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British Post Office Scandal

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Re: British Post Office Scandal

#121

Post by Karellen »

phkahler wrote: post #99

So.... In a lot of these cases the system wrongly reported money missing at these lower levels. It seems these numbers should have rolled up into sums at a higher level that also showed losses and they prosecuted people. But the money was never actually missing so where did it go? Hmmm?

Surely the "missing" money was never there in the first place?

If a Post Office had £20,000 in takings on a day, but the buggy system reported takings of £30,000, then that's £10,000 of money reported missing, which the postmasters were prosecuted for stealing.

But that £10,000 didn't "go" anywhere. It never existed.

Re: British Post Office Scandal

#122

Post by hermitcrab »

TechnicalVault wrote: post #80
abigail95 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

>Parliament can pass a law that the colour orange is now legally the new black.

Or that Rwanda is a safe country for migrants?

Re: British Post Office Scandal

#123

Post by raminf »

minimaul wrote: post #53
walthamstow wrote: post #6

Britons - this is your reminder that Private Eye is available for subscription at the very low price of £45 for an issue in your letterbox fortnightly.

I wish Ian Hislop would drop his opposition to doing a sensible online version - I'd happily subscribe for access to the same content posted online, but when I get it posted through my door I find I don't read it.

FWIW, just started a digital subscription ro PrivateEye via PocketMags. It's essentially a PDF of the magazine inside a basic reader (i.e. lots of zooming and scrolling). In the U.S. it runs $6/month.

Re: British Post Office Scandal

#125

Post by hermitcrab »

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 is an excellent Computerphile video discussing some of the issues in the Horizons software system at the heart of this scandal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBJm9ZYqL10

Re: British Post Office Scandal

#126

Post by hermitcrab »

Fujitsu’s non-executive chairman until 2019, Simon Blagden has donated £376,000 to the Conservative party.

"Despite Fujitsu suing the Government over its failed NHS IT project on his watch, Mr Blagden, who was said to have dined regularly with PM Theresa May, was awarded a CBE in 2016 for services to the economy."

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/fujitsu-exposed-real-...

Re: British Post Office Scandal

#127

Post by hermitcrab »

anentropic wrote: post #17
hashtag-til wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was curious for the same, and ended up reading this - https://em360tech.com/tech-article/post-office-scandal It seems like the classical mega-corp system issues: "These flaws included rounding errors, data corruption, and issues with synchronization between local and central databases."

I was listening to a programme about this on Radio 4 last night it seems like, on top of the buggy software, Fujitsu had contractors logging in to Post Office systems to manually 'fix' accounting errors the buggy software had produced one of them described how while they were logged in to the POS system it would appear to be working to the real user but would actually be doing nothing because it was in some kind of r…

Apparently Fujitsu could log in and change the live data on a subpostmaster's system remotely and they frequently did this to make corrections. However it looked as if the subpostmaster had made the change. There was no proper audit log. However the subpostmasters were told remote access was impossible and any errors were 100% their fault.

The wrong people went to prison.

All the existing convictions must be considered unsafe.

Re: British Post Office Scandal

#128

Post by hermitcrab »

ChrisKnott wrote: post #5
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.

I felt exactly the same. I read some of the original Second Sight reports and I very much got the impression that the issues were quite broad and related to inadequate training, poor/confusing UI etc. There isn't, as far as I can tell, a single interesting "bug" that was causing incorrect figures to be saved in a database, which is the impression you get from skimming the coverage.

My father was interviewed for a potential job as trainer for the Horizons system many years ago. He was horrified by the attitude of the company running the training. Thankfully he didn't get the job.

Re: British Post Office Scandal

#129

Post by hermitcrab »

csan wrote: post #89
toyg wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Agreed, these broken software systems are a symptom and cannot be treated solely as a technical problem to be fixed in isolation. HMCTS is spending ~50 - 100x the amount required (on private consultants) to create these broken IT systems whilst other parts of the justice system are starved of resources. A radical change in culture and leadership is required.

I understand the UK vaccination IT system (not track and trace!) was created by a small team and worked very well.

Re: British Post Office Scandal

#130

Post by Karellen »

razakel wrote: post #104
shrikant wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

The difference being we decided that being gay shouldn't be a crime and never should have been. Defrauding public institutions is quite a different kettle of fish. There will be people convicted who really did have their hands in the till.

> There will be people convicted who really did have their hands in the till.

Maybe, but if any of the evidence used to convict them came from the Horizon system, which has been proven to be flawed and unreliable, then IMO the verdict is still unsupportable. If there is any reason to suspect someone of actually having their hands in the till over the Horizon period, I would still be entirely in favour of requiring that they be immediately set free, and for prosecutors to have to bring an entirely new trial, from scratch. And any jail time resulting from new guilty verdicts to be reduced by time served from the original conviction.

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