret what was going on, but we weren't actively challenging what was happening. The fact that it emerged in that first hearing that I went to and think, yeah, you guys were there as well, emerged. You know, we think this has affected estimated 99 ,000 people and we're going to help less than 200 initial applicants so plus family members you know times that by five there's a tiny tiny proportion of people that they initially suggested they would help the judge as well as us I think thought well if that's going to be the case what's the point in having an injunction to help these people when you've decided you're not helping the huge majority of people who have been affected by this and being put at risk it's better for them to be able to know about this and take precautionary action so there was a push from the judge directly and you can see it in briefing notes that were given to ministers civil servants saying you know if we don't start helping more people then there's a chance that this whole thing is going to be lifted because the protective effects that we say we got this injunction from the beginning you know they're not that big because we're not helping that many people so I think that was part of the reason as to why they've expanded the number of people that they're helping is because of our submissions and because of the judge pushing that and because there's a formal party in these hearings which might have to kind of explain to people what that means but I think the effect of us becoming parties initially and yeah it was your guys initiative to do that so well I'm taking the first step but I think that really helped with actually holding them to account for what they're actually doing to help anyone at all as we've discussed the truth is and

24:20Lewis Goodall:the thing that i do find chilling about it is that and this has been discussed in court although ultimately dismissed surely if it had been known during this period if this breach had been known maybe not immediately but at some point in the last 12 months it feels inconceivable to me i don't know about you but it feels inconceivable to me that at the very least there wouldn't have been quite significant political pressure on the then conservative government on the now labor government don't you think? Yes and I think also the other factor in this is legal pressure as well because I've currently been covering a separate Afghan case which is about the eligibility of specific special forces units.

25:00Basically people arguing the government's potentially unlawful in the way it's deciding who gets help and who doesn't get help basically. And so this whole process of the MOD deciding as a result of this leak who gets help and who doesn't get help it's all happening in secret so there's literally no way that either the public can scrutinize that parliament can scrutinize that the people who are affected by the breach can scrutinize that or anyone can take legal action against that case saying i think i'm high risk because effectively they're helping people that they've deemed a high risk cohort so someone else might come along and say i think i'm high risk you've assessed this wrong when you initially decided who you should help and you should help me as well.

25:46Lewis Goodall:So the government had changed strategy. This injunction was no longer about getting people out, but keeping the story in. We entered what felt like an endless, Kafkaesque nightmare. The government argued that there was a risk the Taliban already had the data set, but we couldn't be sure. The set was widely known in the Afghan community. Indeed, it had been placed in a Facebook group before being removed. But the government said that even though they were proposing to do nothing more to get people out, it would be better for them and everybody else not to be aware that their data had been compromised for their own safety.

26:21Lewis Goodall:When then, we asked, would the injunction be lifted? When the Taliban found out. A break glass moment, they argued. How would we know that, we asked. How could we know that? How could we know that they didn't already know and were using the set to go after people who couldn't themselves take precautions for their own safety because they didn't know about it we'll know when we know was basically the response this case in some ways has rested on whether or not the taliban have access to the data set to the breach there are lots of ways that journalists and particularly journalists like yourself who've got great contacts in this area could try and find that out and indeed the judge has actually repeatedly basically implored us to provide evidence that that might be the case that they've got access but of course in order to do that what you would have to do is approach people in afghanistan or wherever it happens to be and try and make subtle perhaps subtle inquiries as to whether they've heard anything but we were prevented from so doing because you're not allowed to approach anyone because you're subject to the injunction so we've had these long discussions in court about how you might be able to do that while still obeying the restrictions of the injunction and to be honest you can't yeah so basically we've just not been able to interrogate anything that they say but then the worrying thing about this is you know the glimpses of what we do get from the mod in the courtrooms that we can be part of they also aren't making inquiries on many many issues because they also say that they're subject to the injunction so we can't ask people in afghanistan if they've heard about a data set leak but neither can the mod so we're basically just arguing things i'm not quite sure based on more information because you know the mod is also restricted itself in interrogating anything and also people activists have emailed them directly about cases they think could be linked to a data set so people being arrested or interrogated on numbers or addresses and the mod says so we didn't interrogate that because we don't feel we should basically and we don't feel we can so there's a lot of circumstantial information that the government also says that they can't actually interrogate which leaves us in a position where the whole thing's basically just resting on a defense intelligent assessment which we haven't seen eventually it did become clear that the government was bringing people over partly because it was being forced to by the court action indeed though there is some dispute now about the figures by the government's own admission at least 6 ,900 people have now been brought over or invited to the UK as a result of the breach people who wouldn't otherwise have been eligible for relocation some of the documents we've seen suggested that that could be even more at a cost of some 7 billion 7 billion up to 7 billion and a big resettlement programme over which Parliament was having no say, of which no one outside of government and the courts even knew.

29:35Lewis Goodall:With each hearing that went by, I felt more and more uneasy. I'd understood the initial justification, but once that slipped away, it felt to me that the motives involved were darker. This was a then-government, remember, at the fag end of its time in office, early to mid 2024, embattled under siege. This was a catastrophic data breach. It would be an awful story for them. And it also went to the heart of wider politics. Was it conceivable or credible that politics was not playing a role in the decision making? It became clear as part of the court documents that one of the things which had been discussed at the special cabinet subcommittee convened to discuss the matter, including the Defence Secretary, Home Secretary and others, was the pressure on asylum hotels and the fact that it was government policy to reduce their usage, something which was incompatible with a policy of bringing more people in from Afghanistan.

30:32Lewis Goodall:This story, two decades and seven governments in the making, went to the heart of domestic politics in a general election year. That's why one of my top priorities as Prime Minister is to stop the boats. I know stopping the boats is a priority. We've introduced tough new measures today to help us stop the boats. My commitment to stopping the boats is unwavering. We must absolutely stop the boats. Stop the boats. We'll be able to stop the boats. But what bothered me more than even the substance was the process. This was a huge political story. It was clearly in the public interest for it to emerge at some point.

31:09Lewis Goodall:It would clearly have been in Parliament's interest to debate it, to ask ministers questions about the decisions they were making, to compel them to give answers in a way we could not about what had happened and the basis for their decision-making, their justification of what they were doing. But none of that was happening. The only people who knew about the injunction, save for those in Court 27, were the Prime Minister, the Defence Secretary, then Shadow Defence Secretary John Healey, the Speaker of the House of Commons, Lindsay Hoyle, who was told, basically, to make sure that questions which might be asked or not to be.

31:45Lewis Goodall:It felt like a cover-up to me on a grand scale, using a mechanism, a super injunction, which again was described in court as constitutionally unique. As the judge himself said, as long as this super injunction endured, democracy had been put into cold storage. But whatever limited scrutiny we could provide was itself hamstrung, because get this, injuncted as we were, we didn't even know the full extent of the story. We were sitting in a secret court, but there was a secret wrapped within that as well. So I'm standing outside the Royal Courts of Justice, which is where this case has played out in court number 27.

32:26Lewis Goodall:The only court that you can, one of the only courts in there that you can actually close off. It's where it's played out for two years. And I'm currently in the middle of something which has become kind of part of the weird ritual of this entire process which you know as we've said is basically a secret court secret court that's been sitting for two years only people who are parties of the case and who are with the government can attend it and can know anything about it by the force of law but the truth is is that um it's going on right now and i'm not in there why well because there is a secret court within a secret court because although by force of law everybody involved in the case has not been able to reveal or to say or to report or to tell anyone about anything that happens in there.

33:10Lewis Goodall:Whenever the government feels that there is something that they want to keep from even from even the people involved in that process and as I say that they've been junked by force of law they can go into something they call a close session. Now considering the entire thing is closed off anyway you might think that is weird. I certainly found it weird but what it basically means is is that everybody even our lawyer even our kc cannot be part of the closed process so probably i would say at least half of the overall secret proceedings have taken place within a secret on top of that as well and we just don't know what happens there and funnily enough every time the government has had a particularly difficult question that we've put to them over the course of two years weirdly enough they always say something along the lines of well I can't discuss that at the moment but I will be able to discuss it in closed session when all the journalists all the parties and indeed their lawyers are no longer there.

34:04Lewis Goodall:It has been yet another bizarre feature to this case and yet another thing which has left me wondering how on earth any of this can be said to truly operate in a country which is supposed to have freedom of expression as opposed to have democratic scrutiny and process on really important matters of public interest. So every time there was any key detail, any really difficult question, the government lawyers would say, we can't talk about that in open, as if the locked courtroom we were sat in was remotely open already. And if I sound annoyed about this, then forgive me, but it's been two years of this nonsense and it's been a lot.

34:44Lewis Goodall:We were all already injuncted. Initially, Holly and I were representing the media parties, standing up in court, arguing for greater transparency against government lawyers, including the top, top government lawyer, Sir James Eadie. The judge implored us to ask them questions, to give him something to work with. But this was the full might of the British state against a couple of media organisations who couldn't even be fully informed as to what was happening. Over time, fortunately, we got more allies. More newspapers joined, including the FT, the Mail, the Times, who for different reasons heard about the data set and were injuncted as well.

35:22Lewis Goodall:And we hired a brilliant young KC, Jude Bunting. But even he had to leave the room when they went into closed session. So often I sat there just thinking, every card is weighed in the government's favour. They're judge, jury and executioner. These are secrets locked in secrets, skeletons in cupboards with skeletons inside of them. They decided we observed. Indeed, the only check on massive executive power in this entire case, I would say, was the judge, Martin Chamberlain. And honestly, thank God for him. One of the younger and certainly brightest High Court judges. Throughout, he was asking the right questions, clearly deeply cognizant of the burden he was carrying.

36:08Lewis Goodall:He was, by his own admission, freezing our democratic process and the press's right to scrutinise the government. His instincts were right all along and often he didn't give the government its way. Indeed, he even discharged the injunction at one point saying it just didn't make any sense, only for his judgement to be knocked back by the Court of Appeal. But I sat there looking at him thinking, what if we hadn't had him? What if we'd had that first judge, an older establishment type, who gave the government even more secrecy than they wanted. Could our democratic process be so contingent on one man, one man in a robe?

36:44Lewis Goodall:He himself conceded that the secrecy and uniqueness of this case meant the jurisdictional basis was deeply limited. Had it been in open court, there would have been a hundred law professors writing about what had happened, that his decisions and what the government was doing, as it was, it was just him. It left me disturbed. Was this constitutionally significant? Because he, because we, were setting a precedent? On what legal basis was all of this really happening? What else might be hidden because it was inconvenient and difficult in the years ahead? Was I sitting through something when Britain, in a small way, became a different sort of country?

37:30Lewis Goodall:The months went by. I felt more and more frustrated by what I was seeing. We kept hearing of more and more people who were potentially aware of the data set. All the time, the Taliban could have had it. All the time, the British government was insulated from the consequences of its own decisions by the injunction. At each hearing, it became clear that the government was just playing for time, waiting to get to the election. at yet another hearing we finally got to cross-examine someone, one of the Ministry of Defence civil servants involved in the programme. Another unprecedented thing about this is in secret an MOD senior civil servant from the MOD was cross-examined in a secret hearing, which I don't know if that's ever happened before.

38:12When this was put to her, she kind of basically said the slowness is down to ministers who don't make any decisions was effectively how she phrased it i mean she might not want to repeat that but basically she said you know we're struggling to get them to decide anything and meetings that they said that they would be at have been postponed our team's doing what we can to get everything ready and get options ready but the ministerial will to do stuff is not

38:45Lewis Goodall:hugely forthcoming and i got the impression particularly at that time that that was happening that part of that reading between the lines was about the election, that an election was coming and that there was no great sense of any urgency. And this is me speculating here. Obviously, no one's explicitly said this, but it was telling, I think, that there was certainly, as you say, no urgency to resolve this matter. Yeah, and she actually said, you know, the fact that we have court dates has meant that we do work because we work for the court dates and, you know, we get stuff ready for the court.

39:19which is like surely you should be helping people whether or not you're being yelled at by a judge

39:25Lewis Goodall:and i have to say your point and it is just worth dwelling on this your point about the speed i also have found astounding and maddening speed on every level like the time it's taken to get any political decisions the number of times they've said there will be a sub cabinet committee that's due to meet on this day and then we later learn they didn't meet on that day or that it's been postponed or it's been deferred the length of time and you could feel you could see the government lawyers playing for time the entire time trying to push every court date back as long as possible can we please have another week can we please have another 10 days can we please have another two weeks usually the judge doing his best in fairness to him to try and keep them to a good time they'll say oh it's a very bank holiday my lord well i'm sorry and as to be fair to the judge he often has pushed back and i'm sorry bank holiday are not it's tough and then even just the more mechanical things like court hearing availability dates and the different availability how long have we sat there in those rooms while the judge the lawyers between them try and basically literally adjudicate a time that they can all do when they're not caught up on other cases and you're sort of sat there thinking my god this is actually people's lives here and we're basically all arguing about or they're arguing about whether it should be the second week of june or the fourth week of july whatever happens to be because court number 27 isn't available on the right day and I mean, it's Byzantine.

40:47Yeah, I think that really cuts to a lot of my feelings during all of this is we're in the UK in a very grandiose courtroom and it's like extremely senior lawyers. We're debating over whether people in Afghanistan who are in hiding have no money, you know, have no access to any of this, should have the ability to know that they've been put at risk just to even have a message saying please change your number because your data might have been breached the mod says we can't even tell them that we can't even say you know a preliminary warning message saying please take action to protect your data and we just turn up to a high court where people so far away from the reality of their experience or having these discussions.

41:41It just feels quite weird. But obviously I get that that's our system, that's how it works.

41:47Lewis Goodall:But it could have worked better. But it does seem, it has been quite bizarre. When Labour took over, I really thought these games might stop. But it didn't feel like they did. There was still so much playing for time, so much obfuscation. Eventually, though, the newish Secretary of State, John Healy, committed to a review. And guess what? The review concluded that the risk posed by the data set getting into the hands of the Taliban wasn't so great after all. Why? What a change? Had they learned something? Was the initial risk calculus wrong? Well, the conclusions of the review are that some time has passed, the Taliban already has a lot of information anyway, and as far as we can tell, they don't seem to be killing that many people.

42:29Lewis Goodall:Of course, you might think this was all known 23 months ago, and indeed it was, a point I have put to the Ministry of Defence and not received much in the way of a good answer. So, logically, it is possible the last 23 months were entirely based on a false premise, a wrong conclusion, a poor assessment. The MOD denied this, but our democracy may have been frozen an appalling legal precedent set for very little. Indeed, the documents they had provided suggest that the secrecy around the data set could well be making the Taliban more interested in its contents. Not less. Not for the first time. In this case, my head felt like slamming against Court 27's hard oak walls.

43:14Lewis Goodall:This podcast is dropping at noon on Tuesday. That is the date that this 23-month-old super injunction finally comes to an end and is being discharged by the High Court. It is the moment when Mr Justice Chamberlain, in my view, a bit of a hero of this story, as I say, delivered his final judgement. In it, in his characteristically waspish fashion, he makes pretty much the point I made just now, a quizzical eye raised, that as a result of the Ministry of Defence review, suddenly the whole basis of the super injunction that had been granted had all changed. On the day before this hearing, the 25th of June, 2025, I received a copy of the internal review report prepared under the supervision of the retired civil servant Paul Rimmer.

44:02It is sufficient to say that it includes the conclusion with respect to individuals whose data is included in the data set. Acquisition of the data set by the Taliban is unlikely to substantially change an individual's existing exposure given the volume of data already available. It also includes the conclusions that it appears unlikely that merely being on the data set would be grounds for targeting and it is therefore also unlikely that family members, immediate or more distant, will be targeted simply because the principle appears in the data set. These conclusions fundamentally undermine the evidential basis on which I, in my judgment number one and two, and the Court of Appeal relied in deciding that the super injunction should be continued.

44:54Lewis Goodall:And that brings us to today. John Healy is making a statement to the House of Commons at 12.30. It will be the first time in two years that Parliament has been able to exercise its right to scrutinise the executive. Two parties in that time dipped in the blood. Where does it leave us? Maybe you think the government was right. Maybe you think it was too much of a risk. That the right to scrutiny and press freedom and expression is a small sacrifice to pay for protection, however limited, of preventing knowledge of the breach from spreading. Of course, I've wrestled with that myself for two years.

45:29Lewis Goodall:But then, in which case, why now? That logic could have held forever. And what does it say about our democracy, that it should have been the government alone at the stroke of a pen, not the legislature, not anyone who made that decision aided by a single judge, in secret, without any scrutiny, in an online hearing, in the dog days of an August afternoon. The government has spent a huge amount of money on this case, defending its right to secrecy over our right to know, cloaked under Afghan's right to life, but not to know. I worry about where this leaves our democracy. I worry about what precedent it sets.

46:10Lewis Goodall:I worry about how easy it is in our system for the executive to act without restraint. For all of its problems, this could never have happened in the United States with its First Amendment rights and constitutionally bound freedom of expression. So many times I sat in that court and wondered, what else don't we know? Might there be other courts like this in other cases? It never should. Afghans' lives are put at risk through the fecklessness of our own systems. Should it have taken 23 months for you to know that, when the government itself said a long time ago that it wasn't proposing to do anything further to help them?

46:45Lewis Goodall:To this day, there are things I cannot tell you about this case. Secrecy still reigns. This case is about a question as old as politics itself. Who guards the guardians? But here's one thing I can tell you. On the 1st of July, the government quietly wound up the ARAP scheme without warning. It will no longer accept new applications, including potentially from people who are connected to those on the data set. they will no longer have a means to come to the UK. Charities slammed the government for shutting down a lifeline for Afghans living in fear of the Taliban. It's almost like they knew something was coming.

47:26Lewis Goodall:And what of the Afghans only now informed of the jeopardy they've long been in? We owed them a debt, our politicians told us. It is a debt which seems only to deepen. Right, we'll be back with John and Emily just after this.

47:48This is The News Agents. Lewis, this has been a real labour of love. I mean, as you said, this is 23 months just to get to the point where we are able to report the story. and as you made so clear this is about the secrecy of the whole process about why people taxpayers the public have been left in the dark about how much this would all cost and what our policy is now to the afghans that we as you said owed that debt to i mean do we know now have we got any clearer picture of how many people will actually come here as a result of the arab scheme even if that's now been shut down well the weird thing everything about all this is that

48:29Lewis Goodall:But I still don't know whether the government did the right thing and they're denying they kind of did the right thing in a sense that, as I was explaining there, there are 16 ,000 people who have now come to the UK who were on the data set. And that's a huge number of people. What the government are saying and they're spinning today quite furiously is that this is nothing to do with the data breach. This is because of these people would have qualified anyway under the Arab scheme. And you can see why they would do that, because if it is the case that they were or a large proportion of them came over as a result of this catastrophic breach, it has cost a taxpayer an enormous amount of money.

49:08Lewis Goodall:It's cost them seven billion pounds. The government said that in court themselves. And there's a moment in the court where the judge said, sorry, just say that again. Seven billion. He's like, yes, seven billion pounds, my lord. But would we have spent that anyway without the data breach? Well, the government is arguing yes. We can never know and we will never know. They're saying that they've spent 400 million pounds specifically as a result of the data breach. That's still a lot of money. Let's just say for the sake of argument that it was 7 billion or even if it was a good proportion of that 2 billion, 3 billion, 4 billion, whatever.

49:37Lewis Goodall:Consider that. That is a huge amount of money for Parliament to be unaware of that the government, the executive was spending without scrutiny, without process, without questions. and nobody knew apart from the people in that courtroom and people in government. That's the bit that fascinates me is that you think of the hue and cry there have been over the past couple of weeks following the voting down and the welfare reform proposals and everyone's saying, my God, Rachel Reeves has got to find 5 billion quid now that she didn't know. There's a massive black hole. And we've spent 7 billion pounds, we, the British taxpayer, and we know absolutely sod all about it.

50:11Lewis Goodall:And the thing is, I think, John, this story sort of, for me, sort of cuts to the heart of sort of the three big issues of our politics or three of the biggest issues of our politics one the financial situation we find ourselves in if it is seven billion that's a huge amount of money it's about 15 of the defense budget for a year it cuts to immigration and the question about asylum because this is a huge number of people and it has put enormous strain on the state and it also cuts to something which i think is is lesser discussed but which for me has become so central as part of all of this which is about how our justice system works and about what we are told about what is happening you know can secret justice ever really truly be justice and the case that the judge in this case who has done quite a few of these things has written about this extensively saying that in his view we do need to look again as to this was a kind of unique case but when there are courts that sit in private which does happen how that process works because i do not think that our system has worked as it should have done in this case and it's been ad hoc and it's been an unusual set of circumstances but what if it happens again it's really interesting that this started i mean when when we first started investigating this this was the conservative government yeah and you would have expected i think a new government to come in and say right sunlight is the best disinfection let's talk about this the fact that they didn't or couldn't, did that come from the MOD or did that come from the justice system itself?

51:42I mean, did they have a point to make, which is if lives were at risk, then secrecy is always the first port of call? I think they did to begin with.

51:52Lewis Goodall:I don't think it would have required a super injunction, which, as I say, there's this crazy moment in this online hearing when the government wasn't even requesting a super injunction. And this judge came along and said, well, don't you think you ought to have one? And the KCO says, oh, yes, please, let's have one of those so i don't think it required that but i think for sure you know when it was initially sought it was explicitly put and put to me and put to this very small online hearing that this was only a temporary matter of expediency it was simply going to be about the ministry of defense trying to make up for its own screw up right get its ducks in a row and then four months later we come back and it turns out they've changed the entire basis for that and as i say that is only for itself and the thing that really frustrated me Emily throughout that really actually I thought was disgraceful was the sheer number of times when it was so clear that both governments for whatever reason because it happened in the Conservative and Labour government were simply dragging its feet for political expediency you know the number of times you sat there and they had promised the government lawyers they had promised that there would be a ministerial meeting between the relevant ministers and then you find out that hadn't taken place and it was promised again two weeks later and it hadn't taken place the number of times that the lawyers argue that they simply sort of couldn't do the next hearing because they simply didn't have availability or they couldn't talk to the relevant minister in time this was pathetic this was about afghans live we had good reason to believe and as time went on my colleagues who joined the case who had better contacts in afghanistan and know more about this than i did presented the court with more and more evidence that there was a very strong likelihood that the taliban were aware of this data set and might already have it.

53:27Lewis Goodall:My colleagues knew of people, knew of people who were on the list and were killed, were killed during this time. Now, correlation does not equal causation. And a lot of people are killed by the Taliban. Indeed so. But this was clearly a matter of life and death. And to sit there, to sit there as I did in that courtroom sometime, and hear that we couldn't do a hearing for another two weeks because this particular courtroom wasn't available again, or a particular government KC wasn't available because it was a bank holiday, or whatever it happened to be, repeatedly I thought was pathetic. So here's my question.

53:56You use the phrase political expediency. Feels to me like this was institutional expediency. It was a protection of the institutions. I hate all that phrase in American politics of the deep state doing this. This feels like a deep state thing that has gone on where I look at all your reporting on this, Lewis, over the time we've been talking about it and thinking, is there a benign explanation to all of this? Is there a benign way of looking at all of this and why they did what they did for the best of possible reasons?

54:26Lewis Goodall:And it sounds like it is trying to cover up the institutions. It's political expediency. If you're Keir Starmer and you've come into power would have been to just write. Well, new broom, as Emily says, sweep it. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. Yeah, I thought that might well happen. And the only reason that we're having this conversation today is because Healy, who became Defence Secretary, eventually, after a lot of dragging of feet, commissioned this review that, as I say, has concluded for reasons that are undisclosed that the potential disclosure of the data set is no longer such a problem as it was.

55:01Lewis Goodall:I think there was a lot of institutional protection. Of course there was. I think in fairness, we heard from a civil servant from the Minister of Defence as terms of one of the hearings. And that person said actually just getting any ministerial engagement. This person was actually quite damning about her bosses, effectively. They were saying that getting ministers to actually make decisions on these things was very, very difficult. And that is why I think, look, I mean, this is just my speculation here. I don't have evidence for this. But my sense of sitting in every hearing was I just felt that the then Sunak government was doing everything it could to get to the general election and make sure it didn't come out.

55:34Lewis Goodall:You've got to remember what terrible political position Sunak was in. This would have been awful for him. And then I think after that, my sense was I think that the incoming Labour government basically took it on advice of officials that they wanted to continue with this. and I think that they probably thought that given everything else that was going on and the terrible focus and the toxin in our politics around small boats and around refugees and asylum seekers that this was just something that was just too politically difficult. So are you clear why this was a security risk before and isn't now?

56:06No. We don't know? No.

56:09Lewis Goodall:And they're not proposing to tell us. Now I think obviously that is something that MPs are going to want to ask about and are going to try and potentially compel, again, information from the government. But they're simply saying that the risk calculus has changed. Now, whether that's because the risk calculus was always wrong, whether because there's some information that we don't know, or whether because the initial assessment was flawed, we just don't know. And the thing is, John, I cannot tell you how crazy this system is, is that when you're sat there in a secret court where you're all, everybody who is there is under threat of prison, if you reveal anything that goes on in that court.

56:43Lewis Goodall:When there is ever a particularly difficult question for the government like that to answer, what do they say? Well, we can't talk about this in open, as if this were an open court. We can talk about it in close, i.e. we have to get out. And the only people who hear it, our KC doesn't even hear it. This is what I mean about the process to this whole thing. There's secrecy within secrecy. And it leads to a situation where the asymmetry between your side and theirs is just so profound I mean, something I thought about is what if no journalist had ever found out about this? You know, I wouldn't say very much about us doing our jobs, but let's just say there could be a situation where...

57:17Well, there's probably a hundred other cases where exactly that happens. We never find out until 30 years later when the papers are released. Where no journalist ever found out about it.

57:25Lewis Goodall:We were able to provide very limited scrutiny given we weren't even aware of half the documentation. We weren't allowed to sit in half of the court cases themselves. But at least there was some pressure. There was some pressure. The government knew that some media organisations knew about it and we weren't going to let it go. What would have happened if no one had known? And the only scrutiny had come from a single judge who, as I say in the piece, had great instincts and I think did the country of service in the way he handled it. But it could have been a different judge. The contingency of all of this chills me.

57:52Lewis Goodall:And by the way, if you're reading some of this today, because I say, you know, other media organisations have been injuncted and there'll be a lot of press coverage even from those organisations which weren't injuncted. And you're hearing different figures and you've heard different figures from John Healy in the House of Commons than what you've heard here. I'm not that surprised by that, because how can I put this? The government has in their explanations over the last 24 hours that I and other journalists have been putting to them. They have come back with figures, both in terms of the number of people affected, both in terms of the number of people they've relocated, the cost of that which are at some variance with many of the documents and witness statements and submissions that we saw over a two-year period so someone's made a mistake someone potentially could be in contempt of court who knows but that would be the explanation as to why but what we've presented here is basically what the government is telling us now and have some of the information alongside that we saw in court either way what is absolutely clear is a huge number of people have been affected by that data breach.

58:57Lewis Goodall:Quite a lot of people do seem to have been relocated in this enormous covert operation that no one knew about. But the total number of people still affected who have not been relocated, that the government is not proposing to relocate, is almost certainly many more besides. We'll be back tomorrow after an astonishing episode that has taken two years to bring to you. It's even longer than one of your normal episodes. Touche. We couldn't get through without a bit of a jibe, could we? No. See you tomorrow. Bye-bye. Bye. This is a Global Player original podcast.