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UK court clears post office staff convicted due to ‘corrupt data’

theguardian.com

71–80 of 291 posts

Re: UK court clears post office staff convicted due to ‘corrupt data’

#71
> In the latest chapter of one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in English legal history, 39 people who were prosecuted

Meanwhile in the Netherlands, ~26000 people have been branded as fraudsters by the tax office due to a way too strict child benefits law. More than 100 probably entirely innocent people fled the country. Even the compensation that is now promised is only slowly trickling towards them, and likely to be snatched up by debt collectors - including even the tax office itself, which is still partly unrepentant. Okay, they haven't been sent to jail directly, but the scale of this is huge.

Re: UK court clears post office staff convicted due to ‘corrupt data’

#72
post #59

Did no one ever ask where was the money? These people all had these huge short falls, why did no one go to find the cash? That's financial crimes 101

Post Office told the post masters that they were short, so many post masters made up the shortfall from their own pocket, expecting the books to eventually balance and to get repaid. When people were unable to continue making up that shortfall this was seen as further evidence of their criminality: "they've spent the money", "they've hidden the money", and not "they never had the money".

It’s insane they stopped pulling the thread and the defence didn’t push that, even if you spent it there would be evidence. I would have been highly skeptical that all of it just disappeared Into thin air across the entire group....nuts

Re: UK court clears post office staff convicted due to ‘corrupt data’

#73

This and the John Deere bug posted earlier make me a bit concerned over the accumulating evidence of unreliable software ruining people's lives... What can be done? Mandatory audits, pen testing? If this is an organizational problem, more vacation? limiting overtime? rethinking employee incentives?

It's not about positive incentives, it's about the lack of negative incentives. More true negative incentives need to be shifted onto the production side, back onto the corporations, its officers, its middle management, and if required down to the individual contributor.

Corporate structure helps diffuse and deflect responsibility. Each group (executive leadership, middle management, and ICs) gets to diffuse and deflect responsibility and liability onto each other.

We already have all the positive incentives in the world - cash money. It's not enough.

Re: UK court clears post office staff convicted due to ‘corrupt data’

#74
post #43

https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252496560/Fujitsu-bosses... >For the first 10 years of Horizon’s existence, transaction and account data was stored on terminals in each branch before being uploaded to a central database via ISDN. Our source says this part of the system simply did not work. >“The cash account was a piece of software that sat on the counter NT box, asleep all day,” he said. “At the end of the day,…

The crappy state of rural UK broadband (circa 2010) is proudly on display here.

ref: https://www.ingenia.org.uk/Ingenia/Articles/c05470e5-337f-4b...

Maybe the FCC went all NYPD-World-Police on the UK - popped over there to run things for a while.

Re: UK court clears post office staff convicted due to ‘corrupt data’

#75

Outrageous that so many people's lives were blown up by this. Relieved to hear the court ordered in their favour. I wonder if the post masters can now go after the Post Office for damages?

The phrase "Affront to justice" is key here. To be honest, I am completely shocked that this wasn't sorted out several years ago when it was all over the papers and it was completely obvious what had happened. But that key phrase allows the wholesale claiming of damages.

It's also noteworthy that these injustices originated from private prosecutions brought by the Post Office. That is a relatively unusual legal action in this country, where almost all criminal prosecutions are brought by the state. Given the damage that a wrongful criminal prosecution can cause, including imprisonment and having a criminal record, the compensation awarded could be considerable and there is already talk of the Post Office needing extra government funding to cover the cost.

Another small point of interest that doesn't seem to be making the mainstream reporting yet is that under our legal system the state prosecutor (the Crown Prosecution Service) has the power to take over and, if appropriate, shut down any private prosecution. When the inevitable inquiries publish their conclusions, the fact that so many bad prosecutions were successfully brought over such a long period might reflect poorly not only on the Post Office and on the courts and lawyers involved in the convictions but also on the CPS for not intervening. This could become politically significant, because the current Leader of the Opposition was in charge of the CPS around 2009-2013, the last five years when most such prosecutions were being brought. That could leave him in an awkward position if he's attacked over his record during the next general election campaign, given that his party is exactly the one that's supposed to stand up for working class "little guys" like the victims in these cases.

Re: UK court clears post office staff convicted due to ‘corrupt data’

#77
post #60

Software is in the walls. At some point legislators are going to come and ask the question how we stop things like this happening and if the Fujitsu's of the world don't have an answer then we can expect regulation that will likely embed practices that don't help. I don't think we take software reliability seriously enough, most of our focus is on speed of release, ever quicker cycles and it being OK to break things.…

Throwing innocent people on jail based on lies (with bonus, corrupt government officials colluding with foreign entities) is the problem here, not software bugs.

Software-based convictions are all about leveraging black box propriety, to hide the flaws that boost conviction numbers.

and

'Justice' is only used ironically now.

Re: UK court clears post office staff convicted due to ‘corrupt data’

#78

Software is in the walls. At some point legislators are going to come and ask the question how we stop things like this happening and if the Fujitsu's of the world don't have an answer then we can expect regulation that will likely embed practices that don't help. I don't think we take software reliability seriously enough, most of our focus is on speed of release, ever quicker cycles and it being OK to break things.…

> I don't think we take software reliability seriously enough, most of our focus is on speed of release, ever quicker cycles and it being OK to break things. This culture ruined these peoples lives. Things must change. This isn't a unique issue to Fujitsu it is something most of the software industry is doing, this story could be about just about any piece of software. Damn straight. I'm really big on software Qualit…

It's been 15 years since I've seen CMMI mentioned, and I was glad I hadn't.

Re: UK court clears post office staff convicted due to ‘corrupt data’

#79

Software is in the walls. At some point legislators are going to come and ask the question how we stop things like this happening and if the Fujitsu's of the world don't have an answer then we can expect regulation that will likely embed practices that don't help. I don't think we take software reliability seriously enough, most of our focus is on speed of release, ever quicker cycles and it being OK to break things.…

> At some point legislators are going to come and ask the question how we stop things like this happening Bob Martin talks about it a lot, how the software developers of the world need to have an "oath", like the hippocratic oath. Two posts that summarize things well (but there might be more where he talks about these things) https://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2011/01/17/software-cr... https://blog.cleancoder.com/…

"software developers… need to have an "oath", like the hippocratic oath."

More importantly, the employers of software engineers must have ZERO option to emply a software engineer (anywhere on earth) that doesn't have the same oath.

Doctors have a monospony on their services that makes their oath work: the hospital manager cannot just go hire un-oathed doctors.

Never going to happen in software. Ever.

Re: UK court clears post office staff convicted due to ‘corrupt data’

#80
post #52
post #49

The link out to another story[1] has some interesting details... "In December 2019, at the end of a long-running series of civil cases, the Post Office agreed to settle with 555 claimants. " So settlements in 555 of the original 700+ prosecutions. "It accepted it had previously "got things wrong in [its] dealings with a number of postmasters", and agreed to pay £58m in damages. The claimants received a share of £12m,…

Since the government was in a wrong I do not understand at all why they are not ordered to compensate all legal expenses as well.

Government gets to write the laws. That is, when lobbyists let them.
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