“Immediate action” is being taken after blueprints of jail layouts were shared online.

The maps detailing the layouts of prisons in England and Wales were leaked on the dark web over the past fortnight, according to The Times.

The detailed information is said to include the locations of cameras and sensors, prompting fears they could be used to smuggle drugs or weapons into prisons or help inmates plan escapes.

Security officials are now working to identify the source of the leak and who might benefit from the details.

The Ministry of Justice did not disclose which prisons were involved in the breach.

A government spokesperson said in a statement: “We are not going to comment on the specific detail of security matters of this kind, but we are aware of a breach of data to the prison estate and, like with all potential breaches, have taken immediate action to ensure prisons remain secure.”

The leak comes amid a chronic prison overcrowding crisis, which has led to early release schemes and the re-categorising of the security risks of some offenders to ease capacity pressures.

Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood is launching a sentencing review in a bid to ease the crisis.

The UK will “set out a path” to lift defence spending to 2.5% of national income in the spring, the prime minister has said, finally offering a timeframe for an announcement on the long-awaited hike after mounting criticism.

Sir Keir Starmer gave the date during a phone call with Mark Rutte, the secretary general of NATO, in the wake of threats by Moscow to target UK and US military facilities following a decision by London and Washington to let Ukraine fire their missiles inside Russia.

There was no clarity though on when the 2.5% level will be achieved. The UK says it currently spends around 2.3% of GDP on defence.

Ukraine war latest: Follow live updates

A spokeswoman for Downing Street said that the two men “began by discussing the situation in Ukraine and reiterated the importance of putting the country in the strongest possible position going into the winter”.

They also talked about the deployment of thousands of North Korean soldiers to fight alongside Russia.

“The prime minister underscored the need for all NATO countries to step up in support of our collective defence and updated on the government’s progress on the strategic defence review,” the spokeswoman said.

“His government would set out the path to 2.5% in the spring.”

The defence review will also be published in the spring.

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While a date for an announcement on 2.5% will be welcomed by the Ministry of Defence, analysts have long warned that such an increase is still well below the amount that is needed to rebuild the armed forces after decades of decline to meet growing global threats from Russia, an increasingly assertive China, North Korea and Iran.

They say the UK needs to be aiming to hit at least 3% – probably higher.

With Donald Trump returning to the White House, there will be significantly more pressure on the UK and other European NATO allies to accelerate increases in defence spending.

We heard a little more about Rivian’s upcoming plans to open its Rivian Adventure Network chargers at a roundtable discussion with CEO RJ Scaringe this week.

Rivian has been working on its own in-house charging network since 2020, with a focus of placing charging sites on the way to the sort of beautiful natural places that it has tied so much of its brand to.

For a primary example of this, Rivian opened its first “Charging Outpost” just outside Yosemite National Park in July, renovating an old gas station into a very cool ranger cabin-style spot to stop and refuel your car – and also yourself.

Now, it’s ready to open its network to other brands, which it announced last April. The goal was to open by the end of 2024 – which is fast approaching.

While Rivian stopped short of announcing a date for this at our roundtable discussion, it was clear that the announcement is coming “very soon.”

Scaringe told us that he was just reviewing the software that non-Rivian customers will use and that “it’s gonna be awesome.” So it sounds like there’s a plan to offer a separate app experience for non-Rivian owners, likely through the Rivian app (thus ballooning the number of apps that every EV owner needs to have… we need to do something about that).

To this end, Rivian did purchase A Better Route Planner (ABRP) last June, one of the more popular charge planning apps for EVs. This has surely been a factor in Rivian’s app development.

Scaringe told us that RAN has now expanded to a total of 91 sites and around 700 chargers – which he says is around 4% of the size of Tesla’s Supercharger network, but that RAN has maintained high uptime as it scales. Scaringe said that if you would have asked him 6-7 years ago, he would have expected more successful third-party charging companies by now., but that now, out of all the charging networks out there, there are “only two great networks – and only one great scaled network,” namely Tesla Superchargers.

The others, which aren’t owned by an EV manufacturer, just aren’t as good. RAN and Tesla have ~99% uptime, where Scaringe said that other networks have sub-70% or even sub-50% uptime (this may be an underestimate – or maybe not – but the point stands that every EV driver can tell you Tesla is the gold standard here).

So Rivian sees it as important to electrification to offer another great network that can help give drivers more choices, more availability, and high reliability.

But how will that interface with the NACS transition? Rivian was early to hop aboard and announce that it will shift to using NACS and ship adapters to its owners, though its current vehicles still have native CCS ports even post-refresh (the Korean brands will be the first to offer native NACS ports on their vehicles).

We were quite interested in the timeline of who started the discussions to shift to NACS, and Scaringe told us that it was pretty much universal across the industry that as soon as Tesla released its NACS whitepaper calling it an open standard, car companies started talking amongst themselves about the potential of finally harmonizing on a single charging standard.

As of now, Rivian is still installing CCS cables, not NACS ones. It sounded like it intends to keep doing this for the foreseeable future, and that “the charging network will catch up” as cars transition to NACS. Until then, people can use adapters – and “in the long term, everything will go to NACS” as it’s just a better standard, and whatever remaining CCS cars exist will just end up using adapters.

This seems a little strange to make cars that aren’t (natively) supported on your own charging network, but Scaringe said that that’s the benefit of owning the network – cables are not too hard to swap out. So it would be easy to just change out the cable heads on existing chargers without having to build new sites or install new cabinets.

We asked whether they’d try a dual-charging-head strategy, with NACS and CCS heads on each cabinet, but it didn’t sound like that was in the plans. The cables will, at least, be long enough to reach both sides of the vehicle – an important consideration given the lack of standardization of charging port locations on EVs, as networks start opening up to multiple brands.

So – we’re looking forward to hearing more about Rivian’s efforts to open RAN, which ought to bear fruit quite soon, if the “end of the year” schedule holds. Stay tuned, as we’re sure there’s more news to come soon.

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