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

theguardian.com

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

#221

Post by avs733 »

quacked wrote: post #167
avs733 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or breathalyzer convictions in the us...where charges are often dismissed if a subpoena for the code is granted

Do you have a source for that? I'd believe it immediately, but I'd like to be able to spread it around.

I remember reading a fairly in depth article that I cannot find...but some sources I'm able to ID at the moment that discuss the issue:

https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2009/05/11/breathalyzer-source...

https://lawreader.com/?p=12801

https://www.tradesecretslaw.com/2008/02/articles/practice-pr...

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009/05/buggy-breathalyz...

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

#222

Post by LatteLazy »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #209
LatteLazy wrote: post #144

Earlier 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.

If their code is a mess and has errors, and there are people at post office that know this, they should be fined on the spot for false representation of contemp of the court. If their system were up to date, written in a safe language, has unit tests and an independant review said it was solid, then it is just one acceptable piece of evidence. What i dont get is - where was the money? Supposedly hundreds of people st…

The amazing thing about these cases are exactly how many shitty things had to happen (and did) for this to occur. Like you say, where is the money? And why didn't anyone spot that more sub-post-masters were getting charged than almost all other employee types? Why didn't anyone manage to reproduce the error? Why did managers hide the reports (who does that?)?

I personally think this is partly down to the fact people don't get state defence lawyers anymore in the uk. You could accuse me of fraud with zero evidence and I likely would have to plead guilty as I don't have 20k for the down payment for a lawyer...

What a shit storm. Now watch as nothing changes...

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

#223

Post by ClumsyPilot »

zinok wrote: post #131
londons_explore wrote: post #127

Presumably to put someone in prison for being a money thief, one would need to prove where that money went... Were all these people accused of theft with not a single record of the yachts they bought with all the money they supposedly stole? I would assume most of these people would be able to turn over a complete financial record of their lives (ie. I was paid £x, I paid taxes of £y, and here is a bank statement sho…

Post Offices handle a large amount of cash, much more than any other business of their size. Many of the sub-post offices in question would be paying out pensions and welfare benefits in cash to a large proportion of local customers. If someone was stealing from the post office, they could easily do so in cash.

So 500 peiple stole millions and the prosecution cannot show where a single penny went, noone even got a new car or TV? Did they eat the money?

And all the evodence the prosecution has are electronic records, entirely in their control, which they could fake and which were never checked by a third party for basic errors? This is a colossal miscarriage of justice

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

#224

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

jschwartzi wrote: post #153
LatteLazy wrote: post #144

Earlier 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.

They can actually use formal methods to prove that their software is bug free. This technique is often used in safety-critical systems to ensure that they function as-specified. As long as the specification is correct, the software system should perform to specification under all input conditions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_methods We should consider the cost of QA and of engineering process against the cos…

Formal proof of program correctness tends to require that the software's purpose lies in a very narrow, and extremely well-defined problem space. The _Horizon_ software in-question is a general-purpose line-of-business system, which presumably has to react to ever-changing business requirements - that's probably the hardest space to implement formal-methods in - with little benefit for doing-so precisely because requirements change so often.

The places where you do see formal-methods would be in, for example, FADEC for aircraft engines, or an operating system process scheduler.

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

#225

Post by tyingq »

lupire wrote: post #54
tyingq wrote: 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,…

The percentage isn't the problem. The problem is of the settlement amount doesn't include damages and also legal fees, both of which should be the responsibility of the perpetrators.

I found the actual settlement here: https://www.onepostoffice.co.uk/media/47518/20191210-glo-con...

There's obviously a lot of detail there, but it does still feel to me like more than £12M should have gone to the actual post workers. That's ~22k each.

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

#226

Post by giantg2 »

_vertigo wrote: post #203
jonplackett wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These people need to be paid massive compensation for having their lives ruined, paid for by whoever did such a bad job on this system.

It's really not about the bugs. The bugs were unfortunate, but bugs happen. The problem is taking the word of the system at face value and not investigating further even when dozens of people's livelihood and freedom are hanging in the balance. Oh, and also the bit about spending 2 decades covering everything up and trying to clamp down on the investigation rather than admitting you got it wrong, once again at the ex…

"The problem is taking the word of the system at face value and not investigating further even when dozens of people's livelihood and freedom are hanging in the balance."

We do the same thing with breathalyzers in most of the US. No independent people allowed to inspect the system for bugs.

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

#227

Post by dang »

Related articles that submitters and commenters have pointed out:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-56859357 (also from today)

https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252496560/Fujitsu-bosses...

https://www.private-eye.co.uk/pictures/special_reports/justi... [pdf]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/series/m000jf7j [podcast series]

Edit: posted later but might as well add it here:

Convicted Post Office workers have names cleared - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26924882 - April 2021 (152 comments and counting)

Some past related threads - pretty sure there have been others:

UK Post Office: Error-laden software ruined staff lives - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26905528 - April 2021 (3 comments)

UK legal system assumes that computers don't have bugs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25518936 - Dec 2020 (24 comments)

Post Office scandal: Postmasters celebrate victory against convictions - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24661321 - Oct 2020 (2 comments)

Faults in Post Office accounting system led to workers being convicted of theft - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21795219 - Dec 2019 (103 comments)

Post Office hires accountants to review sub-postmasters' computer claims - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4143107 - June 2012 (1 comment)

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

#228

Post by zinok »

lupire wrote: post #207
zinok wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Post Offices handle a large amount of cash, much more than any other business of their size. Many of the sub-post offices in question would be paying out pensions and welfare benefits in cash to a large proportion of local customers. If someone was stealing from the post office, they could easily do so in cash.

It's hard to spend $70K in cash, though.

Perhaps it is, but if there had been credible evidence of a theft 'I would not have been able to spend all that money in cash' is not the basis of a solid defense.

There have been genuine cases where accountants, bank managers, and so on have embezzled large sums of money, including in cash, and spent it all untraceably on things like feeding a gambling addiction.

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

#229

Post by JetSetWilly »

g_p wrote: post #180
JetSetWilly wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's very much a case of assumed infallibility of "scientific evidence," which in this case were computer records. I wonder if any of the prosecuted were in Scotland? In Scots Law there's a fundamental rule of Corroboration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corroboration_in_Scots_law There must be two source of independent evidence for someone to be convicted of a crime. I'll be interested to see (if there's genuinely…

Given this appeal took place in England (and not in the Supreme Court), it was all English verdicts which were overturned as I understand. The requirement for corroboration in such a situation would probably be met by having someone "speak to" the digital evidence and audit trail. For example, if you have CCTV evidence, the CCTV is one piece of evidence, and it would be corroborated by a witness statement of the vict…

Hmn possibly. I suppose I am interested to see if there is a practical difference because there's some debate about whether corroboration is a good thing to have or not, when you can have one piece of evidence (like DNA evidence) which is very high certainty.

I'd expect there was prosecutions north of the border seeing as the post office is UK-wide so be good to see how they went.

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

#230

Post by NovemberWhiskey »

xbar wrote: post #137
lbriner wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a lot of "normal" people like the idea of holding corporates accountable but how would that actually work? The CEO blames one of their directors; the Director blames the supplier; the supplier blames the requirements documentation; the Business Analysts blame the culture for creating confusing and conflicting requirements. Yes, you can hold the organisation accountable but then the people who worked there bac…

Apply the same criminal liability that applies to boards, CFOs and CEOs for financial statements for all other statements?

That's fine, but Sarbanes-Oxley only applies criminal penalties for knowing or willful mis-statements.
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