19 ms·

'My life was ruined by a typo'

389 points by petercooper 10y ago

zczc 10y ago
Reminds me of Tuttle/Buttle mishap in Terry Gilliam's Brazil movie. Life imitates (dystopian) art.
- threepipeproblm 10y ago
  Ha I came here to say this when there was only 1 comment on the page, and you beat me to it. Great movie... too bad we're actually living in it?
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    I posted the scene to a discussion of this elsewhere. From the no-knock warrant to mistaken identity to the bureaucratic nightmare to the utterly inadequate redress, Gilliam hit this square on the head. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nWbIxFKtTmE https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nWbIxFKtTmE
    - ekianjo 10y ago
      you forgot war on terrorism. it had it all.
    - RantyDave 10y ago
      Terry Gilliam moved to England as an adult. England is knee deep in bureaucratic stuff ups and Brazil was practically a documentary. All he did was change the scenery.
      - threepipeproblm 10y ago
        To be fair, he also added in a level of tube-based technology that was beyond what was available to consumers of the day. ;)
underyx 10y ago
>South Yorkshire Police were informed by colleagues in Hertfordshire that they had identified an IP address from which more than 100 indecent images of children had been shared in April that year. The IP address passed on corresponded to an internet account held by Nigel's partner. But it had been typed incorrectly, with an extra digit added by mistake. Here's the reason, for anyone else having difficulty to find it.
- xenadu02 10y ago
  The story needlessly confuses the issue of the wrong IP address with the fact that his actual internet account was owned by his partner. The two have nothing to do with each other. The real IP the police were after belonged to someone else living in a different house.
  - sushid 10y ago
    I believe he accused them of racism and sexism since he was raided by the police for being a suspected pedophile whereas his white female partner was not even investigated as a potential criminal.
    - 9q 10y ago
      I don't think there is any evidence of it being racist. It juts seems more like incompetence to me. Him being male would probably be more relevant, but it's far more likely for men to commit this crime either way, so it's not reasonable to suspect him more highly.
      - MertsA 10y ago
        Him being black would probably be more relevant, but it's far more likely for black people to commit this crime either way, so it's not reasonable to suspect him more highly. This is why it's wrong to just blindly rely on statistics to tell you who to arrest. Prejudice has no place in law enforcement.
      - elastic_church 10y ago
yeukhon 10y ago
I was recently hospitlized. The EMT took my id card and entered my name incorrectly (YUEK as opposed to YEUK). I told the nurse and she said there is nothing she can do about it until I check out the hospital. I waited until I checked out the hospital, and the nurse took my information down. For my situation, I have to follow up with specialist. The clinic received my medical information and the referral from the hospital. The clinic also got the typo from the hospital, plus the wrong insurance information, as well as the wrong cell phone number. I was amazed at the wrong insurance (hospital gave them my dental insurance, but I received a notice from my health insurance regarding my hospital admission before I visited the clinic). How funny. When I went back to confirm my appointment a few days later, the clinic said no one correct my name (wtf?). What a joke. While I was getting admitted into the hospital for a few nights, the nurses had to pair up in order to figure out how to enter data into the system. The program looks like Excel except it isn't. In some cases you have to enter the data in a different column, in some cases you have to enter 0, in some cases you leave it out. The nurses kept saying "oh I remember you have to do this to get around this issue, oh I think you can ignore this option." When I met with the nurse practitioner the next day, he couldn't log into his system. I told him I work as a DevOps and he was curious about my role. Then he said he has to call the IT support (managed solution) somewhere in Tennessee and all the vendor would say is try again later). Yeah, after meeting 30 minutes he was able to login. Here is the thing - typo can ruin life, typo can take away money and time for fixing error, can cause divorce and all sorts of other bad things. Insurance, Social Security, government IDs, Diploma, etc. There is no reason, in my funny but pretty frustrating anecdote, for hospital to run so inefficient, relying on systems built by incompetent people, product dedicated by policy makers or administrators who really are out of touch with real life (they don't use the system). You know, I am angry, I want to reform hospital software system.
- pragone 10y ago
  I've seen all of these situations thousands of times, and I don't even work in a hospital (yet). There has not existed a single EMR I've ever seen that makes any sense whatsoever to the individuals using it. I understand it from the bigger picture, but when things are directly impacting patient care, something needs to be done. I've likewise been extremely interested in reforming EMRs. It's a precarious field to get into, but I am definitely very interested in pursuing it (perhaps after medical school, though).
scrumper 10y ago
So not NATted IP? Not sure I understand how a typo in the IP could point to someone at the same residence. And without excusing police conduct or eliding his real distress, I'd also point out that his life was perhaps also ruined by having a peadophile for a partner...
- macintux 10y ago
  The incorrect IP was assigned to his partner. The "correct" IP, presumably of the criminal, was someone else entirely apparently.
- Mtinie 10y ago
  It appears you misinterpreted the case. His partner's IP address was the one that was mistakenly entered into a system when a typo was introduced. She had nothing to do with it, nor did he. To be fair, the phrasing of the paragraph when this fact was introduced was hard to parse. > The IP address passed on corresponded to an internet account held by Nigel's partner. But it had been typed incorrectly, with an extra digit added by mistake. The typo resulted in a representation his partner's IP. i.e.: 1.1.1.2 //intended target 1.1.1.12 //the partner's
  - scrumper 10y ago
    Ah, thanks, that makes a lot more sense than what I understood.
- stefco_ 10y ago
  Sure, but it's always much more frustrating and disappointing when those tasked with protecting the innocent end up ruining innocent lives. In particular, it's frustrating that better auditing procedures and transparency would prevent things like this from happening. It's also scary how, due to the persistence of (mis)information on the internet, it is possible to end up with (either undeserved or at least excessive) notoriety that follows you across the world with little chance of escape. Who the hell is going to hire someone when a google search of their name mentions that they were arrested on pedophilia charges? Never mind whether they were innocent. [edit: as another poster pointed out, it seems his partner was not the pedophile, but rather that their shared IP address, which was registered to her, was the incorrectly entered value]
Udik 10y ago
I read this bracing myself for the usual kafkaesque story of somebody jailed for months or years on a groundless charge, going through endless sloppy trials, hysterical sentencing, and the predictable tragic consequences on career, relations, together with the trauma and abuse of being jailed. But this case happened in the UK, not the US. After he was "arrested" this man appears to have spent a grand total of three weeks "living with his mother". After these three weeks, his laptop was returned to him by the police and he had been cleared from all charges. However, he laments that "because of what happened" he's suffering of PTSD and he's unable to go back to work. That during the three weeks he was away, his younger son would cry. That the £60k compensation he received from the police for the mistake it's not enough, since he "didn't even get two and a half years' wage". That he hasn't had his day in court, and he needs the world to know he's not a paedophile. The events happened six years ago. I might be underestimating the impact on one's life and mental health of this kind of things. But this story smells of trying to get a better deal or of some deeper personal issue.
- macintux 10y ago
  When you work with troubled youth, an accusation of child pornography is almost as bad as it can possibly be. Since the police didn't give him an explanation for the mistake up front, I'm sure he lived under a cloud of suspicion after that, hence the concern about being alone with young women. For 3 weeks everyone around you assumes you're guilty. How do you prove the absence of pornography in your life when the police have all your equipment? Yes, it could have been much worse. No, I'm not shocked that it was devastating. (Update: forgot to add, I imagine there's a very real fear during those three weeks that you'll be permanently separated from your children.)
  - Udik 10y ago
    Ok, but the police cleared him of the charges. Then he hired a solicitor and thanks to him the mistake was made clear, and he got a totally justified, and very handsome, compensation. One would think that this should be enough to put at rest any possible suspicion. Three weeks are not such a long ordeal, especially when you know from the start it's all a mistake.
saboot 10y ago
Related story: The leak of John Podesta's (Hillary Clinton's campaign manager) emails was caused by their IT support person replying that a phishing email was 'legitimate' when intending to type 'illegitimate', a very serious typo!
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  It was also caused by: 1. Google not providing end-to-end, two-factor, encryption of email. Meaning access to the password was access to the entire corpus. ProtonMail and a few other startups (I've recently created a PM account, otherwise no affiliation) are offering at least E2E email crypto. 2. Google's identity protections failed to detect the phishing attempt and illicit access. This for an exceptionally high-profile account. Data are liability. "Who are you?" is the most expensive question in information technology. No matter how you get it wrong, you, or rather, we all, are fucked.
- lawnchair_larry 10y ago
  So they claim. I don't think he would have used illegitimate in that context. He probably just said it was a typo to save face.
  - kafkaesq 10y ago
    Oh, I can totally believe it was a typo. People who work on campaigns are constantly overworked and sleep-deprived like you wouldn't believe. So they make screw-ups like this all the time.
    - ronilan 10y ago
      It depends upon what the meaning of the word "was" was. https://youtu.be/j4XT-l-_3y0 https://youtu.be/j4XT-l-_3y0
bshimmin 10y ago
I can relate: a good part of my morning was ruined by typing "RAILS_ENv" instead of "RAILS_ENV"...
- WhitneyLand 10y ago
  Someone's life is ruined, and he is shamed in the most unjust way possible, and in your mind it merits a coding joke? Sorry, I just don't understand.
  - bshimmin 10y ago
    You're right, it was in really poor taste. I'm sorry. The downvotes are entirely justified. (As a poor attempt at mitigation, I had literally just made that typo, which cost me about two hours because I'd run a lengthy migration on the wrong database in a staging environment and then not understood why nothing I tested was working, when I read the BBC News article... and, yes, I thought, "Hey, yeah, me too.")
    - WhitneyLand 10y ago
      Thank you for your honesty and reflection.
rdiddly 10y ago
What the article doesn't say (didn't watch any video, so kick me please if need be), is whether the police ever caught the guy they were actually looking for, at the actual IP address.
- linuxkerneldev 10y ago
  This is a very good point. There seems to be no coverage of whether the actual perpetrator was ever caught. We employ and compensate the police, admins and fund the judicial system, at least partly in order to serve as a deterrent to criminals. If our system has a high percentage of false positives or punishes innocent people then that reduces the efficacy of the system as a deterrent. I'm reminded of this exchange between a journalist and a British justice minister where the minister seems incapable of understanding that punishing people who turned out to be innocent isn't an effective system. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DrsVhzbLzU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DrsVhzbLzU
mastazi 10y ago
He received £60,000. Even adding one more zero wouldn't be enough in my opinion.
- sundvor 10y ago
  Hell yes. This makes my blood boil. Anything less than a £6m payout would be too small. It might actually put the police on notice as well, i.e. properly incentivise them to do higher quality work.
  - anigbrowl 10y ago
    The police don't care what the taxpayers have to shell out, it just means sitting through some angry lectures but basically they are no worse. I think compensation for victims of police misconduct should come out of police pensions.
    - tspiteri 10y ago
      If police officers are liable to pay the victims, would anyone want to be a police officer, given their relatively low wages? In order to make them liable for such things, you would have to increase their wages a lot. I think one of the problems is that we expect a lot from the police, which we should, but then they are not paid nearly enough for that level of responsibility.
      - anigbrowl 10y ago
        Conversely, why would I want anyone to be a police officer that had a problem with this? True, a police officer could be innocent and run into some problems anyway - which is the situation faced by everyone else. I'd certainly be in favor of raising pay if it attracted a higher calibre of applicant, but the pay shouldn't be so high that it becomes economically attractive to take risks with others' life and liberty. Lots of police officers are reasonable people trying to do a difficult job with integrity. but the job also attracts a lot of bad people who exploit their authority abuse or kill people, and there are types of politician and voter who support that kind of behavior and choose to advance it.
uptownfunk 10y ago
I'm sorry to say, but this is absolutely disgusting. How horrifying for that poor man. Hope he gets his fight back, there just needs to be more severe penalties for mistreatment like this. This is a totally different scenario but reminds me when police kill someone they think has a weapon but is just holding a toy, or when police kill someone that looks like a criminal they're looking for. The sad outcome is most of the time they get off scott free...
- ghaff 10y ago
  >there just needs to be more severe penalties for mistreatment like this. So, what should these severe penalties be? When someone makes a data entry mistake that's corrected (as in this case), should they lose their job? Maybe be thrown in prison for a few years? I imagine dealing with programming errors like this would serve as some pretty effective encouragement for better practices. Of course, people might simply choose to avoid any actions that could result in errors.
  - JohnGB 10y ago
    In this case, the police refused to give him any information after the fact, forcing him to hire a lawyer. The police only apologised after a lawyer got involved, not after they realised that they had arrested the wrong man. Additionally only having an IP address to go on, they chose to arrest him (I'm assuming because he's a man) rather than the person whose name was on the account. So, the penalty shouldn't be for a mistake. The penalty should be for trying to cover up the mistake over years, and for profiling him based on zero supporting evidence.
  - edgartaor 10y ago
    A double check before arrest someone could be enough.
  - notgood 10y ago
    This issue shouldn't be of "data entry", the IP should have been registered by software not someone typing it using a number pad; what this tells me is that they don't have the most basic safety checks in order to avoid mistakes; I bet part of the problem is that they are more likely to use their gov funds in new patrol cars than in proper TDD software.
UnoriginalGuy 10y ago
An interesting aspect of this story that nobody else picked up on: > The IP address passed on corresponded to an internet account held by Nigel's partner. But it had been typed incorrectly, with an extra digit added by mistake. So he himself wasn't even the owner of that account. He just happened to have been living in his partner's home. So, why specifically was he targeted even with the wrong IP? Is this what law enforcement has become? Rounding up the first male of age in the vicinity of a crime? I'm just saying, not only did they have the wrong home but even then they had absolutely no basis even within that home (since obviously no evidence was found during the search), but his life was absolutely ruined.
- DanBC 10y ago
  This particular crime is overwhelmingly committed by men.
userbinator 10y ago
... and somewhere out there is a lucky pedophile thinking 'my life was saved by a typo'. Errors don't always mean the bad guy wins, however: http://staugustine.com/news/local-news/2011-09-10/elise-okane-gets-saved-typo http://staugustine.com/news/local-news/2011-09-10/elise-okan...
WhitneyLand 10y ago
With the going rate of accountability for these things I think he made out ok with 60k and an apology. Not that I want the deal, but with prosecutorial immunity, and innocent people getting nothing after decades in prison it's all relative.
mirimir 10y ago
I wonder where they got that IP address from. Could this be another Freenet case?
btschaegg 10y ago
Only reading the headline was enough to remind me of Brazil[1]. The movie, while being based on the very premise of a typo ruining lifes, also has the most telling lines in it - the one everybody trying to rectifiy such an issue is bound to get told[2]: Mistake? We don't make mistakes! [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film) [2]: https://youtu.be/6OalIW1yL-k https://youtu.be/6OalIW1yL-k
prohor 10y ago
In Poland there were many people killed, potentially due to a coma (,). A court process of the pacification of Wujek [1] was mainly whether a response to question "Should we shoot?" was "No, wait for orders" or "Don't wait for orders" (in Polish less difference "Nie, czekajcie na razkaz" vs. "Nie czekajcie na rozkaz"). This was really a ruining life of many just by one coma. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacification_of_Wujek https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacification_of_Wujek
- LoSboccacc 10y ago
  I'm learning polish and every sentence is basically one letter away from disaster.
  - Sunset 10y ago
    This is why Poland cannot into space.
  - jungletek 10y ago
    Not sure if clever joke, or irony. (The lower-case 'P' in Polish)
- tauntz 10y ago
  This seems to be a common running joke in some countries. The same story is also told in Estonia ("Hukata, mitte ellu jätta" vs "Hukata mitte, ellu jätta").
DanielBMarkham 10y ago
Following Hertfordshire Police's admission, Nigel sought compensation for a breach of the Data Protection Act 1998, false imprisonment, police assault/battery, and trespass by police...In October 2016, Hertfordshire Police settled out of court. Nigel received damages of £60,000, plus legal costs..."It isn't enough money," Nigel says, "but after six years of fighting, you're tired." That sucks, big time. It is also true that combative lawsuits actually increase the problem, making it more and more unlikely that anybody will voluntarily admit mistakes. So if you're some police clerk and you mis-type an IP address and somebody's life gets ruined, best circle the wagons and keep your mouth shut. Maybe -- maybe -- you could help the poor schmuck get exonerated, but you'd have to be really careful about how you do it. I hate that, but that is how large systems of people operate. It quite quickly becomes "us versus them" There's another aspect to this story that I don't think people discuss enough: for many topics, both law enforcement and the general public are either completely disinterested or want to burn you at the stake. There doesn't seem to be much middle ground or nuance. Have a picture of child porn on your computer? There are folks who argue that not only should you be imprisoned, but that you should never be released. Are you 20 and dating a 17-year-old? People say that's the same thing. Are you a a teenager and send a naked picture of yourself to a friend? You could very well be a child pornographer. This, by any definition of the word, is insane. And it's worse than that. Sexual harassment is such a bad thing that for many folks, there doesn't even have to be any evidence of it. As long as one person says that another person sexually harassed them? Somebody needs to be fired. Somebody should go to jail. There are even those folks that based on a story that one person types on the internet will say "This other person? They're a sexual predator" -- it's the grown-up version of kiddie porn. You're either completely innocent of everything or you're the fucking Evil One incarnate. Once again, insane. I have no answers, but I do observe that when this type of over-reaction to any kind of perceived crime happens in a small village, it's not such a big deal. Some small social groups have social norms that vary quite a bit, and over time they influence one another. I am reminded that the Salem Witch trials ended when, in part, folks in the biggest nearby town asked something like "How could there be so many witches in Salem and none here? How does that make sense?" What we're seeing now is a village-ization of the world. There are people who want only one social group, across the planet, and they want it to have the same norms. That's fantastically fucked up, but I don't think the people doing it have any idea of that. Folks like Nigel are just collateral damage in this mission of theirs.
arjie 10y ago
Classic Police. Get the IP wrong. IP maps to one person's account. Arrest a different person at the same address. When asked, don't admit the reason for release until forced to do so many years later. Mistakes happen, but this is brilliantly compounding incompetence. Imagine a plane crash that goes: the left engine wasn't maintained, the pilot was drunk, and there was less fuel than there should have been. If you look back at the event, you don't conclude that those things followed from each other. They're probably independent. What that means is that less egregious failures are probably happening all the time. In this case, it probably means that this police department routinely arrests the wrong person after finding out which account belongs to a suspect. It also means that they routinely deny information of their wrongdoing. And it probably unsurprisingly means that they typo things all the time. I wonder what actions they took. It's not about firing people. It's about making sure policy doesn't lead to poor outcomes.
- MichaelMoser123 10y ago
  If they have to type the IP address by hand then he was probably not the only person who did time for a typo... Thank goodness they have ipv4 addresses, with ipv6 you would get more typos.
  - skygazer 10y ago
    Overwhelming chances are that if you mistype an ipv6 address, it points to somewhere nonexistent. That sounds preferable.
justAlittleCom 10y ago
In France we have a ISP (Numericable) who had a shitty system to map the IP to the user. Each time the system didn't found the person, he didn't return an error but, someone, always the same dude. Poor dude… https://www.cnil.fr/fr/avertissement-public-nc-numericable-pour-erreur-dans-la-transmission-de-donnees-didentification-sur https://www.cnil.fr/fr/avertissement-public-nc-numericable-p...
- forgottenpass 10y ago
  There are similar problems with geolocation databases: http://fusion.net/story/287592/internet-mapping-glitch-kansas-farm/ http://fusion.net/story/287592/internet-mapping-glitch-kansa...
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MichaelMoser123 10y ago
Reminds me of the story of a poor editor during Stalin's terror who was shot for omitting a letter : instead of 'commander in chief' he had a typo that read 'commander in shit' (главнокомандующий/гавнокомандующий)

389 points by petercooper 10y ago

zczc 10y ago

Reminds me of Tuttle/Buttle mishap in Terry Gilliam's Brazil movie. Life imitates (dystopian) art.

threepipeproblm 10y ago
Ha I came here to say this when there was only 1 comment on the page, and you beat me to it. Great movie... too bad we're actually living in it?
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  I posted the scene to a discussion of this elsewhere. From the no-knock warrant to mistaken identity to the bureaucratic nightmare to the utterly inadequate redress, Gilliam hit this square on the head. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nWbIxFKtTmE https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nWbIxFKtTmE
  - ekianjo 10y ago
    you forgot war on terrorism. it had it all.
  - RantyDave 10y ago
    Terry Gilliam moved to England as an adult. England is knee deep in bureaucratic stuff ups and Brazil was practically a documentary. All he did was change the scenery.
    - threepipeproblm 10y ago
      To be fair, he also added in a level of tube-based technology that was beyond what was available to consumers of the day. ;)

underyx 10y ago

>South Yorkshire Police were informed by colleagues in Hertfordshire that they had identified an IP address from which more than 100 indecent images of children had been shared in April that year. The IP address passed on corresponded to an internet account held by Nigel's partner. But it had been typed incorrectly, with an extra digit added by mistake. Here's the reason, for anyone else having difficulty to find it.

xenadu02 10y ago
The story needlessly confuses the issue of the wrong IP address with the fact that his actual internet account was owned by his partner. The two have nothing to do with each other. The real IP the police were after belonged to someone else living in a different house.
- sushid 10y ago
  I believe he accused them of racism and sexism since he was raided by the police for being a suspected pedophile whereas his white female partner was not even investigated as a potential criminal.
  - 9q 10y ago
    I don't think there is any evidence of it being racist. It juts seems more like incompetence to me. Him being male would probably be more relevant, but it's far more likely for men to commit this crime either way, so it's not reasonable to suspect him more highly.
    - MertsA 10y ago
      Him being black would probably be more relevant, but it's far more likely for black people to commit this crime either way, so it's not reasonable to suspect him more highly. This is why it's wrong to just blindly rely on statistics to tell you who to arrest. Prejudice has no place in law enforcement.
    - elastic_church 10y ago

yeukhon 10y ago

I was recently hospitlized. The EMT took my id card and entered my name incorrectly (YUEK as opposed to YEUK). I told the nurse and she said there is nothing she can do about it until I check out the hospital. I waited until I checked out the hospital, and the nurse took my information down. For my situation, I have to follow up with specialist. The clinic received my medical information and the referral from the hospital. The clinic also got the typo from the hospital, plus the wrong insurance information, as well as the wrong cell phone number. I was amazed at the wrong insurance (hospital gave them my dental insurance, but I received a notice from my health insurance regarding my hospital admission before I visited the clinic). How funny. When I went back to confirm my appointment a few days later, the clinic said no one correct my name (wtf?). What a joke. While I was getting admitted into the hospital for a few nights, the nurses had to pair up in order to figure out how to enter data into the system. The program looks like Excel except it isn't. In some cases you have to enter the data in a different column, in some cases you have to enter 0, in some cases you leave it out. The nurses kept saying "oh I remember you have to do this to get around this issue, oh I think you can ignore this option." When I met with the nurse practitioner the next day, he couldn't log into his system. I told him I work as a DevOps and he was curious about my role. Then he said he has to call the IT support (managed solution) somewhere in Tennessee and all the vendor would say is try again later). Yeah, after meeting 30 minutes he was able to login. Here is the thing - typo can ruin life, typo can take away money and time for fixing error, can cause divorce and all sorts of other bad things. Insurance, Social Security, government IDs, Diploma, etc. There is no reason, in my funny but pretty frustrating anecdote, for hospital to run so inefficient, relying on systems built by incompetent people, product dedicated by policy makers or administrators who really are out of touch with real life (they don't use the system). You know, I am angry, I want to reform hospital software system.

pragone 10y ago
I've seen all of these situations thousands of times, and I don't even work in a hospital (yet). There has not existed a single EMR I've ever seen that makes any sense whatsoever to the individuals using it. I understand it from the bigger picture, but when things are directly impacting patient care, something needs to be done. I've likewise been extremely interested in reforming EMRs. It's a precarious field to get into, but I am definitely very interested in pursuing it (perhaps after medical school, though).

scrumper 10y ago

So not NATted IP? Not sure I understand how a typo in the IP could point to someone at the same residence. And without excusing police conduct or eliding his real distress, I'd also point out that his life was perhaps also ruined by having a peadophile for a partner...

macintux 10y ago
The incorrect IP was assigned to his partner. The "correct" IP, presumably of the criminal, was someone else entirely apparently.
Mtinie 10y ago
It appears you misinterpreted the case. His partner's IP address was the one that was mistakenly entered into a system when a typo was introduced. She had nothing to do with it, nor did he. To be fair, the phrasing of the paragraph when this fact was introduced was hard to parse. > The IP address passed on corresponded to an internet account held by Nigel's partner. But it had been typed incorrectly, with an extra digit added by mistake. The typo resulted in a representation his partner's IP. i.e.: 1.1.1.2 //intended target 1.1.1.12 //the partner's
- scrumper 10y ago
  Ah, thanks, that makes a lot more sense than what I understood.
stefco_ 10y ago
Sure, but it's always much more frustrating and disappointing when those tasked with protecting the innocent end up ruining innocent lives. In particular, it's frustrating that better auditing procedures and transparency would prevent things like this from happening. It's also scary how, due to the persistence of (mis)information on the internet, it is possible to end up with (either undeserved or at least excessive) notoriety that follows you across the world with little chance of escape. Who the hell is going to hire someone when a google search of their name mentions that they were arrested on pedophilia charges? Never mind whether they were innocent. [edit: as another poster pointed out, it seems his partner was not the pedophile, but rather that their shared IP address, which was registered to her, was the incorrectly entered value]

Udik 10y ago

I read this bracing myself for the usual kafkaesque story of somebody jailed for months or years on a groundless charge, going through endless sloppy trials, hysterical sentencing, and the predictable tragic consequences on career, relations, together with the trauma and abuse of being jailed. But this case happened in the UK, not the US. After he was "arrested" this man appears to have spent a grand total of three weeks "living with his mother". After these three weeks, his laptop was returned to him by the police and he had been cleared from all charges. However, he laments that "because of what happened" he's suffering of PTSD and he's unable to go back to work. That during the three weeks he was away, his younger son would cry. That the £60k compensation he received from the police for the mistake it's not enough, since he "didn't even get two and a half years' wage". That he hasn't had his day in court, and he needs the world to know he's not a paedophile. The events happened six years ago. I might be underestimating the impact on one's life and mental health of this kind of things. But this story smells of trying to get a better deal or of some deeper personal issue.

macintux 10y ago
When you work with troubled youth, an accusation of child pornography is almost as bad as it can possibly be. Since the police didn't give him an explanation for the mistake up front, I'm sure he lived under a cloud of suspicion after that, hence the concern about being alone with young women. For 3 weeks everyone around you assumes you're guilty. How do you prove the absence of pornography in your life when the police have all your equipment? Yes, it could have been much worse. No, I'm not shocked that it was devastating. (Update: forgot to add, I imagine there's a very real fear during those three weeks that you'll be permanently separated from your children.)
- Udik 10y ago
  Ok, but the police cleared him of the charges. Then he hired a solicitor and thanks to him the mistake was made clear, and he got a totally justified, and very handsome, compensation. One would think that this should be enough to put at rest any possible suspicion. Three weeks are not such a long ordeal, especially when you know from the start it's all a mistake.

saboot 10y ago

Related story: The leak of John Podesta's (Hillary Clinton's campaign manager) emails was caused by their IT support person replying that a phishing email was 'legitimate' when intending to type 'illegitimate', a very serious typo!

dredmorbius 10y ago
It was also caused by: 1. Google not providing end-to-end, two-factor, encryption of email. Meaning access to the password was access to the entire corpus. ProtonMail and a few other startups (I've recently created a PM account, otherwise no affiliation) are offering at least E2E email crypto. 2. Google's identity protections failed to detect the phishing attempt and illicit access. This for an exceptionally high-profile account. Data are liability. "Who are you?" is the most expensive question in information technology. No matter how you get it wrong, you, or rather, we all, are fucked.
lawnchair_larry 10y ago
So they claim. I don't think he would have used illegitimate in that context. He probably just said it was a typo to save face.
- kafkaesq 10y ago
  Oh, I can totally believe it was a typo. People who work on campaigns are constantly overworked and sleep-deprived like you wouldn't believe. So they make screw-ups like this all the time.
  - ronilan 10y ago
    It depends upon what the meaning of the word "was" was. https://youtu.be/j4XT-l-_3y0 https://youtu.be/j4XT-l-_3y0

bshimmin 10y ago

I can relate: a good part of my morning was ruined by typing "RAILS_ENv" instead of "RAILS_ENV"...

WhitneyLand 10y ago
Someone's life is ruined, and he is shamed in the most unjust way possible, and in your mind it merits a coding joke? Sorry, I just don't understand.
- bshimmin 10y ago
  You're right, it was in really poor taste. I'm sorry. The downvotes are entirely justified. (As a poor attempt at mitigation, I had literally just made that typo, which cost me about two hours because I'd run a lengthy migration on the wrong database in a staging environment and then not understood why nothing I tested was working, when I read the BBC News article... and, yes, I thought, "Hey, yeah, me too.")
  - WhitneyLand 10y ago
    Thank you for your honesty and reflection.

rdiddly 10y ago

What the article doesn't say (didn't watch any video, so kick me please if need be), is whether the police ever caught the guy they were actually looking for, at the actual IP address.

linuxkerneldev 10y ago
This is a very good point. There seems to be no coverage of whether the actual perpetrator was ever caught. We employ and compensate the police, admins and fund the judicial system, at least partly in order to serve as a deterrent to criminals. If our system has a high percentage of false positives or punishes innocent people then that reduces the efficacy of the system as a deterrent. I'm reminded of this exchange between a journalist and a British justice minister where the minister seems incapable of understanding that punishing people who turned out to be innocent isn't an effective system. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DrsVhzbLzU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DrsVhzbLzU

mastazi 10y ago

He received £60,000. Even adding one more zero wouldn't be enough in my opinion.

sundvor 10y ago
Hell yes. This makes my blood boil. Anything less than a £6m payout would be too small. It might actually put the police on notice as well, i.e. properly incentivise them to do higher quality work.
- anigbrowl 10y ago
  The police don't care what the taxpayers have to shell out, it just means sitting through some angry lectures but basically they are no worse. I think compensation for victims of police misconduct should come out of police pensions.
  - tspiteri 10y ago
    If police officers are liable to pay the victims, would anyone want to be a police officer, given their relatively low wages? In order to make them liable for such things, you would have to increase their wages a lot. I think one of the problems is that we expect a lot from the police, which we should, but then they are not paid nearly enough for that level of responsibility.
    - anigbrowl 10y ago
      Conversely, why would I want anyone to be a police officer that had a problem with this? True, a police officer could be innocent and run into some problems anyway - which is the situation faced by everyone else. I'd certainly be in favor of raising pay if it attracted a higher calibre of applicant, but the pay shouldn't be so high that it becomes economically attractive to take risks with others' life and liberty. Lots of police officers are reasonable people trying to do a difficult job with integrity. but the job also attracts a lot of bad people who exploit their authority abuse or kill people, and there are types of politician and voter who support that kind of behavior and choose to advance it.

uptownfunk 10y ago

I'm sorry to say, but this is absolutely disgusting. How horrifying for that poor man. Hope he gets his fight back, there just needs to be more severe penalties for mistreatment like this. This is a totally different scenario but reminds me when police kill someone they think has a weapon but is just holding a toy, or when police kill someone that looks like a criminal they're looking for. The sad outcome is most of the time they get off scott free...

ghaff 10y ago
>there just needs to be more severe penalties for mistreatment like this. So, what should these severe penalties be? When someone makes a data entry mistake that's corrected (as in this case), should they lose their job? Maybe be thrown in prison for a few years? I imagine dealing with programming errors like this would serve as some pretty effective encouragement for better practices. Of course, people might simply choose to avoid any actions that could result in errors.
- JohnGB 10y ago
  In this case, the police refused to give him any information after the fact, forcing him to hire a lawyer. The police only apologised after a lawyer got involved, not after they realised that they had arrested the wrong man. Additionally only having an IP address to go on, they chose to arrest him (I'm assuming because he's a man) rather than the person whose name was on the account. So, the penalty shouldn't be for a mistake. The penalty should be for trying to cover up the mistake over years, and for profiling him based on zero supporting evidence.
- edgartaor 10y ago
  A double check before arrest someone could be enough.
- notgood 10y ago
  This issue shouldn't be of "data entry", the IP should have been registered by software not someone typing it using a number pad; what this tells me is that they don't have the most basic safety checks in order to avoid mistakes; I bet part of the problem is that they are more likely to use their gov funds in new patrol cars than in proper TDD software.

UnoriginalGuy 10y ago

An interesting aspect of this story that nobody else picked up on: > The IP address passed on corresponded to an internet account held by Nigel's partner. But it had been typed incorrectly, with an extra digit added by mistake. So he himself wasn't even the owner of that account. He just happened to have been living in his partner's home. So, why specifically was he targeted even with the wrong IP? Is this what law enforcement has become? Rounding up the first male of age in the vicinity of a crime? I'm just saying, not only did they have the wrong home but even then they had absolutely no basis even within that home (since obviously no evidence was found during the search), but his life was absolutely ruined.

DanBC 10y ago
This particular crime is overwhelmingly committed by men.

userbinator 10y ago

... and somewhere out there is a lucky pedophile thinking 'my life was saved by a typo'. Errors don't always mean the bad guy wins, however: http://staugustine.com/news/local-news/2011-09-10/elise-okane-gets-saved-typo http://staugustine.com/news/local-news/2011-09-10/elise-okan...

WhitneyLand 10y ago

With the going rate of accountability for these things I think he made out ok with 60k and an apology. Not that I want the deal, but with prosecutorial immunity, and innocent people getting nothing after decades in prison it's all relative.

mirimir 10y ago

I wonder where they got that IP address from. Could this be another Freenet case?

btschaegg 10y ago

Only reading the headline was enough to remind me of Brazil[1]. The movie, while being based on the very premise of a typo ruining lifes, also has the most telling lines in it - the one everybody trying to rectifiy such an issue is bound to get told[2]: Mistake? We don't make mistakes! [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film) [2]: https://youtu.be/6OalIW1yL-k https://youtu.be/6OalIW1yL-k

prohor 10y ago

In Poland there were many people killed, potentially due to a coma (,). A court process of the pacification of Wujek [1] was mainly whether a response to question "Should we shoot?" was "No, wait for orders" or "Don't wait for orders" (in Polish less difference "Nie, czekajcie na razkaz" vs. "Nie czekajcie na rozkaz"). This was really a ruining life of many just by one coma. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacification_of_Wujek https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacification_of_Wujek

LoSboccacc 10y ago
I'm learning polish and every sentence is basically one letter away from disaster.
- Sunset 10y ago
  This is why Poland cannot into space.
- jungletek 10y ago
  Not sure if clever joke, or irony. (The lower-case 'P' in Polish)
tauntz 10y ago
This seems to be a common running joke in some countries. The same story is also told in Estonia ("Hukata, mitte ellu jätta" vs "Hukata mitte, ellu jätta").

DanielBMarkham 10y ago

Following Hertfordshire Police's admission, Nigel sought compensation for a breach of the Data Protection Act 1998, false imprisonment, police assault/battery, and trespass by police...In October 2016, Hertfordshire Police settled out of court. Nigel received damages of £60,000, plus legal costs..."It isn't enough money," Nigel says, "but after six years of fighting, you're tired." That sucks, big time. It is also true that combative lawsuits actually increase the problem, making it more and more unlikely that anybody will voluntarily admit mistakes. So if you're some police clerk and you mis-type an IP address and somebody's life gets ruined, best circle the wagons and keep your mouth shut. Maybe -- maybe -- you could help the poor schmuck get exonerated, but you'd have to be really careful about how you do it. I hate that, but that is how large systems of people operate. It quite quickly becomes "us versus them" There's another aspect to this story that I don't think people discuss enough: for many topics, both law enforcement and the general public are either completely disinterested or want to burn you at the stake. There doesn't seem to be much middle ground or nuance. Have a picture of child porn on your computer? There are folks who argue that not only should you be imprisoned, but that you should never be released. Are you 20 and dating a 17-year-old? People say that's the same thing. Are you a a teenager and send a naked picture of yourself to a friend? You could very well be a child pornographer. This, by any definition of the word, is insane. And it's worse than that. Sexual harassment is such a bad thing that for many folks, there doesn't even have to be any evidence of it. As long as one person says that another person sexually harassed them? Somebody needs to be fired. Somebody should go to jail. There are even those folks that based on a story that one person types on the internet will say "This other person? They're a sexual predator" -- it's the grown-up version of kiddie porn. You're either completely innocent of everything or you're the fucking Evil One incarnate. Once again, insane. I have no answers, but I do observe that when this type of over-reaction to any kind of perceived crime happens in a small village, it's not such a big deal. Some small social groups have social norms that vary quite a bit, and over time they influence one another. I am reminded that the Salem Witch trials ended when, in part, folks in the biggest nearby town asked something like "How could there be so many witches in Salem and none here? How does that make sense?" What we're seeing now is a village-ization of the world. There are people who want only one social group, across the planet, and they want it to have the same norms. That's fantastically fucked up, but I don't think the people doing it have any idea of that. Folks like Nigel are just collateral damage in this mission of theirs.

arjie 10y ago

Classic Police. Get the IP wrong. IP maps to one person's account. Arrest a different person at the same address. When asked, don't admit the reason for release until forced to do so many years later. Mistakes happen, but this is brilliantly compounding incompetence. Imagine a plane crash that goes: the left engine wasn't maintained, the pilot was drunk, and there was less fuel than there should have been. If you look back at the event, you don't conclude that those things followed from each other. They're probably independent. What that means is that less egregious failures are probably happening all the time. In this case, it probably means that this police department routinely arrests the wrong person after finding out which account belongs to a suspect. It also means that they routinely deny information of their wrongdoing. And it probably unsurprisingly means that they typo things all the time. I wonder what actions they took. It's not about firing people. It's about making sure policy doesn't lead to poor outcomes.

MichaelMoser123 10y ago
If they have to type the IP address by hand then he was probably not the only person who did time for a typo... Thank goodness they have ipv4 addresses, with ipv6 you would get more typos.
- skygazer 10y ago
  Overwhelming chances are that if you mistype an ipv6 address, it points to somewhere nonexistent. That sounds preferable.

justAlittleCom 10y ago

In France we have a ISP (Numericable) who had a shitty system to map the IP to the user. Each time the system didn't found the person, he didn't return an error but, someone, always the same dude. Poor dude… https://www.cnil.fr/fr/avertissement-public-nc-numericable-pour-erreur-dans-la-transmission-de-donnees-didentification-sur https://www.cnil.fr/fr/avertissement-public-nc-numericable-p...

forgottenpass 10y ago
There are similar problems with geolocation databases: http://fusion.net/story/287592/internet-mapping-glitch-kansas-farm/ http://fusion.net/story/287592/internet-mapping-glitch-kansa...

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MichaelMoser123 10y ago

Reminds me of the story of a poor editor during Stalin's terror who was shot for omitting a letter : instead of 'commander in chief' he had a typo that read 'commander in shit' (главнокомандующий/гавнокомандующий)