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Comment by mmcdermott | Hacker News Reader

The linked document doesn't feel unreasonable to me. The concrete example given in the document is the Post Office Horizon Scandal where shortfalls in accounts were identified based on computer records. All the working presumption correctly would mean is that the defense can't be an idle "well, it's a computer it had bugs". If the computerized records are provided as evidence, the defense has to give a reason to believe that bugs account for those shortfalls.

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.

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> 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.

Paper accounting seems significantly more error prone, at least for a given level of convenience, right? I mean the computer might be worried about comic rays flipping bits, but ink on paper can be smudged by fingers, and they don’t even have to be traveling at an appreciable percentage of the speed of light.

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.

The legal system already has checks and balances to account for errors in paper accounting. They don't require an assumption that the paper accounting is correct, but rather rely on the jury to make judgements, because juries are familiar with the limitations of paper accounting.

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.

> 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.

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”.

Isn't the Horizon scandal the opposite? Everyone knew the software was faulty the whole time and no one cared about the consequences.

That's exactly what this proposal addresses. Consider the paper they cite, in part, for the proposal:

"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.

OK, the original comment makes more sense now.

Are prosecutors in the UK required to disclose both incriminating and exculpatory evidence to the defendant?

I believe so, but they have a notorious track record of not doing so.

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!

Yes.

Would that be a bad thing? If you want the convenience you either pay for something that is proven correct or you take the inefficiency of paper (under your implicit assumption that it's somehow invulnerable to error, burning down, etc), or you accept that you take the convenience but will not be able to use it in court as evidence. If you suspect somebody is stealing, you could always take further measures like switching to magical paper that can't go wrong, or set regular inspections, or new procedures, etc.

Don't pretend that fucking over innocent lives in the pursuit of profits is a law of nature.

>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.

No. It'd actually just force authorship and disclosure of test cases.

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