“It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.” – Thomas Sowell
UK court clears post office staff convicted due to ‘corrupt data’
181–190 of 291 posts
Re: UK court clears post office staff convicted due to ‘corrupt data’
#182> software engineer Richard Roll Risky click.
Never gonna give you up.
Re: UK court clears post office staff convicted due to ‘corrupt data’
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
yes, this reasoning does make sense. but given the human cost it should only make sense if there's a significant prior: in most of these cases there was no previous evidence whatsoever, just a new system, and boom, thieves. I think the core point here is how imbalanced this process was: postal system builds a new accounting program that shows money is missing. these people were convicted solely on the evidence that s…
Yeah I mean if your brand new software discovered that a retail shop was suddenly missing £50k/month in income, surely you'd do full inventory to confirm £50k worth of goods is actually missing. No idea how you would do that in a post office, but I guess take an inventory of stamps and any other services sold?
This would normally be the role of a forensic accountant.
My suspicion is that the Post Office wanted to do this "at scale" and "automate", and just assumed blindly their own records were accurate, because well... They must be!
Had they actually tried to investigate these as one by one offences, you'd gather evidence of individuals concerned making huge cash transactions to buy expensive cars and holidays. And when you didn't find any evidence of this unexplained enrichment (as there wasn't any), your investigator would point this out, and you'd realise you didn't have a case.
Similarly a photograph of the subpostmaster getting into their outright-owned Lamborghini would have been useful evidence there. The absence of any of the evidence of this enrichment seems absent throughout. Let alone the detailed forensic accounting to determine what was actually taken. I suspect the issue was they simply didn't have any way to tell what should have been there, other than what the defective horizon system said... They were trying to run at national scale, without enough ground truth information to validate their assumptions and detect the issue.
Re: UK court clears post office staff convicted due to ‘corrupt data’
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not only that £59,000 was actually stolen but that the accused received the money. There was no evidence that the post masters charged ever had the money in their possession!
What you are both arguing doesn't match up with the facts. It was proved beyond reasonable doubt multiple times. The "proof", (which we now know was flawed) was that the system had shown that what they had sold didn't tally with what was sent to the Post Office, to refute that proof, the defence have to show another plausible explanation. Yes, if they could have proved they also received what was stolen, that would h…
> but there are enough plausible reasons why they can't find the money
There is a strange presumption in here. It is true that lack of evidence doesn't always means there's evidence that there was no crime. But that shouldn't matter. A crime should only be prosecutable if it is demonstrable. We shouldn't say "oh, well the prosecution had a really hard case, we should just convict this person anyway because it wasn't fair to those lawyers." That's such a perverse way of reasoning about it.
Re: UK court clears post office staff convicted due to ‘corrupt data’
#185This is unreal. Shitty software sending people to prison without anyone in the process considering what exactly is the likelihood of hundreds of postmasters simultaneously becoming thieves overnight.
This reminds me of what happened after 9/11, the fear of dirty bomb was all the rage so the US government deployed a network of Geiger counters. They arrested a number of dangerous dirty bombers, all of whom were cancer patients spotted by the detector at the subway station nearest Johns Hopkins radiation treatment facility. It took weeks to fix the problem.
At least when my wife hit that in the Shanghai/Pudong airport (residue from a heart scan, not cancer) they resolved it in a few minutes of talking.
On the other hand, I think Shanghai didn't check well enough--there was one simple test they could have done but didn't: Hand held geiger counter, see what's hot. Body equally hot, baggage not hot, it's medical.
Why couldn't the US cops do the same thing?
Re: UK court clears post office staff convicted due to ‘corrupt data’
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
This reminds me of what happened after 9/11, the fear of dirty bomb was all the rage so the US government deployed a network of Geiger counters. They arrested a number of dangerous dirty bombers, all of whom were cancer patients spotted by the detector at the subway station nearest Johns Hopkins radiation treatment facility. It took weeks to fix the problem.
At least when my wife hit that in the Shanghai/Pudong airport (residue from a heart scan, not cancer) they resolved it in a few minutes of talking. On the other hand, I think Shanghai didn't check well enough--there was one simple test they could have done but didn't: Hand held geiger counter, see what's hot. Body equally hot, baggage not hot, it's medical. Why couldn't the US cops do the same thing?
They implemented the system without even thinking of the false positives. Eventually they added that to the procedures, but they harassed quite a few people before that happened. Cancer patients on top of that, many of whom were probably half dead already.
Re: UK court clears post office staff convicted due to ‘corrupt data’
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
While I agree more broadly, you cannot expect the Post Office to prove a negative. How would they prove conclusively that the software had no bugs at all under any circumstances? That's a pretty steep QA bill imho.
This is the proof that how we write software is inherently wrong, if we allow innocent lives to be destroyed because we don't want to write it differently. Imagine not doing inspections of new building construction because it would be costly.
> This is the proof that how we write software is inherently wrong, if we allow innocent lives to be destroyed because we don't want to write it differently.
I think there's a lot of room for writing software better, including expanded source access for public systems and formal verification when critical.
But the failure in this case isn't technical, it's legal. It's rational to decide that occasional bugs in a mail software system are acceptable, and not worth the cost of designing a system's development around formal-verification. What's obviously insane is treating such a system as if it's bug-free beyond a reasonable doubt, and ruining innocent people's lives over it.
There are a lot of forms of gross incompetence and negligence that we're all fine with because they're so common. Failing to reason about software systems and their pitfalls, or consult with those who are capable of doing so, is an extremely-common and often-dangerous example (cf dumbass Senators grilling Zuckerberg with their 1970s understanding of how technology functions).
The blame here lies squarely on the prosecutors, judges, etc who are responsible for these verdicts. They should be ashamed of themselves.
Re: UK court clears post office staff convicted due to ‘corrupt data’
#188Re: UK court clears post office staff convicted due to ‘corrupt data’
#189I'm saving this article to show developers that your software can ruin lives. It doesn't have to be used in aerospace or health care to matter.
Re: UK court clears post office staff convicted due to ‘corrupt data’
#190As: a postmaster When: I use this software Then: I should not be falsely imprisoned for 3 years.
Tough crowd