Fujitsu says it will pay compensation in UK Post Office scandal
japantimes.co.jp
japantimes.co.jp
The UK government bent over to "save jobs".
It's a story of widespread corruption and it seems most people will get away with it by claiming stuff like "I was told to trust the system, I had no reason not to" when their job was to talk to desperate people whose money kept disappearing and they kept to tell them "pay up or go to jail".
A top manager returned 1400£ of his huge bonus so the conscience is clean.
We don’t know the exact details of this diplomatic incident, but it’s very hard to believe Fujitsu would retreat from the entire UK market over one software project, albeit a high profile one.
If there was a political party donor involved in this story it would be more believable.
We see instances of this problem every day where some 'helpless' clerk stonewalls us saying "the system says". We've automated and turbocharged what was already a Kafkaesque system - only now there is no one on top of what gets into the records. Just some inscrutable pile of code that might have been produced by someone thousands of miles away with no clue of the realities they engender.
I can’t find a citation for this though. Does HN?
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/jan/12/update-law-o...
1. Historically, mechanical tools are presumed to be working well. This makes things simpler. The example quoted by the Guardian is a good one: if someone wants to question the accuracy of a clock, it's on the person claiming the inaccuracy to prove their point.
2. In 1984, it became clear that computers are not just simple mechanical tools, and they were explicitly excluded from this assumption, by saying that computer evidence should be considered 'hearsay' (and therefore inadmissible) unless the prosecution can prove that the evidence is correct, either by a certificate from someone who can reasonably be expected to certify the correct functioning of that particular evidence, or by oral evidence.
3. This meant that anyone depending on the reliability of evidence from a computer (or piece of software, hardware, etc.) as part of their legal argument could be called upon to prove this, and the burden of proof lay with them (i.e.: as a defendant, I could require the prosecution to prove that the computer works as it is intended).
4. Following a review, it seems to be basically the conclusion that the requirements are inconsistent, unnecessarily onerous and time-consuming, and the way it was written was allowing criminals to get off on technicalities because the prosecution were not able to prove minor or irrelevant points about the functioning of the computer, and anyway other countries don't have any special rules about computers. You can read for yourself the recommendation here: https://cloud-platform-e218f50a4812967ba1215eaecede923f.s3.a... (starting page 200 of the document, 215 of the PDF).
5. In 1999, the specific requirement for computer evidence to be treated as hearsay was removed.
There's a subtle difference between what you said and the current state of affairs. It is still possible to challenge the accuracy of a computer system, but the burden of proof lies with the defence. It's not going to be good enough to say 'well I don't know what happened, it must be a computer glitch', and as a result, cause the prosecution to need to produce evidence that the terminal in the Post Office was working correctly, as well as all of the back end servers that may have been responsible in some part for producing the output.
There's an extent to which I think this is reasonable. If I'm accused of fraud based on evidence recovered from a bank computer, it should not be the case that I can require the prosecution to prove that the bank's computers function correctly, and the evidence be thrown out in case the prosecution are unable to do so.
The problem with the Horizon convictions is that in many cases, the evidence produced by computers was the only evidence. Also, as the Post Office has its own prosecutors, they could chase and prosecute cases which would not normally have been tried by the CPS due to lack of evidence. It's also clear that the Post Office bullied and threatened not just the sub-postmasters, but also journalists, to keep quiet about the existence of evidence which might throw into question the correct functioning of the system.
This whole debacle is not primarily caused by the principle that you're referring to. The presumption that computers function correctly has undoubtedly saved billions of pounds, hours, and allowed a huge number of successful, correct convictions, which otherwise might have resulted in not guilty verdicts due to clever litigation, rather than actual innocence.
So a poor individual with no resources should find experts to analyze a software he doesn't even have access to (I know, discovery, but the practical limitations often make it near impossible to find the error within a given time, like having the access only in an isolated room without the internet or your own software, or having an access only to printed source code on paper), rather than the prosecutor (the state) or the company that definitely have the resources?
Obviously almost no one would go to jail then. But this would be because of a very low coding standard. You pretty much can't prove the validity of software, because somewhere around 99,99% just isn't coded in a language and regime that would guarantee being bug-free.
Check out the video by Veritasium "The Universe is Hostile to Computers" [1] - how much software, do you think, has internal error correction implemented to deal with a possible cosmic ray flipping a bit?
The solution is to have extensive logs of data, stored by independent actors, with a lot of redundancy or otherwise error detection and correction. I find it horrifying that someone as well versed in law as you is fine with putting the burden of proof on the defendant, because it would be impractical to force programmers of serious software with serious consequences to actually employ serious standards of work...
That’s not exactly my position.
Basically my concern is that with the hearsay provision of PACE, a fraudster could conceivably require the prosecution to prove that Excel works from first principles, which is absurd.
It’s also patently absurd to refuse to entertain the idea that a computer system may produce an incorrect response. But the law is an ass and you can only work with what you’re given.
That is absolutely horrific.
For some inexplicable reason, most people believe this to be the case. "Surely whoever comes next can't be worse than their predecessor, right? Right?"
Part of the problem is that MPs are on average too old, too stupid, or too reactive to actually understand technology, but another part is that they are incapable almost entirely of engaging with a deep problem if it doesn’t have a soundbite for the Today show.
“The Thick of It” was more of a documentary than many realise.
Politicians are the PE teachers in that old joke. If they had a minimum of competence in anything they do, they would have gotten a serious and honest job like everyone else.
That's also borne out by the fact that many locations (there are after all many many many post offices in the UK) operated without glitches but some locations suffered massive and repeating glitches.
In addition, the UK post office used also be the phone company and in addition managed television transmitters and a national network of coax cables to connect TV/radio transmitters together. I'm guessing but I would suspect that there might be some overlap between (some) post office locations and unusually high levels of ambient electrical interference; such as post office locations being colocated with or nearby to small telco exchanges and tv/radio transmitter sites (which also used to be operated by the post office.)
This is not fair - it was very clearly the actions of humans in Post Office Management with support of humans in Fujitsu that committed fraud in order to falsely convict innocent people.
Headline-writing humans and editors should do better.