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How a software glitch at the UK Post Office ruined lives

385 points by IronWolve 3y ago

testemailfordg2 3y ago
When the elite have a stake in the deals or receive kickbacks, you shouldn't expect the system to run fairly. Any issues found, would be quickly sweeped under the rug with all might. Even judiciary isn't immune from the elite, can't even expect a fair investigation when elites are involved.
IronWolve 3y ago
Wouldn't say it was just a software glitch, bureaucracy tried to cover it for bad press at all levels in the government ran agency.
- calpaterson 3y ago
  Indeed. And it was a number of different bugs, not just one.
- neerajsohal 3y ago
  [dead]
- iforgotpassword 3y ago
  That's why I don't really (knowingly) want to work on something that could ruin lives if there's a bug. medical devices? Hell no. (But you never know where your code ends up running.) As you said this didn't just involve software issues to get that big, but I still wonder how all the devs that worked on this over the years could just shrug it off all these years. You can't tell me not a single dev got wind of these issues. Did they just immediately jump to "impossible I'm the most awesome person on this planet no way there's a problem these people all just stole money". I'd have sleepless nights going over the whole system in my mind trying to figure out where things went wrong. Is this some sort of dunning -kruger going on? I don't really consider myself a coding wizard or anything, but I think I know about enough to know I'll keep producing bugs til the day I die. Rust won't stop logic bugs from happening.
  - bigfudge 3y ago
    Perhaps your humility qualifies you for it! It strikes me that the problems aren’t caused by lack of technical chops per se - it’s almost always because people don’t consider the possible downsides of mistakes and act accordingly.
  - guappa 3y ago
    Well it was basically some banking software… I'm following a BBC podcast about the story, and basically the managers and investigators at the post office knew there were issues. They told every single victim "you're the only one who's claiming there are issues".
- ivix 3y ago
  It's not an government agency. The post office is a completely private company.
  - switch007 3y ago
    Not any old private company. The government just happens to own all the shares "The Post Office is owned by the government, through the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) and UK Government Investments (UKGI), however, the Post Office Ltd Board has responsibility for the operations of the Post Office" [0] And "The Department of Business Energy and Industrial Strategy holds government responsibility for postal affairs, including the Post Office" ... "the Post Office Ltd remains accountable to the government" [0] [0] https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-7550/CBP-7550.pdf https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-...
PakG1 3y ago
This is a new summary of the real-life case that inspired me to go do PhD studies in information systems. I wanted to understand why IT incompetence still could exist to this degree in this day and age after all the knowledge the world had developed about good IT and software practices over decades of experience. Of course, I quickly found out that IS research had already figured most of this out, and that perhaps, people were just people and crappy organizations were just crappy organizations, and perhaps that's something that will never change because bell curve distributions exist for almost everything. If all people could be selfless, humble, intelligent, competent at everything they ever try to do, AND be people of integrity, I'm sure many of the world's problems would disappear, in addition to just IT problems. People suck, organizations suck, societies suck, and we all suck in our own way. I think organizational research like I'm trying to do still tries to point us towards a better path nevertheless, but sometimes it's a throw your hands in the air thing. Some people will never care. Needless to say, I'm no longer focused on researching this topic, as it seems really well-researched already. But it's still interesting to see that this particular example still pops up in a news report now and then. There are still plenty of other big examples that pop up every year, but this one seems to have staying power to stay in the news media.
- IronWolve 3y ago
  I did a quick look around for some blogs about this early paper to digital transaction register migration, I didn't see much for such a major case. Just a few basic things that wasn't included, no audit/transaction logs, transactions modified by tech support to keep the system running. Operators couldn't prove they didn't steal funds, and the british law that computers systems are to be trusted as fact, pretty much convicted them all.
  - imtringued 3y ago
    This isn't a software error and it is pretty clear. There are two problems here. First, the branch manager is responsible for calculated shortfalls, even if the software is broken. Second, there is no way to overturn broken software. Third, the prosecutors are overzealous in trying to shut these people up and convict them straight away. The software itself was just a convenient medium for abuse of authority.
st-keller 3y ago
I found the caption misleading. This article describes the dreadful ramifications of error(s) in a complex IT system. What it falls short of are details on the hows.
- IronWolve 3y ago
  It was from the article, not sure how its misleading. Its pretty much the biggest tech scandal in the news right now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal
  - varispeed 3y ago
    Because it wasn't a software glitch. Probably such misleading headline has been chosen to help Fujitsu regain some of its share value.
  - omoikane 3y ago
    Discussions on this wiki article from few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38937705 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38937705 Actually the article has been posted since 2 years ago, but didn't get much discussion until recently. https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FBritish_Post_Office_scandal https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fw...
a-dub 3y ago
didn't terry gilliam make a movie about literal bugs in government computers ruining lives back in the early 80s?
- IronWolve 3y ago
  Mr Bates vs The Post Office just came out on the ITV, is about the incident in the article. trailer @ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPkvYXufpAY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPkvYXufpAY
- vidarh 3y ago
  Brazil. With a very unfortunate typo causing mistaken identity.
  - HideousKojima 3y ago
    The most hilarious part to me was when the main character's friend (the government torturer guy) suggested that the mixup was intentionally caused by the wrongfully accused (or something along those lines?) as a way to make the government look bad.
    - surfingdino 3y ago
      When I applied for a passport around 20 years ago my local passport office used an old fingerprint reader that often failed to register fingerprints. I was told to try different fingers and when all attempts failed I jokingly offered my toes for scanning. The officials operating the system told me that won't be necessary, because "the system has provision for people without hands"... needless to say my hands are still attached to my body.
- Arn_Thor 3y ago
  Brazil
- momentoftop 3y ago
  "Tuttle? His name's Buttle. There must be some mistake." "Mistake? Ha! We don't make mistakes." Proceeds to drop ceiling plug through ceiling. "That's bloody typical. They've gone back to metric without telling us."
onetimeuse92304 3y ago
Here some more information about what really went down, technically, behind the scenes: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/jan/09/how-the-post-offices-horizon-system-failed-a-technical-breakdown https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/jan/09/how-the-post... "One member of the development team, David McDonnell, who had worked on the Epos system side of the project, told the inquiry that “of eight [people] in the development team, two were very good, another two were mediocre but we could work with them, and then there were probably three or four who just weren’t up to it and weren’t capable of producing professional code”." (Just in case somebody says I am putting blame on developers) Obviously, the responsibility is firmly on management. People making code bugs should not be held responsible for other people going to prison for it.
- onei 3y ago
  From that article (and a few others) > In fact, staff at Fujitsu, which made and operated the Horizon system, were capable of remotely accessing branch accounts, and had “unrestricted and unaudited” access to those systems, the inquiry heard. This has always bothered me. Sure, it's possible to build APIs that audit access completely. But I can easily write code that circumvents those APIs. Code isn't like a building where the walls are impenetrable and the doors the only possible access points - we can redecorate without ever touching the door. Building in an unaudited backdoor for operators seems bad, but if you can edit the source code the backdoors are infinite.
  - fbdab103 3y ago
    There should be application level auditing and database level. The people with access to managing the database level auditing should be extremely limited.
    - onetimeuse92304 3y ago
      Listen. We all know what should have been done. They were not able to do the first thing about running a transaction (ensure that one side of the transaction isn't executed multiple times). What you are saying is an obvious thing and yet it probably is well beyond the maturity of the team that was working on it.
surfingdino 3y ago
The worst thing about it was the assumption that the computer system was right and the people were crooks. This should give people wanting to stick AI into every orifice of our lives a pause, but I have a feeling it will not.
Gee8r9 3y ago
It was not a software glitch! Such thing would get normally discovered and fixed in a few months It was corrupt managers, police and goverment! Literal conspiracy to destroy lives of innocent people!
- iforgotpassword 3y ago
  So the corruption made it that somehow that bug-free software produced inconsistencies in accounting? Interesting.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - vidarh 3y ago
    The point is that the bugs on their own would have been merely a nuisance leading to unnecessary audits if not for the severe mismanagement around them.
  - mathieuh 3y ago
    There were hundreds of these cases, and the affect post-masters were calling the IT helpline repeatedly saying sums of money were going missing. Personally I think that if you have hundreds of people of good reputation and standing swearing up and down that they didn't steal money, and there's a record of their having called repeatedly to report erroneous data in the software, then there should be some sort of investigation to figure out what was going on. Instead they were shouted down and threatened.
    - guappa 3y ago
      There was a case where after a call to the IT helpline the "missing" money just doubled, and the helpline just said "well pay the new amount or go to jail"
  - imtringued 3y ago
    Nobody said the software is bug free. That is your interpretation. The corruption lies in the fact that the bug wasn't fixed.
passerby1 3y ago
Would someone suggest how would hundreds of investigations (and courts? Or there were no courts at all?) were not able to shed any light on the bug? How is it even possible to continue for more than 20 years?
- arkh 3y ago
  Imagine you are head of some administration. Times are getting hard, profits are decreasing so you can not embezzle money as much or as easily. You know people under you must be stealing, and some new software just happen to be able to prove it. Here is the solution to help pay your third mansion in the south of France.
- g_p 3y ago
  It's worth noting that courts (in the common law system) don't generally play any kind of inquisitive role in cases - there's a presumption that both sides bring legal representation for an adversarial debate where the court is impartial and independent. Given many of the sub post masters struggled to fund their legal cases (and legal aid is not likely going to stretch to funding the intensity of expert witness work required to discredit a whole system), this also seems to be one of the non technical failings not often talked about. There's certainly questions about why courts didn't spot issues, but ultimately the common law adversarial system assumes both parties can get equal quality of representation. Unless you have very strong technical knowledge (this site is a non representative sample!) you'd struggle to really shed any light on the bug and get a court to agree with your line of defence. Ultimately that's what did happen in the group litigation by Bates, about which the TV drama was ultimately created.
- jdietrich 3y ago
  The Post Office knew that the Horizon system was deeply flawed and that the prosecutions they were pursuing were unsound. They intentionally covered up this fact. The courts adjudicated based on evidence provided by the Post Office, but that evidence intentionally omitted things like error logs that would have undermined their case. The defendants had a right to see that evidence, but the Post Office simply denied that it existed. The Post Office were helped by the fact that the rules of evidence presume that computer records are accurate unless shown otherwise - the burden was on the defence to show that Horizon was flawed, not on the Post Office to show that it was reliable. Lots of things had to go wrong for this miscarriage of justice to happen, but at the core of it all is the fact that the Post Office lied for years - to the defendants, to the courts, to the media, to government. Things should have been handled differently, the case has revealed a number of systematic failings that need to be urgently addressed, but there's only so much the legal system can do to defend against very sophisticated people who engage in a determined campaign of deceit. We can reduce the risk of something like this happening again, but sadly we can't eliminate that risk entirely. https://davidallengreen.com/2024/01/how-the-legal-system-made-it-so-easy-for-the-post-office-to-destroy-the-lives-of-the-sub-postmasters-and-sub-postmistresses-and-how-the-legal-system-then-made-it-so-hard-for-them-to-obtain-justice/ https://davidallengreen.com/2024/01/how-the-legal-system-mad...
onion2k 3y ago
In my last team I banned use of the word 'glitch'. It was a catch-all phrase for "bug I don't want to take ownership of" used by developers and product owners alike when they were talking to customers. It has no place in a modern tech team.
- m463 3y ago
  Can you own everything?
  - mjh2539 3y ago
    You can't own everything, but referring to something as a "glitch" is essentially ITs thought-terminating cliche.
  - onion2k 3y ago
    You can own all the bugs.
- alphalima 3y ago
  I have also banned "random", replacing with "intermittent", in the past.
- varispeed 3y ago
  These days there are many work places where people don't have enough skill finding and fixing "bugs". People used to copy and paste Stack Overflow answers into the company code base until it "worked". Then if there was a problem it could sit for weeks or months with someone and then moved to another person. It's interesting because in most cases doing simple prints just to see what's going on could give a hint what to fix, but even that was too complex. It's getting worse because if software is making money then there is further incentive to cut costs of development (hiring less experienced and cheaper engineers) and corners (let's not do TDD it's a waste of time). UK government is addicted to big consultancies that are famous for this and they have been exploiting public sector by delivering half arsed projects (if at all) at extremely high cost while tasking cheap and inexperience labour to do the work and pocketing the rest of the money. There is no organisation interested in investigating all those contracts.
freetanga 3y ago
I have read about this somewhere else. The key issue seemed to be in the Post Office internal “Justice” system, which is opaque, biased and refused to consider evidence. It’s pretty stupid that in an age where we strife for universal rights, your job could strip you from defending yourself on the public justice system, with all its defects and warranties… The IT bug was an issue, sure, but the political mismanagement of an institution stuck in the past is what caused all the ruin for so many people. And it flew under the radar until Netflix made a movie. Actually, the lady running the PO was awarded a Goverment recognition. IT and code generation is full of pitfalls, but this one lays somewhere else.
- freetanga 3y ago
  From the FT article: __The state-owned Post Office acted as investigator and prosecutor in the cases, using the general right in English law for any individuals and organisations to pursue private prosecutions without involving the CPS. A public inquiry into the scandal has heard that the Post Office, among other aggressive legal tactics, accused sub-postmasters of theft to pressure them into pleading guilty to lesser charges. The CPS has identified 11 cases it brought against sub-postmasters that involved “notable evidence” from the Horizon system. Legal experts said the government had been warned several years ago that private prosecutions carried a higher risk because those pursuing them were more likely to have motivations other than securing justice. Lord Ken Macdonald KC, a former director of public prosecutions, said: “If you’ve got a body with skin in the game [such as the Post Office] acting as a prosecutor, that creates obvious risks and dangers.”__
  - lmm 3y ago
    IMO the private prosecution is a necessary safeguard. In other countries you get the opposite problem: a gross injustice has been done, but the public prosecutor won't prosecute (often because the perpetrator was connected with the government in one way or another), so nothing gets done.
    - penguin_booze 3y ago
madsbuch 3y ago
Based on the article, this also appears to be miscarriage of justice. A lawyer recommending an innocent person to plea guilty sounds like a lawyer not doing their work properly.
- guappa 3y ago
  They didn't have access to the full documentation, let alone be able to review the software itself.
  - madsbuch 3y ago
    They have access to the suspect. If the suspect don't understand whether they did it, it should call for a full-scale investigation of the software so at least somebody understands exactly why they are guilty. In Denmark the police thoroughly investigates cases also when the accused plead guilty. In a country that has a rule of law, punishment is not negotiation. I do realize that it is up for interpretation for the Anglo system due to its over-commercialized legal system.
    - guappa 3y ago
      They weren't investigated by the police at all. It seems that the post office in england can do their own investigations and prosecutions… the prosecutor wasn't even the same you'd get if you steal from a non-post office.
- gmac 3y ago
  Agreed. Although, as I understand it, this also happens to be a staple of the US legal system: https://stfrancislaw.com/blog/whats-a-plea-bargain-and-how-does-it-impact-the-justice-system/ https://stfrancislaw.com/blog/whats-a-plea-bargain-and-how-d...
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  Or they know they are up against a kangaroo court.
derriz 3y ago
Plenty of obvious villains in this story but where was the legal system in all this? 900 prosecutions without any real evidence or just because “the computer says so”? As one of the 3 pillars, isn’t the legal system and judiciary supposed to act as a backstop against this sort of capricious mass-persecution of completely innocent people?
- madaxe_again 3y ago
  The post office can draw its own prosecutions - no need for the prosecution service etc., and in general, a magistrate confronted with His Majesty’s Postal Service’s Honourable Legal Team (OBE, CBE) and This Dirty Bloke With a Regional Accent What We Reckon Stole From Us will chose the government every time.
- samtho 3y ago
  This is the real failure. The software is neither smart nor dumb, it’s a machine. In this case, it was broken, but people who actually have the ability to critically analyze and judge situations deferred to the output of a machine that they have no real visibility into the internals of, and took its output as gospel.
- laurieg 3y ago
  Here are the judge's instructions to the jury for one of the trials: "There is no direct evidence of her taking any money [...] She adamantly denies stealing. There is no CCTV evidence. There are no fingerprints or marked bank notes or anything of that kind. There is no evidence of her accumulating cash anywhere else or spending large sums of money or paying off debts, no evidence about her bank accounts at all. Nothing incriminating was found when her home was searched." (The only evidence was a shortfall of cash compared to what the Post Office’s Horizon computer system said should have been in the branch.) "Do you accept the prosecution case that there is ample evidence before you to establish that Horizon is a tried and tested system in use at thousands of post offices for several years, fundamentally robust and reliable?" My word against yours wouldn't be enough to meet the standard of "beyond a reasonable doubt", but the Post Office's word backed up by a computer system? It seems that was convincing enough for the jury. They gave a guilty verdict in the above case.
asmnzxklopqw 3y ago
Wow, if something like this happened in the mainland Europe, probably many heads would fall, up to the ministerial level. For the establishment in good ol’ England it’s just another day.
- irdc 3y ago
  Did you hear about the Dutch childcare benefits scandal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_childcare_benefits_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_childcare_benefits_scand...) yet? That one affected about 28’000 parents with 70’000 children and, due to the illegal separation of children from their parents this resulted in, is at the crimes-against-humanity level.
- InCityDreams 3y ago
  > if something like this happened in mainland Europe, probably many heads would fall.... Absolutely no they wouldn't.
laurieg 3y ago
This story has finally been getting the air it deserves. If you want a summary and insight into the staggering scale of the injustice, this article from Private Eye magazine is worth reading: 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... This BBC radio programme, started in 2020, also gives a lot of good information including details of how suspected sub-postmasters were questioned by the Post Office. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand/m000jf7j https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand/m000jf7j
time4tea 3y ago
In UK law, it is presumed that computers systems work perfectly, and it is up to the "other side" to prove they didn't. In short, if the computer said so, it is a fact, in court. Lots more information here https://evidencecritical.systems/2022/06/30/briefing-presumption-that-computers-are-reliable.html https://evidencecritical.systems/2022/06/30/briefing-presump...
- hnfong 3y ago
  > In UK law, it is presumed that computers systems work perfectly, and it is up to the "other side" to prove they didn't. This is kind of true, but there's a bit of nuance -- presumptions can be rebutted by the other side adducing evidence to the contrary. The evidence does not have to be strong enough to "prove" anything, it's generally sufficient that it suggests the presumption might be invalid. So in colloquial terms you don't have to prove the computer system was flawed, just a real possibility. That said, the article you linked to does go on to explain why even this scheme didn't work out in the post office cases.
jbverschoor 3y ago
Right how, software is seen as truth. This is simply not always the case. I’m happy ai is getting a lot of attention, as people seem to be more aware that its judgement can be wrong. What is needed is the requirement that software decisions must disclose their data and decisions path/ “algorithm” in court. Another thing we need laws for is banning a person from using a system. It’s insane that you can be banned for life without recourse or explanation. It’s basically you being thrown in jail for life without reason.
interestica 3y ago
The BBC aired this story as a documentary in 2015 as part of the Panorama series. They received threats from the Post Office over the content. > The Post Office threatened and lied to the BBC in a failed effort to suppress key evidence that helped clear postmasters in the Horizon scandal. > The Post Office's false claims did not stop the programme, but they did cause the BBC to delay the broadcast by several weeks. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-67884743 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-67884743 It wasn't just a "glitch" -- it was also a PR campaign (quite successful up to now) that supporessed the voices of those affected.
- shaoonb 3y ago
  I find it shocking that this has been known about for so long, but only now that there was a TV drama about it is it actually being addressed. It came up in the news and I thought "what, I remember hearing about this 5 years ago, surely it's been sorted out by now?"
  - bspammer 3y ago
    My parents both work for the BBC and are pretty disheartened about this (though they're happy people finally care). It really feels like presenting the results of journalism as a drama, rather than a documentary, is orders of magnitude more effective at enacting change.
- SLJ7 3y ago
  I would like to understand enough about law, governments and the postal service to assign blame here, but I'll just say that it's really fucking sad that this is still in any way ongoing after being known about for so many years. This shouldn't have needed to be publicised in such a way before the wheels of justice started turning. I remember hearing about this several years ago and thinking "Jesus, that's rough. Technology sure ruins lives." And now I'm hearing about the (still ongoing) situation in 2024 and I no longer blame the tech. It's all people. People are awful.
abrookewood 3y ago
This is very similar to the robodebt scheme [0] that happened in Australia with similarly devastating consequences: - Welfare recipients' suicide after receiving automated debt recovery notices - Debt notices were issued to deceased people. - Issuing debt notices to disability pensioners. Looks like Wikipedia has termed this Algocracy (government by algorithm). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robodebt_scheme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robodebt_scheme
- partomniscient 3y ago
  It's kind of similar, but in Robodebt it was more a case of covertly implementing a wrong algorithm for debt calculation (because it inferred good results for the government of the time), placing the responsibility of disproving the debt on the individual with ridiculous requirements and no support or process to easily challenge them. It was really a result of the Liberal & National Party (LNP) who were in government at the time wanting to: - look tough on welfare cheats for image/election purposes - claim a potential massive source of income (that wasn't really there) for the next budget Most of the wrong calculations were due to a result of income averaging fortnight or multiple fortnights worth of income and extrapolating them to an annual figure, which is the absolute wrong thing to do when a lot of people on welfare worked as casuals and/or had short term jobs and the fortnight(/s) were non-representative of their yearly income. In some cases the first time the alleged debtee found out about the debt was via a demand from a debt collection agency. When individual action was taken against them, the government was reducing debts to $0.00 and then claiming there was no longer a reason for a case against them and had it dropped. The only reason the debt recovery program was stopped was because lawyers acting upon someones behalf also claimed interest on a paid false debt, which meant they couldn't succeed using the same tactic at which point they rolled over and admitted the unlawfulness of the scheme, which had been going for many years at this point. I recommend this youtube 3 part series to get a good understanding of what was involved: [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfsL9GAbl3M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfsL9GAbl3M It starts out mentioning that it resulted in the largest class action lawsuit in Australian history...
  - zimpenfish 3y ago
vijaybritto 3y ago
P1: I brought down prod with a faulty migration script P2: oh Im responsible for the deaths of many people and court cases spanning 2 decades. There's even a tv show based on the story
kunley 3y ago
I would guess it's the corruption of tenders in the public sector. The organisation in the public sector must choose the right vendor and then any sh*t sold by this vendor is correct, otherwise it would prove the wrong choice.
londons_explore 3y ago
I don't fully understand how people end up in prison over this... If the software says there should be X money in the cash drawer, but there is actually Y money, then clearly something is wrong, so you investigate. You get the software to print off a list of every sale made that day with timestamps. You check the stores CCTV so see when every customer came into and out of the store. You cross reference. Most are small stores that probably only see 300 customers all day anyway. If you are a store manager wrongly accused of fraud, of course you can be bothered to do this. It would only take one store to do this to find out that the software was wrong.
- ghusbands 3y ago
  There were more than 900 convictions, and you think that not one of those accused would have tried to prove their innocence? Typically, when it gets to the point of being an accusation, employees will lose all access to all systems. It's also widely reported that evidence was routinely suppressed and emails conveniently lost. And the software was found wrong in November 2019, when a judge ruled that the software contained bugs, errors and defects, which caused a settlement in that case and a cessation of further cases. The oddest part is that with all these Horizon problems being pointed out for decades and then a judge ruling that it was faulty, there still hadn't been an inquiry until very recently.
gmerc 3y ago
it’s not the software glitch that ruined life. It was people making decisions about suppressing evidence, lying, not correcting the mistake. It’s like saying faulty breaks killed thousand people and omitting that the company could have recalled the car after the first car but chose not to. Is suspect this kind of reporting is intentional to minimize pushback. “How Fujitsu and the Post Office drove people into suicide” gets you angry lawyers. Blaming the glitch not.
oliwarner 3y ago
The glitch wasn't the reason people went to prison. It was incompetence, perverse outcome-based executive incentives, plain corruption and baseless hubris. The problem that this unearthed was that evidence of crimes committed through information systems can be obscenely complex and therefore obscenely expensive to defend against. "Computer says guilty" shouldn't be enough, but a defence would take months of debugging. Not something somebody on a £20k salary could ever afford. But that's what happend. Hubris that Fujitsu's system was infallible. Targets and bonuses that stopped management asking uncomfortable questions. Layers of incompetence meaning people weren't asking the right questions, missing the correct burden of proof in the legal process. And all this over an accounting system that can be forensically picked apart. Just imagine how bad it'll be when it's a black-box AI.
alexey-salmin 3y ago
The title should be "how post office executives knowingly ruined lives and obstructed justice"
forinti 3y ago
I wonder if you could provoke the doubling bug until you got to a ridiculous amount or an overflow that would be just too ridiculous to not be considered a bug. If a post office owed a billion pounds then that would be impossible to blame on the postmaster.
- hnfong 3y ago
  Yes but ironically if you intentionally triggered the bug you'll definitely be found guilty of fraud. I don't think the "I was just trying to show how ridiculous the bug was" defense will go too well in court.
zubairq 3y ago
The UK Postcode scandal is interesting in that it was exposed at all. Many people in countless industries have had their lives ruined by similar software bugs and bad industry practices, but those people have not been able to fight or to get justice.
BonoboIO 3y ago
I think the higher ups of the post office should got to prison for a loooong time, strip their wealth. It was a software glitch, but the coverup was massive, even years ago. It was intentional to hide their incompetence.
arp242 3y ago
I really hate how this is being framed as "a software glitch caused [...]". It wasn't a "software glitch" that caused anything. Yes the software sucked, but lots of software sucks. It was human decisions that caused this, by using software they knew (or could and should have known) was not fit for purpose. And by ignoring people who told them it was not fit for purpose after it was deployed. And the government not stepping in. And National Federation of Sub-postmasters. &c &c &c. All of this is well documented. That the initial mistakes were made was kind of ridiculous for lots of reasons, but okay, mistakes happen. But that it took 20 fucking years to correct while the broken software continued to be used is just indescribable, and absolutely not the fault of any software but the result of human choices. That's the real problem; in an alternative universe people realized Horizon was a piece of crap shortly after being deployed, the mistakes were corrected, and they fixed it or stopped using it. Humans caused the misery. Not software. The software bit is almost a minor detail IMO. By framing it as "a software glitch" people will focus on software to "fix" things, but that's not where things need to be fixed.
- vb-8448 3y ago
  > But that it took 20 fucking years to correct while the broken software continued to be used is just indescribable, and absolutely not the fault of any software but the result of human choices 100% agree. Managers who were in charge of these choices should be convicted.
  - ChocolateGod 3y ago
    If the ITV show is factually accurate, looks like the managers knowingly tried to send innocent people to prison to cover their own careers and reputation. They should have the book thrown at them.
    - johndunne 3y ago
      That’s the crux of the scandal. The Post Office had experts claim under oath that ‘horizon is faultless and fit for purpose’. Mounting evidence shows that these experts were evidently aware that they were lying and so the scandal is taking on a new turn. Police are investigating the perjury that might have contributed to the prosecution’s by the PO. I want to see key people at the PO sent the jail in the same manner any one else who perjured themselves would be. It appears that some power politics went on in the background that either covered up the scandal, or could have ended it early, but turned a blind eye.
yurytom 3y ago
I remember meeting two guys in a pub. They worked for a bank. When I told them I work in IT, they said, 'Oh, it's because of IT systems failure that we had the 2008 financial crisis.' They truly believed in what they were saying.
jimnotgym 3y ago
It still intrigues me that if I want a steel beam in my house I need a 'Chartered Engineer' to calculate the size. If I want to know what it will cost I use a 'Chartered Quantity Surveyor', and to work out the financial implications I might use a Chartered Accountant. All of these have rigorous multi-year training, with experience requirements...and a code of ethics. This is all for a £1K contract. Meanwhile, if I want a multi-billion dollar critical infrastructure software project, I can use people who learnt to code at summer camp. Isn't it time we had proper qualifications for software 'engineers'?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
jwmoz 3y ago
You were never going to get the best of the best working on this system in a random soviet looking tower block in Bracknell.
jongjong 3y ago
As a software engineer who has built distributed systems, I can attest that building reliable software is really difficult, bordering on impossible. The hardest part is probably handling and recovering from all possible failure scenarios. You need to make sure that the system could crash while in the middle of processing any line of logic in your system and it should be able to recover elegantly; without skipping anything and without re-processing what has already been processed (which can cause duplication of records). The challenge with distributed/partitioned systems specifically is that atomicity is much harder to achieve and strategies for achieving a similar result are complex and error-prone (e.g. two phase commits, using idempotency to avoid double-insertion)... For complex database transactions involving several tables with a custom two-phase commit mechanism, you have to be careful to process records of different types in a specific order. Also, you need to set up your database indexes carefully for fast lookup and sorting...
switch007 3y ago
For anyone thinking the Post Office being a private company absolves the Government of any responsibility, not so fast. It's wholly owned by the Government and there is a minister responsible for postal affairs, which includes the Post Office. However it has its own board for day-to-day operations. The government has a _lot_ of blood on their hands Source: https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-7550/CBP-7550.pdf https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-...
vlovich123 3y ago
This story just gets worse and worse. Interesting that Sunak only promises to try to overturn convictions and get some kind of financial remuneration for victims, but no discussion about having a investigation into how this structurally happened in the first place and figuring out who needs to be punished for coming up with these incentives in the first place?
- g_p 3y ago
  I believe this is coming, but (rightly) from the police investigating credible allegations of criminal wrongdoing, rather than from Government intervention. 2x fairly prominent Fujitsu people have been interviewed under caution on suspicion of perjury, and some of the recent revelations from recent testimony in both the parliamentary committee hearing and the public inquiry seem likely to open the door to further such investigations. In terms of internal conduct, the Post Office is now (as of first week of January) apparently under investigation for potential fraud offences. There is some speculation this includes individuals, as well as the entity itself (given many fraudulent actions would be carried out by individual people). I imagine such prosecutions (properly carried out, independent of government actions) may help focus people's memories and also begin to start the process of punishing those individuals concerned, and implicate others in the process.
  - vlovich123 3y ago
    I just feel for these families. I recall reading about the software bug so long ago and they’re just now starting to talk about getting them retired.
tlivolsi 3y ago
Is anyone being held accountable for this?
- thebruce87m 3y ago
  The people responsible are probably still deciding on the scapegoat. Give it time.
MikeDelta 3y ago
The glitch caused it, but it was the way the UK Post Office handled it that ruined lives.
tremon 3y ago
I absolutely object to this phrasing. No, the software glitch itself did not ruin lives. It was management choosing to conduct a witch hunt instead of a thorough investigation that ruined lives.
HacklesRaised 3y ago
A software glitch didn't ruin lives, a duplicitous organization with dishonest people at the helm ruined lives. The problems with Fujitsu's system were widespread and understood but the Post Office pursued these people regardless. It should come as no surprise that the money they fleeced from these helpless victims likely went to executive pay. We all know that capitalism is a terrible system, it's just better than any other system that has been proferred, but profit motive brings out the very worst in people.

385 points by IronWolve 3y ago

When the elite have a stake in the deals or receive kickbacks, you shouldn't expect the system to run fairly. Any issues found, would be quickly sweeped under the rug with all might. Even judiciary isn't immune from the elite, can't even expect a fair investigation when elites are involved.

IronWolve 3y ago

Wouldn't say it was just a software glitch, bureaucracy tried to cover it for bad press at all levels in the government ran agency.

calpaterson 3y ago
Indeed. And it was a number of different bugs, not just one.
neerajsohal 3y ago
[dead]
iforgotpassword 3y ago
That's why I don't really (knowingly) want to work on something that could ruin lives if there's a bug. medical devices? Hell no. (But you never know where your code ends up running.) As you said this didn't just involve software issues to get that big, but I still wonder how all the devs that worked on this over the years could just shrug it off all these years. You can't tell me not a single dev got wind of these issues. Did they just immediately jump to "impossible I'm the most awesome person on this planet no way there's a problem these people all just stole money". I'd have sleepless nights going over the whole system in my mind trying to figure out where things went wrong. Is this some sort of dunning -kruger going on? I don't really consider myself a coding wizard or anything, but I think I know about enough to know I'll keep producing bugs til the day I die. Rust won't stop logic bugs from happening.
- bigfudge 3y ago
  Perhaps your humility qualifies you for it! It strikes me that the problems aren’t caused by lack of technical chops per se - it’s almost always because people don’t consider the possible downsides of mistakes and act accordingly.
- guappa 3y ago
  Well it was basically some banking software… I'm following a BBC podcast about the story, and basically the managers and investigators at the post office knew there were issues. They told every single victim "you're the only one who's claiming there are issues".
ivix 3y ago
It's not an government agency. The post office is a completely private company.
- switch007 3y ago
  Not any old private company. The government just happens to own all the shares "The Post Office is owned by the government, through the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) and UK Government Investments (UKGI), however, the Post Office Ltd Board has responsibility for the operations of the Post Office" [0] And "The Department of Business Energy and Industrial Strategy holds government responsibility for postal affairs, including the Post Office" ... "the Post Office Ltd remains accountable to the government" [0] [0] https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-7550/CBP-7550.pdf https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-...

PakG1 3y ago

This is a new summary of the real-life case that inspired me to go do PhD studies in information systems. I wanted to understand why IT incompetence still could exist to this degree in this day and age after all the knowledge the world had developed about good IT and software practices over decades of experience. Of course, I quickly found out that IS research had already figured most of this out, and that perhaps, people were just people and crappy organizations were just crappy organizations, and perhaps that's something that will never change because bell curve distributions exist for almost everything. If all people could be selfless, humble, intelligent, competent at everything they ever try to do, AND be people of integrity, I'm sure many of the world's problems would disappear, in addition to just IT problems. People suck, organizations suck, societies suck, and we all suck in our own way. I think organizational research like I'm trying to do still tries to point us towards a better path nevertheless, but sometimes it's a throw your hands in the air thing. Some people will never care. Needless to say, I'm no longer focused on researching this topic, as it seems really well-researched already. But it's still interesting to see that this particular example still pops up in a news report now and then. There are still plenty of other big examples that pop up every year, but this one seems to have staying power to stay in the news media.

IronWolve 3y ago
I did a quick look around for some blogs about this early paper to digital transaction register migration, I didn't see much for such a major case. Just a few basic things that wasn't included, no audit/transaction logs, transactions modified by tech support to keep the system running. Operators couldn't prove they didn't steal funds, and the british law that computers systems are to be trusted as fact, pretty much convicted them all.
- imtringued 3y ago
  This isn't a software error and it is pretty clear. There are two problems here. First, the branch manager is responsible for calculated shortfalls, even if the software is broken. Second, there is no way to overturn broken software. Third, the prosecutors are overzealous in trying to shut these people up and convict them straight away. The software itself was just a convenient medium for abuse of authority.

st-keller 3y ago

I found the caption misleading. This article describes the dreadful ramifications of error(s) in a complex IT system. What it falls short of are details on the hows.

IronWolve 3y ago
It was from the article, not sure how its misleading. Its pretty much the biggest tech scandal in the news right now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal
- varispeed 3y ago
  Because it wasn't a software glitch. Probably such misleading headline has been chosen to help Fujitsu regain some of its share value.
- omoikane 3y ago
  Discussions on this wiki article from few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38937705 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38937705 Actually the article has been posted since 2 years ago, but didn't get much discussion until recently. https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FBritish_Post_Office_scandal https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fw...

a-dub 3y ago

didn't terry gilliam make a movie about literal bugs in government computers ruining lives back in the early 80s?

IronWolve 3y ago
Mr Bates vs The Post Office just came out on the ITV, is about the incident in the article. trailer @ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPkvYXufpAY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPkvYXufpAY
vidarh 3y ago
Brazil. With a very unfortunate typo causing mistaken identity.
- HideousKojima 3y ago
  The most hilarious part to me was when the main character's friend (the government torturer guy) suggested that the mixup was intentionally caused by the wrongfully accused (or something along those lines?) as a way to make the government look bad.
  - surfingdino 3y ago
    When I applied for a passport around 20 years ago my local passport office used an old fingerprint reader that often failed to register fingerprints. I was told to try different fingers and when all attempts failed I jokingly offered my toes for scanning. The officials operating the system told me that won't be necessary, because "the system has provision for people without hands"... needless to say my hands are still attached to my body.
Arn_Thor 3y ago
Brazil
momentoftop 3y ago
"Tuttle? His name's Buttle. There must be some mistake." "Mistake? Ha! We don't make mistakes." Proceeds to drop ceiling plug through ceiling. "That's bloody typical. They've gone back to metric without telling us."

onetimeuse92304 3y ago

Here some more information about what really went down, technically, behind the scenes: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/jan/09/how-the-post-offices-horizon-system-failed-a-technical-breakdown https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/jan/09/how-the-post... "One member of the development team, David McDonnell, who had worked on the Epos system side of the project, told the inquiry that “of eight [people] in the development team, two were very good, another two were mediocre but we could work with them, and then there were probably three or four who just weren’t up to it and weren’t capable of producing professional code”." (Just in case somebody says I am putting blame on developers) Obviously, the responsibility is firmly on management. People making code bugs should not be held responsible for other people going to prison for it.

onei 3y ago
From that article (and a few others) > In fact, staff at Fujitsu, which made and operated the Horizon system, were capable of remotely accessing branch accounts, and had “unrestricted and unaudited” access to those systems, the inquiry heard. This has always bothered me. Sure, it's possible to build APIs that audit access completely. But I can easily write code that circumvents those APIs. Code isn't like a building where the walls are impenetrable and the doors the only possible access points - we can redecorate without ever touching the door. Building in an unaudited backdoor for operators seems bad, but if you can edit the source code the backdoors are infinite.
- fbdab103 3y ago
  There should be application level auditing and database level. The people with access to managing the database level auditing should be extremely limited.
  - onetimeuse92304 3y ago
    Listen. We all know what should have been done. They were not able to do the first thing about running a transaction (ensure that one side of the transaction isn't executed multiple times). What you are saying is an obvious thing and yet it probably is well beyond the maturity of the team that was working on it.

surfingdino 3y ago

The worst thing about it was the assumption that the computer system was right and the people were crooks. This should give people wanting to stick AI into every orifice of our lives a pause, but I have a feeling it will not.

Gee8r9 3y ago

It was not a software glitch! Such thing would get normally discovered and fixed in a few months It was corrupt managers, police and goverment! Literal conspiracy to destroy lives of innocent people!

iforgotpassword 3y ago
So the corruption made it that somehow that bug-free software produced inconsistencies in accounting? Interesting.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- vidarh 3y ago
  The point is that the bugs on their own would have been merely a nuisance leading to unnecessary audits if not for the severe mismanagement around them.
- mathieuh 3y ago
  There were hundreds of these cases, and the affect post-masters were calling the IT helpline repeatedly saying sums of money were going missing. Personally I think that if you have hundreds of people of good reputation and standing swearing up and down that they didn't steal money, and there's a record of their having called repeatedly to report erroneous data in the software, then there should be some sort of investigation to figure out what was going on. Instead they were shouted down and threatened.
  - guappa 3y ago
    There was a case where after a call to the IT helpline the "missing" money just doubled, and the helpline just said "well pay the new amount or go to jail"
- imtringued 3y ago
  Nobody said the software is bug free. That is your interpretation. The corruption lies in the fact that the bug wasn't fixed.

passerby1 3y ago

Would someone suggest how would hundreds of investigations (and courts? Or there were no courts at all?) were not able to shed any light on the bug? How is it even possible to continue for more than 20 years?

arkh 3y ago
Imagine you are head of some administration. Times are getting hard, profits are decreasing so you can not embezzle money as much or as easily. You know people under you must be stealing, and some new software just happen to be able to prove it. Here is the solution to help pay your third mansion in the south of France.
g_p 3y ago
It's worth noting that courts (in the common law system) don't generally play any kind of inquisitive role in cases - there's a presumption that both sides bring legal representation for an adversarial debate where the court is impartial and independent. Given many of the sub post masters struggled to fund their legal cases (and legal aid is not likely going to stretch to funding the intensity of expert witness work required to discredit a whole system), this also seems to be one of the non technical failings not often talked about. There's certainly questions about why courts didn't spot issues, but ultimately the common law adversarial system assumes both parties can get equal quality of representation. Unless you have very strong technical knowledge (this site is a non representative sample!) you'd struggle to really shed any light on the bug and get a court to agree with your line of defence. Ultimately that's what did happen in the group litigation by Bates, about which the TV drama was ultimately created.
jdietrich 3y ago
The Post Office knew that the Horizon system was deeply flawed and that the prosecutions they were pursuing were unsound. They intentionally covered up this fact. The courts adjudicated based on evidence provided by the Post Office, but that evidence intentionally omitted things like error logs that would have undermined their case. The defendants had a right to see that evidence, but the Post Office simply denied that it existed. The Post Office were helped by the fact that the rules of evidence presume that computer records are accurate unless shown otherwise - the burden was on the defence to show that Horizon was flawed, not on the Post Office to show that it was reliable. Lots of things had to go wrong for this miscarriage of justice to happen, but at the core of it all is the fact that the Post Office lied for years - to the defendants, to the courts, to the media, to government. Things should have been handled differently, the case has revealed a number of systematic failings that need to be urgently addressed, but there's only so much the legal system can do to defend against very sophisticated people who engage in a determined campaign of deceit. We can reduce the risk of something like this happening again, but sadly we can't eliminate that risk entirely. https://davidallengreen.com/2024/01/how-the-legal-system-made-it-so-easy-for-the-post-office-to-destroy-the-lives-of-the-sub-postmasters-and-sub-postmistresses-and-how-the-legal-system-then-made-it-so-hard-for-them-to-obtain-justice/ https://davidallengreen.com/2024/01/how-the-legal-system-mad...

onion2k 3y ago

In my last team I banned use of the word 'glitch'. It was a catch-all phrase for "bug I don't want to take ownership of" used by developers and product owners alike when they were talking to customers. It has no place in a modern tech team.

m463 3y ago
Can you own everything?
- mjh2539 3y ago
  You can't own everything, but referring to something as a "glitch" is essentially ITs thought-terminating cliche.
- onion2k 3y ago
  You can own all the bugs.
alphalima 3y ago
I have also banned "random", replacing with "intermittent", in the past.
varispeed 3y ago
These days there are many work places where people don't have enough skill finding and fixing "bugs". People used to copy and paste Stack Overflow answers into the company code base until it "worked". Then if there was a problem it could sit for weeks or months with someone and then moved to another person. It's interesting because in most cases doing simple prints just to see what's going on could give a hint what to fix, but even that was too complex. It's getting worse because if software is making money then there is further incentive to cut costs of development (hiring less experienced and cheaper engineers) and corners (let's not do TDD it's a waste of time). UK government is addicted to big consultancies that are famous for this and they have been exploiting public sector by delivering half arsed projects (if at all) at extremely high cost while tasking cheap and inexperience labour to do the work and pocketing the rest of the money. There is no organisation interested in investigating all those contracts.

freetanga 3y ago

I have read about this somewhere else. The key issue seemed to be in the Post Office internal “Justice” system, which is opaque, biased and refused to consider evidence. It’s pretty stupid that in an age where we strife for universal rights, your job could strip you from defending yourself on the public justice system, with all its defects and warranties… The IT bug was an issue, sure, but the political mismanagement of an institution stuck in the past is what caused all the ruin for so many people. And it flew under the radar until Netflix made a movie. Actually, the lady running the PO was awarded a Goverment recognition. IT and code generation is full of pitfalls, but this one lays somewhere else.

freetanga 3y ago
From the FT article: __The state-owned Post Office acted as investigator and prosecutor in the cases, using the general right in English law for any individuals and organisations to pursue private prosecutions without involving the CPS. A public inquiry into the scandal has heard that the Post Office, among other aggressive legal tactics, accused sub-postmasters of theft to pressure them into pleading guilty to lesser charges. The CPS has identified 11 cases it brought against sub-postmasters that involved “notable evidence” from the Horizon system. Legal experts said the government had been warned several years ago that private prosecutions carried a higher risk because those pursuing them were more likely to have motivations other than securing justice. Lord Ken Macdonald KC, a former director of public prosecutions, said: “If you’ve got a body with skin in the game [such as the Post Office] acting as a prosecutor, that creates obvious risks and dangers.”__
- lmm 3y ago
  IMO the private prosecution is a necessary safeguard. In other countries you get the opposite problem: a gross injustice has been done, but the public prosecutor won't prosecute (often because the perpetrator was connected with the government in one way or another), so nothing gets done.
  - penguin_booze 3y ago

madsbuch 3y ago

Based on the article, this also appears to be miscarriage of justice. A lawyer recommending an innocent person to plea guilty sounds like a lawyer not doing their work properly.

guappa 3y ago
They didn't have access to the full documentation, let alone be able to review the software itself.
- madsbuch 3y ago
  They have access to the suspect. If the suspect don't understand whether they did it, it should call for a full-scale investigation of the software so at least somebody understands exactly why they are guilty. In Denmark the police thoroughly investigates cases also when the accused plead guilty. In a country that has a rule of law, punishment is not negotiation. I do realize that it is up for interpretation for the Anglo system due to its over-commercialized legal system.
  - guappa 3y ago
    They weren't investigated by the police at all. It seems that the post office in england can do their own investigations and prosecutions… the prosecutor wasn't even the same you'd get if you steal from a non-post office.
gmac 3y ago
Agreed. Although, as I understand it, this also happens to be a staple of the US legal system: https://stfrancislaw.com/blog/whats-a-plea-bargain-and-how-does-it-impact-the-justice-system/ https://stfrancislaw.com/blog/whats-a-plea-bargain-and-how-d...
quickthrower2 3y ago
Or they know they are up against a kangaroo court.

derriz 3y ago

Plenty of obvious villains in this story but where was the legal system in all this? 900 prosecutions without any real evidence or just because “the computer says so”? As one of the 3 pillars, isn’t the legal system and judiciary supposed to act as a backstop against this sort of capricious mass-persecution of completely innocent people?

madaxe_again 3y ago
The post office can draw its own prosecutions - no need for the prosecution service etc., and in general, a magistrate confronted with His Majesty’s Postal Service’s Honourable Legal Team (OBE, CBE) and This Dirty Bloke With a Regional Accent What We Reckon Stole From Us will chose the government every time.
samtho 3y ago
This is the real failure. The software is neither smart nor dumb, it’s a machine. In this case, it was broken, but people who actually have the ability to critically analyze and judge situations deferred to the output of a machine that they have no real visibility into the internals of, and took its output as gospel.
laurieg 3y ago
Here are the judge's instructions to the jury for one of the trials: "There is no direct evidence of her taking any money [...] She adamantly denies stealing. There is no CCTV evidence. There are no fingerprints or marked bank notes or anything of that kind. There is no evidence of her accumulating cash anywhere else or spending large sums of money or paying off debts, no evidence about her bank accounts at all. Nothing incriminating was found when her home was searched." (The only evidence was a shortfall of cash compared to what the Post Office’s Horizon computer system said should have been in the branch.) "Do you accept the prosecution case that there is ample evidence before you to establish that Horizon is a tried and tested system in use at thousands of post offices for several years, fundamentally robust and reliable?" My word against yours wouldn't be enough to meet the standard of "beyond a reasonable doubt", but the Post Office's word backed up by a computer system? It seems that was convincing enough for the jury. They gave a guilty verdict in the above case.

asmnzxklopqw 3y ago

Wow, if something like this happened in the mainland Europe, probably many heads would fall, up to the ministerial level. For the establishment in good ol’ England it’s just another day.

irdc 3y ago
Did you hear about the Dutch childcare benefits scandal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_childcare_benefits_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_childcare_benefits_scand...) yet? That one affected about 28’000 parents with 70’000 children and, due to the illegal separation of children from their parents this resulted in, is at the crimes-against-humanity level.
InCityDreams 3y ago
> if something like this happened in mainland Europe, probably many heads would fall.... Absolutely no they wouldn't.

laurieg 3y ago

This story has finally been getting the air it deserves. If you want a summary and insight into the staggering scale of the injustice, this article from Private Eye magazine is worth reading: 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... This BBC radio programme, started in 2020, also gives a lot of good information including details of how suspected sub-postmasters were questioned by the Post Office. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand/m000jf7j https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand/m000jf7j

time4tea 3y ago

In UK law, it is presumed that computers systems work perfectly, and it is up to the "other side" to prove they didn't. In short, if the computer said so, it is a fact, in court. Lots more information here https://evidencecritical.systems/2022/06/30/briefing-presumption-that-computers-are-reliable.html https://evidencecritical.systems/2022/06/30/briefing-presump...

hnfong 3y ago
> In UK law, it is presumed that computers systems work perfectly, and it is up to the "other side" to prove they didn't. This is kind of true, but there's a bit of nuance -- presumptions can be rebutted by the other side adducing evidence to the contrary. The evidence does not have to be strong enough to "prove" anything, it's generally sufficient that it suggests the presumption might be invalid. So in colloquial terms you don't have to prove the computer system was flawed, just a real possibility. That said, the article you linked to does go on to explain why even this scheme didn't work out in the post office cases.

jbverschoor 3y ago

Right how, software is seen as truth. This is simply not always the case. I’m happy ai is getting a lot of attention, as people seem to be more aware that its judgement can be wrong. What is needed is the requirement that software decisions must disclose their data and decisions path/ “algorithm” in court. Another thing we need laws for is banning a person from using a system. It’s insane that you can be banned for life without recourse or explanation. It’s basically you being thrown in jail for life without reason.

interestica 3y ago

The BBC aired this story as a documentary in 2015 as part of the Panorama series. They received threats from the Post Office over the content. > The Post Office threatened and lied to the BBC in a failed effort to suppress key evidence that helped clear postmasters in the Horizon scandal. > The Post Office's false claims did not stop the programme, but they did cause the BBC to delay the broadcast by several weeks. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-67884743 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-67884743 It wasn't just a "glitch" -- it was also a PR campaign (quite successful up to now) that supporessed the voices of those affected.

shaoonb 3y ago
I find it shocking that this has been known about for so long, but only now that there was a TV drama about it is it actually being addressed. It came up in the news and I thought "what, I remember hearing about this 5 years ago, surely it's been sorted out by now?"
- bspammer 3y ago
  My parents both work for the BBC and are pretty disheartened about this (though they're happy people finally care). It really feels like presenting the results of journalism as a drama, rather than a documentary, is orders of magnitude more effective at enacting change.
SLJ7 3y ago
I would like to understand enough about law, governments and the postal service to assign blame here, but I'll just say that it's really fucking sad that this is still in any way ongoing after being known about for so many years. This shouldn't have needed to be publicised in such a way before the wheels of justice started turning. I remember hearing about this several years ago and thinking "Jesus, that's rough. Technology sure ruins lives." And now I'm hearing about the (still ongoing) situation in 2024 and I no longer blame the tech. It's all people. People are awful.

abrookewood 3y ago

This is very similar to the robodebt scheme [0] that happened in Australia with similarly devastating consequences: - Welfare recipients' suicide after receiving automated debt recovery notices - Debt notices were issued to deceased people. - Issuing debt notices to disability pensioners. Looks like Wikipedia has termed this Algocracy (government by algorithm). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robodebt_scheme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robodebt_scheme

partomniscient 3y ago
It's kind of similar, but in Robodebt it was more a case of covertly implementing a wrong algorithm for debt calculation (because it inferred good results for the government of the time), placing the responsibility of disproving the debt on the individual with ridiculous requirements and no support or process to easily challenge them. It was really a result of the Liberal & National Party (LNP) who were in government at the time wanting to: - look tough on welfare cheats for image/election purposes - claim a potential massive source of income (that wasn't really there) for the next budget Most of the wrong calculations were due to a result of income averaging fortnight or multiple fortnights worth of income and extrapolating them to an annual figure, which is the absolute wrong thing to do when a lot of people on welfare worked as casuals and/or had short term jobs and the fortnight(/s) were non-representative of their yearly income. In some cases the first time the alleged debtee found out about the debt was via a demand from a debt collection agency. When individual action was taken against them, the government was reducing debts to $0.00 and then claiming there was no longer a reason for a case against them and had it dropped. The only reason the debt recovery program was stopped was because lawyers acting upon someones behalf also claimed interest on a paid false debt, which meant they couldn't succeed using the same tactic at which point they rolled over and admitted the unlawfulness of the scheme, which had been going for many years at this point. I recommend this youtube 3 part series to get a good understanding of what was involved: [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfsL9GAbl3M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfsL9GAbl3M It starts out mentioning that it resulted in the largest class action lawsuit in Australian history...
- zimpenfish 3y ago

vijaybritto 3y ago

P1: I brought down prod with a faulty migration script P2: oh Im responsible for the deaths of many people and court cases spanning 2 decades. There's even a tv show based on the story

kunley 3y ago

I would guess it's the corruption of tenders in the public sector. The organisation in the public sector must choose the right vendor and then any sh*t sold by this vendor is correct, otherwise it would prove the wrong choice.

londons_explore 3y ago

I don't fully understand how people end up in prison over this... If the software says there should be X money in the cash drawer, but there is actually Y money, then clearly something is wrong, so you investigate. You get the software to print off a list of every sale made that day with timestamps. You check the stores CCTV so see when every customer came into and out of the store. You cross reference. Most are small stores that probably only see 300 customers all day anyway. If you are a store manager wrongly accused of fraud, of course you can be bothered to do this. It would only take one store to do this to find out that the software was wrong.

ghusbands 3y ago
There were more than 900 convictions, and you think that not one of those accused would have tried to prove their innocence? Typically, when it gets to the point of being an accusation, employees will lose all access to all systems. It's also widely reported that evidence was routinely suppressed and emails conveniently lost. And the software was found wrong in November 2019, when a judge ruled that the software contained bugs, errors and defects, which caused a settlement in that case and a cessation of further cases. The oddest part is that with all these Horizon problems being pointed out for decades and then a judge ruling that it was faulty, there still hadn't been an inquiry until very recently.

gmerc 3y ago

it’s not the software glitch that ruined life. It was people making decisions about suppressing evidence, lying, not correcting the mistake. It’s like saying faulty breaks killed thousand people and omitting that the company could have recalled the car after the first car but chose not to. Is suspect this kind of reporting is intentional to minimize pushback. “How Fujitsu and the Post Office drove people into suicide” gets you angry lawyers. Blaming the glitch not.

oliwarner 3y ago

The glitch wasn't the reason people went to prison. It was incompetence, perverse outcome-based executive incentives, plain corruption and baseless hubris. The problem that this unearthed was that evidence of crimes committed through information systems can be obscenely complex and therefore obscenely expensive to defend against. "Computer says guilty" shouldn't be enough, but a defence would take months of debugging. Not something somebody on a £20k salary could ever afford. But that's what happend. Hubris that Fujitsu's system was infallible. Targets and bonuses that stopped management asking uncomfortable questions. Layers of incompetence meaning people weren't asking the right questions, missing the correct burden of proof in the legal process. And all this over an accounting system that can be forensically picked apart. Just imagine how bad it'll be when it's a black-box AI.

alexey-salmin 3y ago

The title should be "how post office executives knowingly ruined lives and obstructed justice"

forinti 3y ago

I wonder if you could provoke the doubling bug until you got to a ridiculous amount or an overflow that would be just too ridiculous to not be considered a bug. If a post office owed a billion pounds then that would be impossible to blame on the postmaster.

hnfong 3y ago
Yes but ironically if you intentionally triggered the bug you'll definitely be found guilty of fraud. I don't think the "I was just trying to show how ridiculous the bug was" defense will go too well in court.

zubairq 3y ago

The UK Postcode scandal is interesting in that it was exposed at all. Many people in countless industries have had their lives ruined by similar software bugs and bad industry practices, but those people have not been able to fight or to get justice.

BonoboIO 3y ago

I think the higher ups of the post office should got to prison for a loooong time, strip their wealth. It was a software glitch, but the coverup was massive, even years ago. It was intentional to hide their incompetence.

arp242 3y ago

I really hate how this is being framed as "a software glitch caused [...]". It wasn't a "software glitch" that caused anything. Yes the software sucked, but lots of software sucks. It was human decisions that caused this, by using software they knew (or could and should have known) was not fit for purpose. And by ignoring people who told them it was not fit for purpose after it was deployed. And the government not stepping in. And National Federation of Sub-postmasters. &c &c &c. All of this is well documented. That the initial mistakes were made was kind of ridiculous for lots of reasons, but okay, mistakes happen. But that it took 20 fucking years to correct while the broken software continued to be used is just indescribable, and absolutely not the fault of any software but the result of human choices. That's the real problem; in an alternative universe people realized Horizon was a piece of crap shortly after being deployed, the mistakes were corrected, and they fixed it or stopped using it. Humans caused the misery. Not software. The software bit is almost a minor detail IMO. By framing it as "a software glitch" people will focus on software to "fix" things, but that's not where things need to be fixed.

vb-8448 3y ago
> But that it took 20 fucking years to correct while the broken software continued to be used is just indescribable, and absolutely not the fault of any software but the result of human choices 100% agree. Managers who were in charge of these choices should be convicted.
- ChocolateGod 3y ago
  If the ITV show is factually accurate, looks like the managers knowingly tried to send innocent people to prison to cover their own careers and reputation. They should have the book thrown at them.
  - johndunne 3y ago
    That’s the crux of the scandal. The Post Office had experts claim under oath that ‘horizon is faultless and fit for purpose’. Mounting evidence shows that these experts were evidently aware that they were lying and so the scandal is taking on a new turn. Police are investigating the perjury that might have contributed to the prosecution’s by the PO. I want to see key people at the PO sent the jail in the same manner any one else who perjured themselves would be. It appears that some power politics went on in the background that either covered up the scandal, or could have ended it early, but turned a blind eye.

yurytom 3y ago

I remember meeting two guys in a pub. They worked for a bank. When I told them I work in IT, they said, 'Oh, it's because of IT systems failure that we had the 2008 financial crisis.' They truly believed in what they were saying.

jimnotgym 3y ago

It still intrigues me that if I want a steel beam in my house I need a 'Chartered Engineer' to calculate the size. If I want to know what it will cost I use a 'Chartered Quantity Surveyor', and to work out the financial implications I might use a Chartered Accountant. All of these have rigorous multi-year training, with experience requirements...and a code of ethics. This is all for a £1K contract. Meanwhile, if I want a multi-billion dollar critical infrastructure software project, I can use people who learnt to code at summer camp. Isn't it time we had proper qualifications for software 'engineers'?

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jwmoz 3y ago

You were never going to get the best of the best working on this system in a random soviet looking tower block in Bracknell.

jongjong 3y ago

As a software engineer who has built distributed systems, I can attest that building reliable software is really difficult, bordering on impossible. The hardest part is probably handling and recovering from all possible failure scenarios. You need to make sure that the system could crash while in the middle of processing any line of logic in your system and it should be able to recover elegantly; without skipping anything and without re-processing what has already been processed (which can cause duplication of records). The challenge with distributed/partitioned systems specifically is that atomicity is much harder to achieve and strategies for achieving a similar result are complex and error-prone (e.g. two phase commits, using idempotency to avoid double-insertion)... For complex database transactions involving several tables with a custom two-phase commit mechanism, you have to be careful to process records of different types in a specific order. Also, you need to set up your database indexes carefully for fast lookup and sorting...

switch007 3y ago

For anyone thinking the Post Office being a private company absolves the Government of any responsibility, not so fast. It's wholly owned by the Government and there is a minister responsible for postal affairs, which includes the Post Office. However it has its own board for day-to-day operations. The government has a _lot_ of blood on their hands Source: https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-7550/CBP-7550.pdf https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-...

vlovich123 3y ago

This story just gets worse and worse. Interesting that Sunak only promises to try to overturn convictions and get some kind of financial remuneration for victims, but no discussion about having a investigation into how this structurally happened in the first place and figuring out who needs to be punished for coming up with these incentives in the first place?

g_p 3y ago
I believe this is coming, but (rightly) from the police investigating credible allegations of criminal wrongdoing, rather than from Government intervention. 2x fairly prominent Fujitsu people have been interviewed under caution on suspicion of perjury, and some of the recent revelations from recent testimony in both the parliamentary committee hearing and the public inquiry seem likely to open the door to further such investigations. In terms of internal conduct, the Post Office is now (as of first week of January) apparently under investigation for potential fraud offences. There is some speculation this includes individuals, as well as the entity itself (given many fraudulent actions would be carried out by individual people). I imagine such prosecutions (properly carried out, independent of government actions) may help focus people's memories and also begin to start the process of punishing those individuals concerned, and implicate others in the process.
- vlovich123 3y ago
  I just feel for these families. I recall reading about the software bug so long ago and they’re just now starting to talk about getting them retired.

tlivolsi 3y ago

Is anyone being held accountable for this?

thebruce87m 3y ago
The people responsible are probably still deciding on the scapegoat. Give it time.

MikeDelta 3y ago

The glitch caused it, but it was the way the UK Post Office handled it that ruined lives.

tremon 3y ago

I absolutely object to this phrasing. No, the software glitch itself did not ruin lives. It was management choosing to conduct a witch hunt instead of a thorough investigation that ruined lives.

HacklesRaised 3y ago

A software glitch didn't ruin lives, a duplicitous organization with dishonest people at the helm ruined lives. The problems with Fujitsu's system were widespread and understood but the Post Office pursued these people regardless. It should come as no surprise that the money they fleeced from these helpless victims likely went to executive pay. We all know that capitalism is a terrible system, it's just better than any other system that has been proferred, but profit motive brings out the very worst in people.