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British Post Office Scandal

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Re: British Post Office Scandal

#71

Post by nness »

jl6 wrote: post #63

This thing has layers. It's scandalous that a £billion computer system had basic accounting errors. It's scandalous that Fujitsu pressured the government to accept the system, and scandalous that the government gave in to this pressure. It's scandalous how the private prosecution hid evidence. It's scandalous how long it takes the courts to rectify miscarriages of justice. It's scandalous that it took a popular TV sh…

The cynic in me says that the Government only took notice to shift the narrative from the fact that they've pushed the election until later in the year, when everyone expected it to be in May (where it was predicted that they would meet a resounding defeated.)

I'm glad the victims are getting justice, but I hate that it might only have gotten this level of scrutiny because it's a fight that makes the Government look responsible...

Re: British Post Office Scandal

#72

Post by zarkowsky »

I always used to wonder why the folks at the cash register always make it a point to print the transaction slip in the pos machine and securing the paper in their drawers, when everything's recorded electronically already.

Not any more.

Re: British Post Office Scandal

#73

Post by [deleted] »

shrikant wrote: post #39
HatchedLake721 wrote: post #26

BBC explains why it’s hard to overturn the convictions: The scale of the Post Office scandal means that there are no easy and quick solutions for the government. Ministers could advise the King to grant Royal Pardons, once reserved for the condemned as they faced the gallows. But these would be largely symbolic acts because the government can't, at the stroke of a pen, quash a conviction. That’s because the courts ar…

If the government could find a way to make it work for the homosexual activity convictions, I'm sure they can find a way for this miscarriage of justice as well. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/04/past-convictio...

[deleted]

Re: British Post Office Scandal

#74

Post by switch007 »

mjburgess wrote: post #30

To clarify how this happened: in the UK anyone can bring a private prosecution where they effectively act as the prosecutor . This is usually used by charities who take on laws to prosecute (eg., crimes against animals). Here the post office used the law to prosecute its own staff in alleged crimes against the post office . So they were both the prosecutor and the victim. This gave them overwhelming incentives not to…

Private prosecutions are also common in the railways in England

There are also some parallels with one of the Government's train companies, Northern, who use similar scare tactics as the Post Office with threats of court action and some rail enthusiasts/experts have called their tactics "extortion" [0]

(Northern is directly owned and operated by the Government. So they may flap and act indignant about the Post Office, but that makes them hypocrites.)

[0] A thread on railway private prosecutions in light of the Post Office Scandal: https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/should-the-railways-pow...

Re: British Post Office Scandal

#75

Post by NolF »

zzbn00 wrote: post #55
mjburgess wrote: post #30

To clarify how this happened: in the UK anyone can bring a private prosecution where they effectively act as the prosecutor . This is usually used by charities who take on laws to prosecute (eg., crimes against animals). Here the post office used the law to prosecute its own staff in alleged crimes against the post office . So they were both the prosecutor and the victim. This gave them overwhelming incentives not to…

Private prosecutions like this are specific to England & Wales (Scotland has a separate legal system where I believe they are extremely rare; Northern Ireland is also a separate legal system). While the incentives are not to reveal evidence the law is absolutely clear that all evidence identified must be revealed. The difficulty is that forcing and unlimited discovery to identify the evidence would break the whole le…

The Courts already have mechanisms to limit "unlimited" subpoenas or requests for discovery. Requests for the software source code or similar, bug reports, and other reports of issues are or would largely not be unreasonable where the key issue is reported thievery, fraud, and mismatched data based on software as the basis for the allegations and prosecution.

Re: British Post Office Scandal

#76

Post by zabil »

I'm following this from the UK. I watched the first episode of "Bates vs Post Office". It's interesting to see that the Horizon system, set up in 1999, was a client-server model with a box in each post office syncing with a central server. I'm surprised they thought this would work back then, given the challenges like network problems, failures and backup and the sheer volume of data. To me, it seems like the technology wasn't available back then. They had a big idea for a paperless system, and the tech team scrambled to build something without checking feasibility.

Re: British Post Office Scandal

#77

Post by makomk »

prof-dr-ir wrote: post #36
HatchedLake721 wrote: post #26

BBC explains why it’s hard to overturn the convictions: The scale of the Post Office scandal means that there are no easy and quick solutions for the government. Ministers could advise the King to grant Royal Pardons, once reserved for the condemned as they faced the gallows. But these would be largely symbolic acts because the government can't, at the stroke of a pen, quash a conviction. That’s because the courts ar…

This explanation may be correct but happens to also fit the pattern of the BBC carrying, perhaps unintentionally, the water for the government. The more important factoid is that, until the renewed outrage this week, no one in the current UK government was seriously pushing to fix anything whatsoever.

One of the big problems with British politics at the moment is that lots of people seem to think that if the BBC is less willing to pretend there are easy solutions with no downsides the government is ignoring than other parts of the media this is seen as them being in the government's pocket. Which isn't the same as not willing at all, they pretty systematically focus only on the downsides of government policies already - one of the examples that made HN was the UK Covid app, where the BBC treated using Google and Apple's framework as obviously better right up until the point the government launched a new app that did, when they immediately switched and focused only on the advantages of the old app due to it not doing so. They just don't do this as consistently as some other outlets.

That is, the minimum standard they need to meet in order not to be perceived as carrying water for the government is not just lying and misleading the public in order to get the ruling party kicked out, but doing so as aggressively and shamelessly as the most aggressive and shameless of their competitors (which includes social media to some extent).

Re: British Post Office Scandal

#78

Post by toyg »

csan wrote: post #66

Further IT related miscarriages of justice are a likely consequence of the recent 'digital transformation' of the UK's courts service - see https://csan149.substack.com/p/justice-at-risk The case management software now used within the justice system itself is deeply flawed and poses a risk to large numbers of cases including child protection, benefit appeals, divorce and probate.

I wish that were the only cause of miscarriages of justice in the UK... The whole British justice system is now beyond farcical. A quick read of The Secret Barrister [1] will leave one despairing for the state of the country.

[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Secret-Barrister-Stories-Law-Broken...

Re: British Post Office Scandal

#79

Post by throwaway167 »

ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #16
sdflhasjd wrote: post #3

Is there any actual technical report of what's wrong with the Horizon system? This feels like a weirdly long Wikipedia article that only touches on legal points and that somewhat lacks in real substance.

There's some more detail here: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/jan/09/how-the-post... It only mentions a few bugs out of the hundreds that were discovered (a full list hasn't been published), but it appears that the bugs weren't the only issue: > In 2015, for instance, the Post Office told the House of Commons inquiry: “There is no functionality in Horizon for either a branch, Post Office or Fujitsu to edit,…

> In fact, staff at Fujitsu, which made and operated the Horizon system, were capable of remotely accessing branch accounts, and had “unrestricted and unaudited” access to those systems

I worked in core banking systems for a bit. This is beyond basic, it demonstrates Fujitsu do not have controls in place to design compliant systems. Fujitsu should forever have their reputation tarnished and never let near financial systems. I don't often advocate selling a business to Tata, but this might be one of those times.

Re: British Post Office Scandal

#80

Post by TechnicalVault »

abigail95 wrote: post #50
HatchedLake721 wrote: post #26

BBC explains why it’s hard to overturn the convictions: The scale of the Post Office scandal means that there are no easy and quick solutions for the government. Ministers could advise the King to grant Royal Pardons, once reserved for the condemned as they faced the gallows. But these would be largely symbolic acts because the government can't, at the stroke of a pen, quash a conviction. That’s because the courts ar…

Why does an appeal require government support? There's no way reasonable doubt remains, what is the legal barrier that an appeal court is trying to deal with? > But these would be largely symbolic acts because the government can't, at the stroke of a pen, quash a conviction This is untrue. Judges may not like it but I don't really care. The parliament is legally soverign and the courts are subservient to interpret an…

Indeed, the quirk of the Westminster system is that parliament can indeed legislate whatever it likes. Parliament can pass a law that the colour orange is now legally the new black.

There is however one detail, what is passed must be internally consistent with other legislation otherwise it will fall at Judicial Review. For example if you want to pass legislation that contravenes the UK's Human Rights Act, you need to include a "notwithstanding" clause to show the courts you intended to override that law.

They could pass a bill to vacate these convictions quite easily but unlike the Buggery Act and Offences Against the Person Act 1828, they still want to be able to prosecute and protect the convictions of a subset of these people who actually did commit false accounting so the legislation is going to need to be more complex.

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