I have seen a lot of dumb legal takes, usually by non-lawyers and non-judges.
But this is so very dumb.
But this is so very dumb.
The alternative would be to say that only a system that has been proven correct could be used as evidence which would force pretty much all accounting back to paper.
Assuming that the paper accounting could be proven correct, when the computerized accounting could not, your proposed alternative would seem to be an upgrade.
You can make paper backups of course, but you can also make electronic ones, the electronic ones can be shipped around the world basically for free.
We're still a long way away from pulling that off with computers, but the idea that someone could have made a mistake shouldn't be that hard to grasp.
Don't pretend that fucking over innocent lives in the pursuit of profits is a law of nature.
"It is a matter of surprise that important documentary records, such as the Fujitsu Known Error Log (KEL), were disclosed only in response to a direction from the court and in the face of opposition by the Post Office." (https://journals.sas.ac.uk/deeslr/article/view/5240/5083)
The proposal in this paper would require prosecution to disclose extant documents related to the reliability of the system. In the Horizon case, such documents existed, but were never disclosed, as current practices did not require the prosecution to do so.
Are prosecutors in the UK required to disclose both incriminating and exculpatory evidence to the defendant?
But from other articles it sounds like these prosecutions involved some kind of parallel legal system just for the mail?
I think though that the issue that this saga hit is that the law was such that the computer “evidence” was presumptively correct so they tried to pretend any “bugs” they were aware of didn’t change that fact and so the existence of bugs was not “exculpatory” - obviously BS, but it seems like that was the core behaviour/belief of the post office. That put the victims in the position of having to disprove the accusation but the only “evidence” in the case was the presumptively true report from the buggy system.
Ie the only evidence presented was a system that was buggy, but the victim could not get evidence the system was broken without first proving it was broken.
Yay!
No. It'd actually just force authorship and disclosure of test cases.
No, there are many alternatives. Including, most critically, the one laid out in the paper under discussion. Which is – spoilers – not “only a system that has been proven correct could be used as evidence”.
It's not like they're going to give you the keys to the server room.
It's more than that. You don't have to instruct a jury that they have to accept that a person does what they're supposed to do unless proven otherwise... unless that person wrote code for a computer.
The original rule-makers probably never considered the idea of a giant, bespoke enterprise software system; it's just a particularly terrible edge case that got caught up in what looks like a reasonable efficiency measure.
Eye witnesses, expert witnesses, etc. can be unreliable. It's very difficult to prove that they have not made any errors. However, we don't ask juries to presume they are infallible.
There is a difference between being infallible and being correct. No one assumes that computers cannot err, just that they have not erred unless there is reason to believe they have. Likewise, if a witness gives coherent evidence and no one has any reason to assume they are wrong or lying, that evidence will not generally be disregarded simply because humans are fallible and therefore the evidence is presumed to be flawed.
There's no reason to think that programmers are less fallible than other people.
> required the prosecution to prove that a computer was operating properly at the relevant time before a document produced by such a computer could be admitted as evidence.
But I'm sure you actually mean to agree, and that your comment was just garbled in transit. :)