[HN Gopher] Convicted Post Office workers have names cleared
___________________________________________________________________
Convicted Post Office workers have names cleared
Author : colinprince
Score : 267 points
Date : 2021-04-24 14:02 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.com)
| segfaultbuserr wrote:
| Back in the 80s on the Usenet, there used to be a popular forum &
| newsletter called comp.risks on the potential risks of computer
| technology failures in the society, such as software bugs.
| Incidents like this one were exactly the situation imagined by
| the forum members.
| drak0n1c wrote:
| People getting forcibly removed from overbooked flights was
| another. When policies rely solely on computer automation, and
| human employees aren't allowed to make common sense ad hoc
| decisions, you end up with some ridiculous injustices (however
| petty).
| rwmj wrote:
| It still exists! It's now mainly a mailing list, which I'm
| still subscribed to and still receiving. Unfortunately right
| this second the website seems to be down, but it's:
| http://www.risks.org
| crazygringo wrote:
| Does anyone know how the courts rendered these verdicts?
|
| Courts are _supposed_ to be a level of protection.
|
| If they can't show motivation, point to actual dates and
| quantities of money stolen, a bank account or purchase it showed
| up in, all the usual standards of evidence to make an _actual
| criminal case_...
|
| ...how does this progress from an accusation to beyond reasonable
| doubt?
|
| Software is buggy. Since when does a court accept the
| uncorroborated report of software, without _any_ other
| corroborating evidence, and sentence someone?
|
| This boggles my mind, and seems to go against fundamental legal
| principles.
|
| Is this going to result in some sort of legal reform? The root
| cause here isn't a software bug, it's a legal system bug.
| echopom wrote:
| > Software is buggy. Since when does a court accept the
| uncorroborated report of software, without any other
| corroborating evidence, and sentence someone?
|
| Former PwC Auditor here , the court accepts evidence from
| independent IT Auditing company who are qualified to perform an
| audit on the system and asses the reliability of the system or
| from the vendor himself who provide proofs that the system he
| sells is reliable ( testing , certifications etc..)
|
| If you're developer you'll probably agree with me that this
| approach is of course a "non-sense" because no software was
| ever created "bug-free" or can be really defined as "reliable".
|
| Yet , that's how the court works : "The vendor says the
| software has no bugs , thus the court is rejecting the
| objection of buggy software. The court found you guilty"
|
| I'm sadden by this news because it depicts how much the mixture
| of "bad software" and "corporate/enterprise software" are tied
| together and how much it can impact people on their daily life
| with irreversible impact.
| interestica wrote:
| > or from the vendor himself who provide proofs that the
| system he sells is reliable
|
| It seems that this was the conflict of interest that made
| Fujitsu's testimony unreliable. They couldn't admit fault
| without risking the contract. And I'm not sure that
| relationship was addressed in court for a jury to note.
| failwhaleshark wrote:
| What kind of auditor if you don't mind me asking?
|
| And, do you hate Lotus Notes?
| theginger wrote:
| There is a paper here [1] based a lot on these cases calling
| for a review of the presumption that computer evidence is
| correct.
|
| It is an absolutely crazy situation where the onus is on the
| person disputing the computer evidence to show that something
| is wrong. Even in the middle ages they had a system in place
| where both parties would have reliable evidence to deal with
| non reputation in financial transactions. They used a split
| wooden tally sticks [2], yet now because it is on a computer,
| and computers are supposedly rarely wrong the courts will allow
| an organisation to produce something from essentially their own
| 1 sided ledger and it is up to the other side to prove it
| wrong. The sub postmasters had no evidence, no ledgers or paper
| receipts of their own, they were expected to rely entirely on
| this system to be correct, when it wasn't the entire justice
| system was rigged against them with the only possibility of
| winning was to prove that a multi million PS IT system was not
| working correctly. This would have been hard enough anyway, but
| the company who built it and the one using it were both willing
| to lie to cover up its failings.
|
| [1]https://journals.sas.ac.uk/deeslr/article/view/5240
|
| [2]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tally_stick
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| Legal reform is like software refactoring. You always know it
| needs to happen. It rarely ever does. Even if it does, there's
| still bugs.
|
| > Since when does a court accept the uncorroborated report of
| software, without any other corroborating evidence, and
| sentence someone?
|
| Since before software has had bugs. Law is the human-governance
| form of software. It's just as shitty as software is, for the
| same exact reason.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| Everyone except the victims is to blame here. The courts should
| have done better, but in the UK these people would have been
| unable to get a public defender and unable to afford their own
| defence either. So many would have plead guilty and others had
| to try and manage the defence themselves. The result is
| predictable.
|
| A wider question is why no one asked why so many people with
| the same job were being charged and convicted/pleading guilty.
| Fraud is a rare crime and rarely prosecuted. So many Cases in
| one profession is fishy all by itself.
| robinjfisher wrote:
| > but in the UK these people would have been unable to get a
| public defender
|
| Absolutely not the case. If one cannot afford a solicitor one
| will be appointed.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| For a crown court, anyone with an adjusted household income
| over PS22345 is expected to pay in part. Anyone with a
| household income (unadjusted) over PS37500 gets no help.
| You can also be caught if you have more than about 30k in
| assets (including equity in your home so anyone who owns in
| the southeast is screwed).
|
| https://www.gov.uk/guidance/criminal-legal-aid-means-
| testing
|
| I only discovered this 2y ago when I was arrested. My
| solicitor in the police station explained he was free but
| only on that day. I'd have to pay in advance if the police
| choose to prosecute (they didn't, I was released without
| charge).
|
| A lot of people don't realise how expensive it is to be
| innocent in the UK sadly.
| robinjfisher wrote:
| Quite - the criminal justice system is woefully
| underfunded and COVID has only exacerbated the problem.
| The means testing leaves many people facing no choice but
| to plead guilty or risk bankruptcy.
|
| This book is a chilling insight into the state of
| criminal justice: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Secret-
| Barrister-Stories-Law-Broken...
| FpUser wrote:
| >"but in the UK these people would have been unable to get a
| public defender and unable to afford their own defence
| either"
|
| So maybe the UK should spend less time writing horror stories
| about other "undemocratic" countries and concentrate on their
| own sorry state of human rights.
|
| What had happen should be impossible in a "democratic western
| country that respects human rights". Last time I checked they
| count themselves as one.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| You are getting downvoted, but I think this is a fair point
| - most folks are busy being patriotic or whatever and do
| not realise that UK is basically turning into Russia with
| recent corruption scandal
| FpUser wrote:
| >"You are getting downvoted"
|
| I wear it as a badge of honor ;)
| thewakalix wrote:
| I think they can do both of those things at the same time.
| FpUser wrote:
| They're not doing both. Not until they start punishing
| those responsible. Otherwise it is just oopsy and
| business as usual till the next big fuckup.
| DanBC wrote:
| > but in the UK these people would have been unable to get a
| public defender
|
| What makes you think that?
| LatteLazy wrote:
| I've replied above more fully but legal defence is a means
| tested benefit and the test is very restrictive even for
| the crown court. Household incomes over 38k mean you pay
| the whole cost. Or if you have more than about 30k in home
| equity you also pay the whole cost.
|
| https://www.gov.uk/guidance/criminal-legal-aid-means-
| testing
| Buttons840 wrote:
| > A wider question is why no one asked why so many people
| with the same job were being charged and convicted/pleading
| guilty
|
| Indeed. You would hope at some point someone would ask why so
| many have "stolen" money, but yet the actual money has never
| been located in any account, almost as if the money just
| disappeared, or never existed in the first place. Hmmm.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| Exactly. Some people went bankrupt trying to pay back large
| sums they "owed", they had no apparent assets, no apparent
| extravagant expenses and yet everyone convinced they have a
| tonne of cash somewhere...
| mjw1007 wrote:
| Particularly given that, on the theory that the software was
| correct, the post office was able to reliably detect the kind
| of fraud they claim was going on and make the supposed
| fraudsters pay the money back.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| "Bad software" is only part of the story.
|
| From what has been reported in the media, the Post Office and
| the contractor knew that the software had issues but chose to
| cover it up and to go after innocent individuals instead. In
| some instances people were also made to sign settlements
| preventing them from criticising the software.
|
| This is why this is such a big scandal in the UK. The software
| was buggy but people lied and sent innocent people to jail to
| cover it up.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| The law presumes that computer systems operate correctly unless
| there is evidence to the contrary.
|
| This is a reasonably common thing - for example the law also
| assumes letters are delivered after being posted unless there
| is evidence to the contrary.
| natch wrote:
| To riff off that, it's also a very common (not universal,
| nobody is saying that) thing to presume that the justice
| system works correctly, at least in some countries. But this
| is aspirational at best.
|
| We need better frameworks for incorporating doubt into our
| thinking about such things... whether it's the reliability of
| computers, or of the justice system, producing what we
| expect.
| FpUser wrote:
| >"This is a reasonably common thing - for example the law
| also assumes letters are delivered after being posted unless
| there is evidence to the contrary."
|
| They did not invent registered mail for nothing. It is
| exactly for the reason that mail does not get delivered. I am
| sick of counting how many times I've received somebody else's
| mail. And I got $8,000 worth of integrated circuits from
| Digikey marked as delivered but missing. By sheer accident
| found that it's been delivered to the house of one of my
| neighbors.
|
| I even once chased the postman and asked him why are you
| dropping somebody else's mail in my box? All I could get from
| him was: "it is ok"
| DanBC wrote:
| But in for legal cases in England and Wales you only need
| proof of posting, you do not need proof of delivery.
|
| Using proof of delivery can cause problems. People are
| allowed to decline to accept those letters, and if they do
| that there's now a paper trail proving they didn't get your
| letter. That doesn't happen if you just use proof of
| posting.
| FpUser wrote:
| >"But in for legal cases in England and Wales you only
| need proof of posting, you do not need proof of delivery"
|
| Then it is sorry state of affairs. People could get
| punished for no fault of their own.
| mitchdoogle wrote:
| I don't see the problem in what you describe. Seems like
| a problem only for people who find the truth inconvenient
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > They did not invent registered mail for nothing.
|
| You need _proof of posting_ , not _proof of delivery_. If
| you can prove posting, it's up to them to disprove
| delivery.
| crazygringo wrote:
| But that's still circumstantial evidence.
|
| If the computer says money amounts don't match, that still
| doesn't say who stole it.
|
| It _could_ have been the person directly responsible for it
| -- or it _could_ have been a third party attempting to steal
| from _them_ , or someone hacking the system, etc.
|
| You still need to go beyond reasonable doubt -- establish
| motive, establish corroborating evidence, etc.
| fauigerzigerk wrote:
| One pretty obvious piece of evidence for faulty software
| would have been if there were significantly more such
| accusations after the introduction of this software than
| before. I wonder if anyone asked for these statistics.
| youngbullind wrote:
| They could always say the software was shining a light on
| a problem that was going unnoticed before.
| fauigerzigerk wrote:
| That wouldn't be very credible though. They would have
| had to explain why stock keeping and accounting was so
| much less accurate before. They would also have to
| explain why their staff was supposedly far more
| delinquent than staff at comparable shops.
|
| Of course they can claim anything they want, but it could
| have weakened their argument considerably. As a defense
| lawyer I would have asked for those numbers to raise some
| doubts, not because it's incontrovertible proof.
| simion314 wrote:
| >Does anyone know how the courts rendered these verdicts?
|
| I am wondering too if they maybe had "experts" testify , and
| those experts were just clueless.
| philjohn wrote:
| I've heard whispers that lies may have been told under oath,
| but can't say definitively. A criminal prosecution looks
| likely to be opened regardless.
| xioxox wrote:
| In one case (Seema Misra) the judge asked the jury this in
| his/her summing up:
|
| "There is no direct evidence of her taking any money... She
| adamantly denies stealing. There is no CCTV evidence. There are
| no fingerprints or marked bank notes or anything of that kind.
| There is no evidence of her accumulating cash anywhere else or
| spending large sums of money or paying off debts, no evidence
| about her bank accounts at all. Nothing incriminating was found
| when her home was searched...Do you accept the prosecution case
| that there is ample evidence before you to establish that
| Horizon is a tried and tested system in use at thousands of
| post offices for several years, fundamentally robust and
| reliable?"
|
| The jury pronounced Seema Misra guilty.
|
| There are many more details in this very comprehensive report
| by Private Eye: https://www.private-eye.co.uk/special-
| reports/justice-lost-i...
| UnpossibleJim wrote:
| Never underestimate the lack of technical knowledge of judge,
| jury, Senate or Congress (I'm American, I can't speak to the
| British system - but it seems similar).
| IshKebab wrote:
| People think software is infallible, despite their direct
| evidence otherwise.
| 0x_rs wrote:
| It's a "guilty until proven innocent" story, and I'm afraid
| there'll be many more in the future when the black-box
| software so prints out and whomever is in charge refuses to
| question the legitimacy of the claims for whatever reason
| they may have. This one time they made it out, countless more
| may not.
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| Thankfully stories like this help to reinforce positive
| outcomes in other similar trials.
| kergonath wrote:
| Yes, you face an uphill battle if one forensic "expert" has
| decided you were guilty. It is actually quite similar to
| non-falsifiable pseudo-science forensic techniques that are
| used to impress jurys. Being innocent is not enough.
| jack_riminton wrote:
| Will be even worse when the black-box in question is a deep
| neural network that can't show its workings out
| anigbrowl wrote:
| This is a good example of why a jury trial is not always the
| best choice for a defendant. Juries are often overly
| impressed by authority figures, and assess the status of
| witnesses rather than the evidence itself.
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| Nevertheless a trial by our peers is the best option we
| have in the long run. Think of alternatives, such as an
| algorithm, or a single person.
|
| It's not great, sure, but people from the same
| circumstances judging a peer is as good as it gets.
| voxic11 wrote:
| It's not as good as it gets at all. It's just a good
| fallback to have available for defendants should the rest
| of the system fail.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| It's a great option but it should not be the only option,
| in my view.
| deanCommie wrote:
| Perfect example of the
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSI_effect
| [deleted]
| PoignardAzur wrote:
| Yup. I knew someone who worked in the Ministry of Justice
| in France and he was ecstatic when they announced they
| would stop jury trials for criminal charges.
|
| He said juries just aren't that great at the job. They're
| easily influenced by current events, susceptible to
| fallacies, etc. A lot more so than judges, according to my
| acquaintance (who was admittedly biased).
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| I believe a US judge is capable of personally acquitting a
| defendant -- a jury is only needed to convict.
|
| Is that not the case in Britain?
| nohuck13 wrote:
| This is called a "judgement notwithstanding the verdict" in
| US federal courts.
|
| It's also one of the few instances where the _prosecution_
| may appeal without violating double jeopardy protections.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judgment_notwithstandin
| g_ver...
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| a judge can indeed overrule a jury verdict in favor of the
| defendent if he thinks the jury is clearly off it's rocker
| or that the prosecutor did not produce evidence that meets
| the standard of the law. Sometimes it's best to go with a
| bench trial based on situation. This might have been a good
| one, if the judge is known to have a solid understanding of
| technology vs the general public who barely know how to
| work a mouse and keyboard and have little training in
| deciding things base on a logical premise like "all
| software has bugs" as opposed to appeals to emotion.
| gene91 wrote:
| If a jury concluded that the defendant is guilty, I don't
| think judicial process reform would help. The fix would
| require at least public education. Reforming judicial process
| is hard, but fixing public perception seems way harder.
| xioxox wrote:
| I've heard part of the problem is that the Post Office were
| allowed to conduct their own prosecutions. If the public
| prosecutor (Crown Prosecution Service) would have been
| involved, they would have asked the Post Office for any
| material which would have benefited the defence (this would
| be passed as disclosure). Because the Post Office were
| "victim" and prosecutor they never did this and the defence
| didn't get this material.
| goodcanadian wrote:
| I have said in the past, only half in jest, that if I were
| guilty of a crime, I would want a jury trial, but if I were
| innocent, I would want to be tried by a judge, alone.
| kergonath wrote:
| Private Eye is a national treasure. Britain would be much
| worse without it.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| Courts are led by humans. Judges (and juries) and in particular
| old judges (and older juries) often don't have a good grasp on
| technology and injustice like this happens. Luckily there is
| the appeal process in most modern countries so that such
| misdeeds can be corrected. Unfortunately a lot of people were
| hurt by this. Hopefully some good education of justice
| officials can come out of this.
| lewispollard wrote:
| I don't know the full details of how the judges operated during
| the prosecutions, but one of the bizarre details is that the
| post office has the oldest prosecution and investigation team
| in the world, predating the police force, dating back to
| highwaymen robbing postal services on horseback. In other
| words, the post office executives seem to have made a policy
| decision around these financial discrepancies, the post office
| managers gathered evidence on their behalf under the guise of
| helping their employees, and the post office prosecution team
| prosecuted them in court. Very little unbiased external opinion
| was brought in. Even the police seemed to have decided early on
| that they didn't have jurisdiction in the post office for the
| above reasons. Its an extremely bizarre detail that, as a UK
| resident, I had no idea about until these recent revelations.
| DanBC wrote:
| The judgment has a few details.
|
| https://www.judiciary.uk/judgments/hamilton-others-v-post-of...
|
| There's possibly something on Bailii. (A small volunteer run
| project, but the website is tricky to use.) Searching for [post
| office horizon] reveals a few cases.
|
| Here's one useful transcript and discussion:
| https://journals.sas.ac.uk/deeslr/article/view/2217
| croes wrote:
| People believe machines because they don't lie. There is a
| cognitive dissonance between knowing that software is written
| by humans who make lots of errors and the believe that machines
| don't make errors.
| tialaramex wrote:
| This occurs for other things across a variety of spheres, but
| defence barristers are more or less experienced in some of
| those spheres, and lay people have more or less knowledge in
| some spheres.
|
| If a police officer tells the jury that they are 100% sure the
| person they saw with the knife was the defendant, the defence
| understands how and to what extent they might be able to
| persuade the jury that the officer is mistaken about this, or
| how else to undermine this testimony, and they won't accept it
| if the officer seems to suggest that, since they're sure this
| was the person with the knife _therefore_ that person stabbed
| the victim. There are lots of reasons why, even if the jury is
| convinced their client is lying and had a knife, that doesn 't
| necessarily mean they stabbed the victim.
|
| In contrast when an "IT expert" tells the jury that 100% the
| only way this database entry would appear is if the defendant
| stole money, the defence legal team may be unsure how to
| persuade a jury (since they aren't IT experts) that this might
| not be so, and they may end up allowing this to go unchallenged
| even though _I_ would know to ask lots of questions about
| access, logging, test strategies, and so on.
|
| Or if a medical doctor tells the jury that the only way this
| baby gets so many broken bones is that her parents were
| deliberately shaking her because she was crying, and so they're
| guilty of murder, the lawyer isn't a medic, and neither is the
| jury. So who is there to tell them that er, actually there
| _can_ be other causes and the prosecution needs something else?
|
| Light Blue Touchpaper covered some cases where it seems likely
| what happened is that crap implementations of EMV ("Chip and
| PIN") were defrauded by crooks who understood where the flaws
| were and how to exploit them, but the banks went after their
| customers, telling juries that the machine is infallible and if
| it says they used a PIN, that must be true, even though the
| researchers show various ways it might _not_ in fact be true.
| Further, bank employees will cheerfully tell a jury that there
| 's no way for other employees to discover a customer PIN, even
| though meanwhile the bank is firing employees it knows did just
| that. We ultimately cannot entirely insulate the justice system
| against people who lie under oath. We can only punish them when
| they get caught.
|
| So, to the extent anything should be done here, you'd want to
| start with say, not rewarding the people at Post Office Ltd and
| in the Horizon team who lied about this and tried so hard to
| prevent justice being done. Two guesses whether the present
| government chose to do that...
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _the defence legal team may be unsure how to persuade a
| jury (since they aren 't IT experts) that this might not be
| so_
|
| Then they're a crap defense.
|
| They find an expert witness -- an IT witness in this case --
| for _their_ side to explain how the software might make
| errors, how no software is perfect, etc. Having opposing
| expert witnesses, one for prosecution and one for defense, is
| _standard_.
|
| Lawyers don't need to _be_ domain experts in every, or even
| most, cases they take on. They do need to _find_ experts
| though.
| dmoy wrote:
| UK courts also sent a woman to prison for infanticide,
| basically off of the testimony of a single doctor who didn't
| know how statistics work:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sally_Clark
|
| I agree the issue is a legal system bug.
| Anthony-G wrote:
| Wow! That was painful and heart-breaking to read.
|
| The poor woman suffered the loss of her two sons, had to go
| through a Kafka-esque ordeal of trying to prove her
| innocence, only to spend three years in prison, all the time
| being reviled by the press, prison officers and prisoners for
| being a child-killer. Her second appeal seems to only have
| been successful because the family discovered that the
| prosecution had actually withheld exculpatory evidence
| showing that the second death was actually due to a bacterial
| infection (the first appeal acknowledged the statistical
| evidence was flawed but still upheld the conviction). She
| effectively received a death sentence as she died four years
| later from psychological issues that were a direct result of
| her ordeal.
|
| If such a tragic miscarriage of justice could happen to a
| reasonably well-off, professional working woman (solicitor),
| it could happen to anyone!
| bordercases wrote:
| It's probably trading off an unjust precedent which they would
| want to set anyway to create a CYA situation.
| amelius wrote:
| Not only the software was buggy, the court was buggy as well
| ...
| tyingq wrote:
| Apparently, some of the defendants were also so intimidated by
| the problem they tried to replace the "lost" money with their
| own money.
| robinjfisher wrote:
| The answer to this question is that senior executives within
| the Post Office knew that Horizon had faults and deliberately
| withheld the information when prosecuting the sub-postmasters.
|
| This is a fundamental breach of the prosecutor's duty to
| disclose any evidence that undermines the prosecution case or
| supports the defence case. This duty continues to exist after
| conviction so timing of knowledge is irrelevant.
|
| The judgment is telling in that there are records in which Post
| Office officials made statements that minutes of meetings about
| faults in the Horizon system should not be taken so as to avoid
| having to disclose them in proceedings.
|
| It is corporate failure on an unimaginable scale and three
| convicted individuals have died before having their convictions
| quashed.
|
| Yesterday's judgment is long but very readable. I would
| anticipate further fallout and understand there may be a live
| police investigation on the basis that several individuals may
| have perverted the course of justice by either proceeding with
| prosecutions or omitting material evidence from testimony.
| silexia wrote:
| A big part of the problem is that the post office is not
| accountable as it's a government organization. A private
| company would be bankrupted by this, but the post office will
| just be bailed out by taxpayers.
| kergonath wrote:
| Well, then reality is a direct contradiction of your point
| of view. The Post Office is actually a private company, and
| yet here we are...
| dv_dt wrote:
| Instead of viewing the problem as "bailing out", maybe it
| should be viewed at mitigated and fixed - because a system
| that people rely upon, one that needs to work, should be
| kept working - there are no better alternatives.
|
| With private companies, everyone else is often left holding
| the bag - esp e.g. with mining and drilling companies. But
| with private corruption companies too - the bankruptcy of
| the company typically involves all of those being owed
| money taking a hit if not losing their money completely.
| kortilla wrote:
| > owed money taking a hit if not losing their money
| completely.
|
| You mention that as if it's a bad thing? Wiping out bad
| investments is one of the major tenets of free market
| approaches. It's the negative feedback loop for bad
| investments.
|
| If something is unsustainable, it should go out of
| business and the investors should take a loss.
| silexia wrote:
| I agree with the grandparent. Externalities should be
| born by the company making the profits.
|
| Example: imagine an oil company that can pump toxic
| fluids into the ground in order to cheaply extract lots
| of oil. Those toxic fluids render miles of ground as
| wasteland far into the future. The owners of the company
| should not be allowed to take the profits now, then allow
| the company to go bankrupt so they don't have to pay back
| and repair the damage they did.
|
| The limited liability company should be eliminated as it
| encourages terrible behaviors.
| dv_dt wrote:
| For things that are private goods, it's fine to have a
| process of elimination - but only if that elimination
| doesn't leave even more public obligations to clean up
| (like pollution).
|
| However the post office is a public good, so just letting
| it disappear is something that needs to be prefaced by an
| actual public discussion to do so.
| rectang wrote:
| > _it 's a government organization_
|
| You're conveniently overlooking the role that Fujitsu, the
| software contractor, played.
|
| The issue is _concentration of power_ at large
| organizations, relative to the rights of individuals in
| society.
|
| It is problematic when _any_ organization accumulates too
| much power and runs roughshod over an individual citizen,
| whether that organization is government or private
| enterprise.
| pmyteh wrote:
| At one point the Post Office's _own barrister_ had to tell
| them in no uncertain terms that their attempts to prevent
| disclosure might amount to a conspiracy to pervert the
| course of justice (a pretty serious crime).
|
| The Post Office might not be bankrupted, but I don't think
| this is going to go well for many of the people involved in
| the prosecution. The wheels of justice run slow but grind
| exceedingly fine etc.
| afandian wrote:
| Can you cite that specifically? I'm reading through the
| judgment but its slow going.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| The UK post office was privatized in the middle of the
| period in question, so your assertion is half-true. Of
| course, even as a private entity it retains an aura of
| state authority which may have swayed perceptions of
| juries.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Mail#Privatisation
| jayelbe wrote:
| No, this is not accurate. The Post Office was split from
| Royal Mail; Royal Mail was privatised while the Post
| Office remained (and still remains) in the public sector.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| A good point, I misremembered the structure of the
| companies post-privatization.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_Office_Ltd
| Buttons840 wrote:
| I don't think that is the answer to the question.
|
| The OP asked, "doesn't there need to be evidence beyond just
| 'a computer said so'?".
|
| You said the answer is that "the computer said so" and then
| the operator of the computer said "I agree with the
| computer".
|
| In my mind, the question still remains. Isn't there any
| requirement to show where the money went, what account it
| went into, give dates and details about how they stole the
| money, etc?
|
| Of course, hiding the known bugs in the software is a scandal
| and worth talking about, but it doesn't answer the original
| question I think.
| smallnamespace wrote:
| Money is just a number in a database somewhere, so you're
| _also_ advocating for 'the computer said so', for a
| slightly different set of computers.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| I'm not advocating for anything. Just saying that "Why
| isn't there a higher legal standard for proof?" answered
| with "The Post Office management knew about the bugs."
| isn't a satisfying question/answer exchange.
| mcguire wrote:
| What kind of standard of proof do you expect, beyond
| "convincing to a jury"?
| rushabh wrote:
| There are auditors who are supposed to scrutinise this stuff.
| Audit trails with counter party ledgers, receipts, reconciliation
| with bank statements can easily bring out any such fraud.
|
| To claim the miscarriage of justice happened due to "bugs" is
| wrong. It's due to bad auditors. I think this is poor journalism.
| scotchmi_st wrote:
| This story has been covered for a while by the
| investigative/satirical magazine Private Eye in the uk-
|
| https://www.private-eye.co.uk/pictures/special_reports/justi...
|
| There's also a podcast about it as well-
|
| https://www.private-eye.co.uk/podcast/49
|
| It's a fascinating and heartbreaking story. The film Brazil made
| real.
| cs702 wrote:
| A bureaucratic nightmare straight out of Terry Gillian's classic
| film, _Brazil_ [a].
|
| Thankfully, in this case we got a Hollywood-style ending in which
| innocent postal workers were ultimately found not to be guilty,
| so they weren't completely chewed up by the bureaucratic
| machinery.
|
| Still, what a horrible ordeal.
|
| [a] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film)
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| Unfortunately civic literacy is at an all time low in our
| country. In many ways our constitutional foundation is being
| openly questioned, let alone reinforced in school.
|
| If people don't believe foundational things like "innocent until
| proven guilty" then we have a lot of other issues coming down the
| pipeline. The opposite is being reinforced by activists, social
| media, mainstream media, and even large corporations.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| The UK postal service used to be a public institution but was
| privatized in the early 2000s. For all the indignant rhetoric
| from public figures, you can be completely sure that no penal
| consequences are going to fall on the management, police or
| prosecutors that cheerfully sent people off to prison absent any
| evidence of the 'missing' funds' existence outside of the
| computerized accounting system.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| And all I can think of is programmers who _want_ to spend time
| ensuring that their software is correct, but have "sprint goals"
| to meet.
| montroser wrote:
| The craziest thing to me here is that they never actually found
| any of the accused to be in possession of the funds they had
| supposedly embezzled. I wonder if there's someone sitting on a
| beach somewhere with their favorite stapler and all of those
| fractions of pennies piled up on an offshore account...
| agilob wrote:
| Yes, someone from Fujitsu who didn't deliver quality software,
| refused to accept it _might_ be buggy.
|
| >In the same speech, he said that the Post Office would work
| with the government to compensate the employees who were
| affected by Horizon's inaccuracies.
|
| Fujitsu won't even be held financially accountable for the
| suicide, but tax payers will. To me, it sounds like a great
| deal, delivery shitty software, bounce back any questions about
| quality, bugs, refuse to re-test software for given scenarios
| for years, but still get paid.
| philjohn wrote:
| It's just another example of "socialise the losses".
|
| IF people at Fujitsu knew that there were problems with the
| system and IF they still presented evidence that it was
| infallible, then people need to be going to prison.
| agilob wrote:
| People at RM knew about it. They were covering up the
| operation and protecting the system, which already cost tax
| payers 100M.
| dv_dt wrote:
| If one were writing a novel, the thief would be hiding their
| tracks by being in a key place feeding the prosecution.
|
| But really there is a track record of court systems latching
| onto criminal prosecutions via questionable technologies from
| handwriting analysis to lie detectors et al.
| agilob wrote:
| There was a TV series about it.
| js2 wrote:
| > Earlier this month the chief executive of the Post Office said
| that Horizon would be replaced with a new, cloud-based solution.
|
| I'm sure that will fix it. The problem is bigger than the
| software, obviously.
| mihaaly wrote:
| Software do not send people to jail, people send people to jail.
| The users/supervisors and those involved in the persecution are
| to blame not to investigate the matter much much sooner and using
| software output blindly.
| jmfldn wrote:
| It's scary that this could have happened without substantial
| corroborating evidence. I don't care how reliable you think the
| software is. Software has bugs! For any enterprise system of any
| scale, no matter how tight the development, and especially once
| you start to evolve the system, is going to be full of them. This
| idea of proving reliability is fantasy. Proofs might work on
| mathematically-based algorithms ie certain discrete bit of code
| like a cryptographic function, but you can't ultimately proove
| anything about any system of any scale. You can use heuristics
| like tests to gain a high degree of confidence but "proofs" or
| anything even in that ballpark?!
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| _People_ sent postal workers to jail. A judicial system convicted
| and jailed them. The bad software was just one part of the input
| to that decision.
|
| As the BBC article which should have been linked quotes their
| attorney as saying, the post office is "an organisation that not
| only turned a blind eye to the failings in its hugely expensive
| IT system, but positively promoted a culture of cover-up and
| subterfuge in the pursuit of reputation and profit"
| rileymat2 wrote:
| > The bad software was just one part of the input to that
| decision.
|
| To play devil's advocate was there evidence of malfeasance
| besides the software?
|
| If not, it is a bit disingenuous to say that the software did
| not send them to jail. If it was a witness who was mistaken and
| that was the only evidence, in standard english, we would say
| the witness sent them to jail.
| mitchdoogle wrote:
| Saying it was the software absolves others of responsibility.
| If anyone knew it was buggy and went forth prosecuting these
| individuals anyway, they themselves should be sent to jail
| for criminal negligence.
| IshKebab wrote:
| If you knew that witness was unreliable and you still
| prosecuted based on that witness, and covered up evidence you
| had of their unreliability...
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| Yes. I'm not going to summarize it for you. Read the articles
| that are the original reporting. They contain many details of
| the post office knowing they had problems and covering them
| up, allowing folks to be prosecuted rather than to own up to
| IT problems.
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/business-56859357
| https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-52905378
|
| Also please don't post leading comments as being "devil's
| advocate". It's the laziest form of rhetoric, "just asking
| questions".
| tome wrote:
| I think you've taken rileymat2's comment the opposite way
| than was intended.
| dang wrote:
| We've changed the URL now. The submitted URL
| (https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/23/22399721/uk-post-
| office-s...) had the bad bad software title.
| mickeypi wrote:
| Yes, people also built the buggy software. But the role of
| software here can't be overlooked. Because people trust
| software to run the modern world, there is a high level of
| trust that this software is working properly. The article says
| that this trust was misplaced in this case and it caused
| serious harm. It doesn't just blame the existence of software,
| but questions the way in which it is built, used, and the ways
| in which society places trust in it.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > But the role of software here can't be overlooked.
|
| Whilst giving testimony in one case that there couldn't have
| been software errors, one of the Post Office executives was
| participating in internal communications regarding clear cut
| cases of software errors.
|
| Yes, the software is bad, but these executives actively
| engaged in a cover up, in court. They should be prosecuted.
| bostonsre wrote:
| I hope the wrongly accused are able to sue the software company
| to get better than the offered 22k compensation.
| robinjfisher wrote:
| I've made this point on LinkedIn and I'll make it here - bad
| software did not send postal workers to jail.
|
| Read the judgment: https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-
| content/uploads/2021/04/Hamilton...
|
| The Post Office knew Horizon had faults and had a legal duty to
| disclose its knowledge to the defendants when prosecuting them.
| They failed to do so.
|
| Paragraphs 81-90 are frankly unbelievable and I question what
| Post Office's own lawyers were doing.
|
| Paragraph 91(iii):
|
| A memorandum dated 22 October 2010 by a senior lawyer in POL's
| Criminal Law Division reported the successful prosecution of
| Seema Misra. The memorandum complained that the case had involved
| "an unprecedented attack on the Horizon system" which, the author
| said, the prosecution team had been able to "destroy". He ended
| the memorandum, which was copied to the Press Office, by
| expressing the hope that "the case will set a marker to dissuade
| other defendants from jumping on the Horizon bashing bandwagon".
|
| The prosecution team had "destroyed" it because they had withheld
| crucial evidence supporting the allegations against the Horizon
| system.
|
| The Seema Misra case is what started the unravelling because her
| husband called a journalist, Nick Wallis [1], who has spent 10
| years investigating and reporting on this case.
|
| It's a scandal of immense proportions and three convicted
| individuals died before seeing their convictions quashed. It is
| very sad.
|
| [1] https://www.nickwallis.com
| IshKebab wrote:
| What are the chances we'll see jail time for any of the people
| responsible? I'm guessing zero?
| klelatti wrote:
| I find it hard to believe that the approach taken - to
| prosecute sub post masters in this way - didn't make it to
| board level (indeed if it didn't then that by itself would be a
| corporate failure).
|
| Individual managers may have had incentives that would lead to
| take this approach but the PO Board should have had an overview
| and have been able to correct this.
|
| In any event a great scandal and very sad as you say.
| qyi wrote:
| Why is British policing so consistently stupid?
| walshemj wrote:
| This was not the Police here
| qyi wrote:
| Ok, "the justice system".
| failwhaleshark wrote:
| It's mechanical reliance on the religion of technocracy
| rather than common-sense and human critical-thinking
| skills.
| qyi wrote:
| They had the death penalty for using the royalty's name
| in vein until the 90s or so, jailing someone because he
| was drunk and made a "death threat" (with zero likelihood
| of it being real) on Facebook, arresting someone for
| camping alone without a mask, CCTV everywhere, being
| illegal to raise the middle finger, etc. And yes, then
| once tech is involved it is accordingly used as stupidly.
| The UK somehow has a whole different brand of legal
| stupidity than America.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't post unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments here
| and spare us from nationalistic flamewar in particular.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| anigbrowl wrote:
| A cultural (but sadly not unique) preference for order over
| justice.
| walshemj wrote:
| No it was the Post office mangers that did that
| failwhaleshark wrote:
| ?
|
| The system miscalculated some figures and assumed
| subpostmasters (delivery people) were stealing money. There was
| likely no theft occurring.
| rmason wrote:
| The State of Michigan installed a software program to eliminate
| tens of millions of dollars of unemployment fraud. Seems foreign
| actors figured out how to cheat the system.
|
| Along comes COVID-19 and tens of thousands of Michigan residents
| have legitimate unemployment claims denied. Some people have been
| waiting for over a year.
|
| What about all the fraud? Seems the foreign actors figured out
| how to beat the new system and fraud is at record levels.
|
| Sorry no link but both Detroit newspapers are behind paywalls -
| even for articles that were free to read at the date of their
| publication :<( .
| CapriciousCptl wrote:
| This is terrible, not to mention the UK was already the setting
| of the archetypical example of "prosecutor's fallacy" and flawed
| statistics-- Meadow's Law.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meadow%27s_law
| dw-im-here wrote:
| n-gate dream come true
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| This is one of the worst miscarriages of justice in the UK this
| century - and it's amazing it is not a bigger scandal.
|
| But we should hope to see legal changes over software evidence -
| especially as we walk into the AI world - Inpersonally would like
| to see open publication of the software in any court case. It
| might at least make people think twice.
| Thaxll wrote:
| On the end who's accountable for this mess? Also what do those
| software looks like tech wise, is it some heavy enterprise Java
| with Oracle?
| simion314 wrote:
| Do you think that using your favorite cool language and stack
| there will never be logic errors? Could be worse, some idiot
| developer would be even less humble if he thinks he is using
| some bullet proof language.
| csomar wrote:
| > On the end who's accountable for this mess?
|
| The judicial system. You don't lock someone up because some
| powerful/big company say they stole. My guess is they took the
| company for its own word.
| candiodari wrote:
| People say holding government responsible for mistakes in
| court is difficult and takes decades. Holding the justice
| system itself responsible is impossible.
|
| In .nl it was found youth judges sent kids and lone mothers
| to an institution practicing slavery, knowingly, for decades.
| Textiles. Nobody has ever been held responsible, least of all
| judges.
| DanBC wrote:
| The Post Office is responsible because they drove the process
| of:
|
| 1) buying broken software and not checking it was fit for
| purpose
|
| 2) Vigorously investigating post masters and not relenting even
| when many of the people being investigated claimed there must
| be a problem with the software
|
| 3) (and this is the kicker) continuing when they started to
| realise that maybe the software was the problem
|
| Personally I think members of the board at the time need to
| face some kind of criminal, or at least civil, action here.
| coding123 wrote:
| It's funny because when it was the little guy it deserves jail
| time, when they found it was a software company it's negligence
| and no jail time. That being said I understand why, but try
| convincing the people that were jailed of that.
| davisr wrote:
| This is a horrifying miscarriage of justice, and could not have
| happened if "free/libre" was in the software's specifications. We
| must demand software freedom! Users must be entitled to see, run,
| modify, and share software.
| ajuc wrote:
| > could not have happened
|
| Could still happen. But would be less likely.
| bottled_poe wrote:
| This is shameful. The creators/endorsers of this software are
| negligent and impede progress technology can bring to society:
| these people should be ousted from our profession.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| The project managers who demand one-hour turnaround on every
| feature request and mandatory overtime are to blame.
| dang wrote:
| Discussed yesterday:
|
| _UK court clears post office staff convicted due to 'corrupt
| data'_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26913037 - April
| 2021 (279 comments)
|
| Some past threads:
|
| _UK Post Office: Error-laden software ruined staff lives_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26905528 - April 2021 (3
| comments)
|
| _UK legal system assumes that computers don 't have bugs_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25518936 - Dec 2020 (24
| comments)
|
| _Post Office scandal: Postmasters celebrate victory against
| convictions_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24661321 -
| Oct 2020 (2 comments)
|
| _Faults in Post Office accounting system led to workers being
| convicted of theft_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21795219 - Dec 2019 (103
| comments)
|
| _Post Office hires accountants to review sub-postmasters '
| computer claims_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4143107 -
| June 2012 (1 comment)
|
| p.s. I've changed URL above from
| https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/23/22399721/uk-post-office-s...
| to the BBC article it's based on.
| roachpepe wrote:
| Guess this is just one more instance the British justice system
| shows how incompetent and outdated it is with its regulations and
| officials in regards to modern tech. And I have no doubt the same
| goes for most other countries, but hey why listen to the experts
| when you're in power, right?
| vilaca wrote:
| This is beyond "Terry Gilliam's Brazil" level of dystopic.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| > ... what is reportedly the largest miscarriage of justice that
| the UK has ever seen.
|
| Journalists just can't help themselves. EVERYTHING MUST BE THE
| WORST EVER
| mjw1007 wrote:
| I think in this case they simply mean it's the highest number
| of defendents who have succeeded in having their convictions
| overturned.
| monksy wrote:
| I wonder what Fujitsu's QA and testing process looked like. I'm
| sure they had 100% unit test coverage, integration tests, feature
| tests, and QA testing.
| klelatti wrote:
| A lot of criticism of the courts here - much of which is probably
| reasonable.
|
| I wonder though if one element is that post masters were of
| course prosecuted individually, and the evidence mounted against
| them may have looked convincing on an individual basis - with the
| courts not having the time or the resources to mount a full scale
| investigation into the validity of the claims made by the post
| office.
|
| Only when looked at in aggregate did the position look absurd -
| 700 or so postmasters breaking the law in this way out of 12,000
| or so post offices. I suspect that it's rare for courts to
| perform a probabilistic assessment of the likelihood of an
| offence occurring.
|
| The only people with an overview of the situation were post
| office management and they chose to cover it up.
| failwhaleshark wrote:
| Tuttle.. Buttle.
|
| Guilty!
|
| Send them to the Ministry of Information Retrieval.
| croes wrote:
| Will be a lot harder to prove the software was wrong if it uses
| AI
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| Anytime you work for a company that has some form of obvious
| negligence, be careful what you sign and agree to. One day, they
| may have a major incident and when they get caught rather than
| admit fault they will simply point fingers as whoever is the
| easiest target.
| haunter wrote:
| I don't get this from the story. No one from the Post Office or
| Fujitsu has been held accountable. Literally no one and this
| case, these cases, were ongoing since 1999.
| failwhaleshark wrote:
| Basic professional ethics. Don't do or participate what you're
| not comfortable with. Hold your ground and let them either do
| things right or fire you.
|
| This happened to me at a Big Name university where they wanted
| me to rush punching major holes in a secure private network for
| credit card processing to make it more convenient for a
| contractor to be able to remote in. I told my boss "it's not
| going to happen on this timeline without a security review" and
| was told to do it or resign. That was it.
| mrwh wrote:
| Has much information come out from the Fujitsu side yet? I guess
| the inside story of what it was like developing Horizon is too
| much to hope for, but (as a software engineer) important to
| understand.
| rectang wrote:
| The full headline:
|
| > _Bad software sent postal workers to jail, because no one
| wanted to admit it could be wrong_
|
| The people who didn't want to admit that the software could be
| wrong... sent postal workers to jail.
| cmsefton wrote:
| The full headline feels misleading. It's not that no-one wanted
| to admit it _could_ be wrong. No-one wanted to admit it _was_
| wrong. There were plenty of people involved who were well aware
| it was wrong, they just didn 't want the consequences of that
| admission.
| dang wrote:
| We've changed it. See
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26927818.
| bdw5204 wrote:
| One of the biggest problems we face in the modern world is the
| excessive confidence in software from people who don't write it.
| All software of nontrivial complexity contains bugs, this is
| unavoidable and people need to be taught to think before trusting
| the software because you never know when you will come across a
| software bug.
|
| I don't know the best way to get this message across to people
| who don't write software but there has to be a way to get them to
| practice a basic level of critical thinking before blindly
| accepting what the software says.
| samfisher83 wrote:
| Even if the software was messed up there must have been some bank
| records that they double checked. Don't banks have some sort of
| the paper trail.
| blondin wrote:
| this is indeed the mind-boggling part for me. nothing was done
| to prove these people guilty but simply trust the output of a
| piece of software.
|
| in the deep-mind world we live in today that's a scary thing to
| do.
|
| i am going to have to agree with the group that feel unhappy
| with the monetary outcome.
| reddotX wrote:
| wait until we weaponize the AI and let smart weapons decide
| who lives or dies
| catlifeonmars wrote:
| Does it matter? Humans have an excellent track record of
| deciding who lives and dies.
| catlifeonmars wrote:
| What worries me more is that smarter killing machines
| will make humans more efficient at killing the "right"
| people.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| As I understand it, the issue is there was never a second
| record.
|
| Imagine you run a post office, people pay you cash to post
| their letter/parcel instead of putting a stamp on it.
|
| You are meant to enter into the till every time you do that.
| Every pound you get this way, you owe 50p to RM who will pickup
| and deliver whatever is in the bag at the end of the day.
|
| You diligently and honestly enter every pound you get into the
| till. But the till is broken, every time someone buys a Mars
| bar, it adds one to the count of objects posted.
|
| At the end of the month, royal mail think you posted 1000s of
| extra items. They demand 1000s of extra 50ps. You didn't and
| don't count every item, that's the tills job. But somehow your
| losing money. You don't know how, RM don't care they just
| demand payment. Sooner or later you cannot pay (or refuse as
| the number must be wrong).
|
| Then the courts get involved...
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