A what??

You probably know the story of the SAS soldier who has had his sentence of 18 months imprisonment for a firearms offence overturned on appeal, in great part due to the public outcry it caused.  It has now been suggested that the MoD tried to suppress the original story by issuing a D-notice.  A D-notice??  Did you know we still had D-notices?  Surely they were a war-time thing?  The D stands for defence and their original purpose was to prevent newspapers from publishing information which could be useful to the enemy.  That's the problem with these things - they are introduced for a good enough reason, but then when the reason has gone, they are not revoked, and end up being used for purposes well removed from their original intent.  There's a lot of it about!