When a news story bursts into the headlines in the U.K. and consumes all the oxygen for several days, it can be difficult to know whether it is a domestic uproar or something that is reaching an international audience.

For all the fevered debate here, it seems that what we are calling “the Afghan data leak scandal” has not attracted much notice in America. Perhaps we should be grateful.

To sum up, in February 2022, a Royal Marine at U.K. Special Forces headquarters emailed a spreadsheet that he thought contained the names of around 150 Afghan nationals who had applied to come to Britain, having assisted U.K. forces in Afghanistan. In fact, it had the details of 18,714 Afghans, as well as some Special Forces personnel, senior defense officials, members of Parliament and intelligence officers.

In the wrong hands, it could have been a pre-prepared Taliban kill list. This was a catastrophic breach of data security.

The Ministry of Defence was unaware of this loss of data for 18 months, until some of the information appeared in a Facebook group in August 2023. Defence Secretary Ben Wallace applied to the High Court for a temporary injunction on reporting the leak so that the security implications could be assessed and appropriate measures put in place to protect those at risk. Wallace was, however, standing down. His successor, Grant Shapps, who took on responsibility for the issue.

Astonishingly, the High Court judge who considered the Ministry of Defence’s........

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