13 ms·

Convicted Post Office workers have names cleared

299 points by colinprince 6y ago

montroser 6y ago
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...
- dv_dt 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    There was a TV series about it.
- agilob 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      People at RM knew about it. They were covering up the operation and protecting the system, which already cost tax payers 100M.
CapriciousCptl 6y ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meadow%27s_law
Thaxll 6y ago
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?
- coding123 6y ago
  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.
- simion314 6y ago
  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 6y ago
  > 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 6y ago
    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 6y ago
  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.
davisr 6y ago
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 6y ago
  > could not have happened Could still happen. But would be less likely.
bottled_poe 6y ago
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 6y ago
  The project managers who demand one-hour turnaround on every feature request and mandatory overtime are to blame.
vilaca 6y ago
This is beyond "Terry Gilliam's Brazil" level of dystopic.
rectang 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    We've changed it. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26927818 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26927818.
samfisher83 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    wait until we weaponize the AI and let smart weapons decide who lives or dies
    - catlifeonmars 6y ago
      Does it matter? Humans have an excellent track record of deciding who lives and dies.
      - catlifeonmars 6y ago
        What worries me more is that smarter killing machines will make humans more efficient at killing the “right” people.
- LatteLazy 6y ago
  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...
segfaultbuserr 6y ago
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.
- rwmj 6y ago
  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 http://www.risks.org
- drak0n1c 6y ago
  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).
crazygringo 6y ago
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.
- mytailorisrich 6y ago
  "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.
- simion314 6y ago
  >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 6y ago
    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.
- lewispollard 6y ago
  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.
dw-im-here 6y ago
n-gate dream come true
NelsonMinar 6y ago
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"
- mickeypi 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    > 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.
- rileymat2 6y ago
  > 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 6y ago
    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.
qyi 6y ago
Why is British policing so consistently stupid?
- walshemj 6y ago
  This was not the Police here
  - qyi 6y ago
    Ok, "the justice system".
    - failwhaleshark 6y ago
      It's mechanical reliance on the religion of technocracy rather than common-sense and human critical-thinking skills.
      - qyi 6y ago
        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.
- anigbrowl 6y ago
  A cultural (but sadly not unique) preference for order over justice.
- dang 6y ago
  Please don't post unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments here and spare us from nationalistic flamewar in particular. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
walshemj 6y ago
No it was the Post office mangers that did that
- failwhaleshark 6y ago
  ? The system miscalculated some figures and assumed subpostmasters (delivery people) were stealing money. There was likely no theft occurring.
js2 6y ago
> 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.
6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
> ... 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 6y ago
  I think in this case they simply mean it's the highest number of defendents who have succeeded in having their convictions overturned.
bdw5204 6y ago
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.
commandlinefan 6y ago
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.
monksy 6y ago
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.
- baobabKoodaa 6y ago
  Not sure if you're being sarcastic, but yes, they may have had all those things, and still had this bug, because cargo cult testing is not usually effective at finding bugs.
klelatti 6y ago
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.
encryptluks2 6y ago
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.
- failwhaleshark 6y ago
  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.
- haunter 6y ago
  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.
scotchmi_st 6y ago
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/justice-lost-in-the-post.pdf 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 https://www.private-eye.co.uk/podcast/49 It's a fascinating and heartbreaking story. The film Brazil made real.
mihaaly 6y ago
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.
robinjfisher 6y ago
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-Others-v-Post-Office-judgment-230421.pdf 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 https://www.nickwallis.com
- IshKebab 6y ago
  What are the chances we'll see jail time for any of the people responsible? I'm guessing zero?
- klelatti 6y ago
  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.
anigbrowl 6y ago
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.
jmfldn 6y ago
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?!
failwhaleshark 6y ago
Tuttle.. Buttle. Guilty! Send them to the Ministry of Information Retrieval.
mrwh 6y ago
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.
rushabh 6y ago
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.
lifeisstillgood 6y ago
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.
roachpepe 6y ago
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?
cs702 6y ago
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) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film)
bostonsre 6y ago
I hope the wrongly accused are able to sue the software company to get better than the offered 22k compensation.
rmason 6y ago
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 :<( .
dang 6y ago
Discussed yesterday: UK court clears post office staff convicted due to ‘corrupt data’ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26913037 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 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 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 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 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 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-software-bug-criminal-convictions-overturned https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/23/22399721/uk-post-office-s... to the BBC article it's based on.
croes 6y ago
Will be a lot harder to prove the software was wrong if it uses AI
ed25519FUUU 6y ago
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.
phendrenad2 6y ago
Hopefully the victims of this incompetence can sue for in excess of a million pounds each. Sure the government will pass it on to the taxpayers, but lots of departments will feel their budgets artificially shrunk due to it, and that's perhaps enough inconvenience for them to think twice before slacking off and blindly trusting software.

299 points by colinprince 6y ago

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...

dv_dt 6y ago
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 6y ago
  There was a TV series about it.
agilob 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    People at RM knew about it. They were covering up the operation and protecting the system, which already cost tax payers 100M.

CapriciousCptl 6y ago

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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meadow%27s_law

Thaxll 6y ago

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?

coding123 6y ago
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.
simion314 6y ago
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 6y ago
> 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 6y ago
  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 6y ago
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.

davisr 6y ago

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 6y ago
> could not have happened Could still happen. But would be less likely.

bottled_poe 6y ago

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 6y ago
The project managers who demand one-hour turnaround on every feature request and mandatory overtime are to blame.

vilaca 6y ago

This is beyond "Terry Gilliam's Brazil" level of dystopic.

rectang 6y ago

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 6y ago
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 6y ago
  We've changed it. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26927818 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26927818.

samfisher83 6y ago

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 6y ago
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 6y ago
  wait until we weaponize the AI and let smart weapons decide who lives or dies
  - catlifeonmars 6y ago
    Does it matter? Humans have an excellent track record of deciding who lives and dies.
    - catlifeonmars 6y ago
      What worries me more is that smarter killing machines will make humans more efficient at killing the “right” people.
LatteLazy 6y ago
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...

segfaultbuserr 6y ago

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.

rwmj 6y ago
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 http://www.risks.org
drak0n1c 6y ago
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).

crazygringo 6y ago

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.

mytailorisrich 6y ago
"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.
simion314 6y ago
>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 6y ago
  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.
lewispollard 6y ago
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.

dw-im-here 6y ago

n-gate dream come true

NelsonMinar 6y ago

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"

mickeypi 6y ago
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 6y ago
  > 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.
rileymat2 6y ago
> 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 6y ago
  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.

qyi 6y ago

Why is British policing so consistently stupid?

walshemj 6y ago
This was not the Police here
- qyi 6y ago
  Ok, "the justice system".
  - failwhaleshark 6y ago
    It's mechanical reliance on the religion of technocracy rather than common-sense and human critical-thinking skills.
    - qyi 6y ago
      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.
anigbrowl 6y ago
A cultural (but sadly not unique) preference for order over justice.
dang 6y ago
Please don't post unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments here and spare us from nationalistic flamewar in particular. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

walshemj 6y ago

No it was the Post office mangers that did that

failwhaleshark 6y ago
? The system miscalculated some figures and assumed subpostmasters (delivery people) were stealing money. There was likely no theft occurring.

js2 6y ago

> 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.

6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago

> ... 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 6y ago
I think in this case they simply mean it's the highest number of defendents who have succeeded in having their convictions overturned.

bdw5204 6y ago

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.

commandlinefan 6y ago

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.

monksy 6y ago

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.

baobabKoodaa 6y ago
Not sure if you're being sarcastic, but yes, they may have had all those things, and still had this bug, because cargo cult testing is not usually effective at finding bugs.

klelatti 6y ago

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.

encryptluks2 6y ago

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.

failwhaleshark 6y ago
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.
haunter 6y ago
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.

scotchmi_st 6y ago

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/justice-lost-in-the-post.pdf 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 https://www.private-eye.co.uk/podcast/49 It's a fascinating and heartbreaking story. The film Brazil made real.

mihaaly 6y ago

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.

robinjfisher 6y ago

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-Others-v-Post-Office-judgment-230421.pdf 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 https://www.nickwallis.com

IshKebab 6y ago
What are the chances we'll see jail time for any of the people responsible? I'm guessing zero?
klelatti 6y ago
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.

anigbrowl 6y ago

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.

jmfldn 6y ago

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?!

failwhaleshark 6y ago

Tuttle.. Buttle. Guilty! Send them to the Ministry of Information Retrieval.

mrwh 6y ago

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.

rushabh 6y ago

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.

lifeisstillgood 6y ago

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.

roachpepe 6y ago

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?

cs702 6y ago

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) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film)

bostonsre 6y ago

I hope the wrongly accused are able to sue the software company to get better than the offered 22k compensation.

rmason 6y ago

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 :<( .

dang 6y ago

Discussed yesterday: UK court clears post office staff convicted due to ‘corrupt data’ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26913037 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 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 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 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 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 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-software-bug-criminal-convictions-overturned https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/23/22399721/uk-post-office-s... to the BBC article it's based on.

croes 6y ago

Will be a lot harder to prove the software was wrong if it uses AI

ed25519FUUU 6y ago

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.

phendrenad2 6y ago

Hopefully the victims of this incompetence can sue for in excess of a million pounds each. Sure the government will pass it on to the taxpayers, but lots of departments will feel their budgets artificially shrunk due to it, and that's perhaps enough inconvenience for them to think twice before slacking off and blindly trusting software.