Fujitsu bugs that sent innocent people to prison were known "from the start" • Hacker News Board

Re: Fujitsu bugs that sent innocent people to prison were known "from the start"

#251

Post by denton-scratch » Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 1:04 PM UTC

helsinkiandrew wrote: post #7

Bugs are inevitable. The real issue is with the post office management that prosecuted people they knew there was a good chance were innocent, withheld evidence, falsified evidence, and harassed journalists investigating. What really bothers me is that the CEO of the Organisation at the time was also a Christian priest/deacon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paula_Vennells > witness statements from Fujitsu staff due to…

> falsified evidence

I haven't heard any testimony that would lead to that conclusion (yet).

There does seem to have been routine falsification of records; "everyone" knew the system was buggy, so there were standard procedures for correcting incorrect records. When those procedures failed, and the records became even more incorrect as a result, PO managers just gave up and blamed the subpostmasters.

Re: Fujitsu bugs that sent innocent people to prison were known "from the start"

#252

Post by denton-scratch » Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 1:21 PM UTC

dumbfounder wrote: post #109

worik wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bugs are inevitable. Yes But accounting software that gets totals wrong is not inevitable Entirely avoidable

And can't the numbers be, I dunno, audited?!!?!!? WTF. Like, did all these numbers just get spit out to a jury and then these people were prosecuted? How in the hell?????

I'm not sure yet, but my impression is that the "Single Source of Truth" was an append-only message-list, written periodically to write-only CD-ROM. This was difficult to query, so extracts were pulled down to an investigator's workstation, to be processed into spreadsheet format, that the prosecutors and auditors could consume.

That conversion to spreadsheet-format was also unreliable, and required human intervention. So the data presented to the court wasn't the raw Single Source of Truth, but rather had been through a dodgy extraction process, in which human error was possible, and which resulted in Excel spreadsheets with hacked macros for "fixing" errors.

Excel itself is not famous for it's reliability and trustworthiness as accounting software.

Re: Fujitsu bugs that sent innocent people to prison were known "from the start"

#253

Post by mananaysiempre » Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 1:25 PM UTC

Eisenstein wrote: post #200

mananaysiempre wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, many others have used the same tactics with civil suits—being stripped of all of one’s money might be marginally better than being put in prison, but I’d argue it’s still on the same spectrum, so it makes for a hell of a lot of leverage. So I don’t think this works as an argument against private prosecutors—it’s rather an argument against a legal system that necessitates ruinously expensive lawyers, which is…

> I mean, many others have used the same tactics with civil suits—being stripped of all of one’s money might be marginally better than being put in prison, but I’d argue it’s still on the same spectrum, so it makes for a hell of a lot of leverage. So if one thing is terrible let's use that to justify something worse?

I’m just not convinced they are different things. Instead, what you’ve said sounds like a general argument against allowing people (and other legal entities) to bring others to court.

Re: Fujitsu bugs that sent innocent people to prison were known "from the start"

#254

Post by graemep » Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 3:00 PM UTC

FerretFred wrote: post #229

chris_wot wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There seemed to be a culture in Fujitsu where incompetent and judgemental people were allowed to rule the roost. The best example of this is the testimony of one Peter Sewell, who never met one of the victims but who, in an email, called him a “nasty chap” and that he was out to “rubbish the FJ name”. You can see how he realises the enormity of his stupidity in testimony and tries to half heartedly defend himself (un…

> There seemed to be a culture in Fujitsu where incompetent and judgemental people were allowed to rule the roost. This also applies to Parliament. They're renowned for it!

There is no better alternative, and at least Parliament operates fairly transparently.

It is the rest of government (civil servants and agencies, as well as politicians) that is the real problem.

Re: Fujitsu bugs that sent innocent people to prison were known "from the start"

#255

Post by graemep » Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 3:05 PM UTC

wonderwonder wrote: post #198

Ichthypresbyter wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lawyer paid by the private party fills the role of the government prosecutor, but the case is heard by the same judge and jury who would hear it in a state prosecution. Until the 1980s this was how almost all criminal prosecutions worked in England, though by the end the "private prosecutor" was usually a police officer.

So a company with money and a good lawyer could really just essentially have you thrown in jail? Seems really not good.

A company or an individual can bring a private prosecute.

They would have to prove the case against you beyond reasonable doubt though.

The real real problem is that the courts (not just in this case) assume computer records are sufficient of guilt without independent verification they are correct. There have been previous HN discussions on the law behind this.

The Crown Prosecution Service can take over a private prosecution and then drop it.

Re: Fujitsu bugs that sent innocent people to prison were known "from the start"

#256

Post by amiga386 » Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 3:06 PM UTC

denton-scratch wrote: post #250

amiga386 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worse than that. Post Office investigators got performance-related bonuses for every successful prosecution. They were chomping at the bit to prosecute anyone who showed the slightest discrepancy, and all their Christmases came at once after Horizon was installed. Moral hazard, cobra effect, if all you have is a hammer, etc. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/01/10/post-office-exec...

To be fair, Sewell (Fujitsu security team manager) was asked about these bonuses, and denied that they related to prosecutions; they were just for doing their job well. To be unfair , the job they were tasked with was providing evidence to support the prosecutions. And Sewell was a strikingly unconvincing witness; "It was 2008. I don't remember." Apparently he remembered almost nothing that might have a bearing on th…

In this case I was talking about the Post Office investigators, not Fujitsu, although it's also very depressing about the Fujitsu side of things.

From the article:

> Mr Thomas, of the Post Office security team, told the inquiry there were “bonus objectives”, including a 40 per cent “loss recovery objective”, available to his team.

> Asked if that influenced his behaviour as an investigator, he said: “I’d probably be lying if I said no because… it was part of the business, the culture of the business of recoveries or even under the terms of a postmaster’s contract with the contracts manager.”

> In an email sent by Mr Thomas in 2021 to Nick Read, the Post Office’s chief executive, and which was disclosed to the inquiry, he wrote: “My yearly objectives that were bonus worthy at the time were based on numbers of successful prosecutions and recovery amounts of money to the business.”

> He also discussed “a proceeds of crime unit within Post Office Ltd that ensured some of these individuals lost their homes and families”.

> Mr Thomas was the lead investigator in the case of sub-postmaster Julian Wilson, who was convicted of false accounting and died of cancer five years before his conviction was overturned.

> Mr Thomas did not include any of the problems Mr Wilson had reported with the Horizon system when writing his report after interviewing him in 2008. Years later, Mr Thomas told a colleague he was “pleased” to have his hands on documents relating to Mr Wilson’s case because he wanted to prove there was “no ‘Case for the Justice of Thieving Subposters’” and that they “were all crooks”.

Re: Fujitsu bugs that sent innocent people to prison were known "from the start"

#257

Post by amiga386 » Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 3:13 PM UTC

heads wrote: post #206

amiga386 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The contract to be an SPM makes you liable for all losses, no matter how they are caused , which includes blatant faults of the accounting/ePOS software. It's the ultimate case of moral hazard. Why fix the broken software if it's only some other sucker who's on the hook for it?

I taught in a private school for a while. In England and Wales the law says that your employment “contract” is simply the verbal, written, or implied agreement to work there and the document enumerating the details — the written statement of employment particulars which is basically the thing you or I would call “the contract” — doesn’t have to be supplied until up to two months after you’ve started work. My employme…

That is pretty awful, and although it's legal to argue over contract terms, including the employer being completely obstinate and your only option being not to agree, you were right not to back down and accept such a one-sided negotiation.

In the case of SPMs, as the Post Office holds all the cards, they can kick out anyone not willing to accept the unfair contract... like the Mr Bates at the centre of it all, who lost his position as SPM after standing his ground and refusing to accept liability for blatantly false losses attributed to his branch by the Horizon software. Not every SPM was lucky enough to be in the same position as him.

Re: Fujitsu bugs that sent innocent people to prison were known "from the start"

#258

Post by Eisenstein » Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 4:10 PM UTC

mananaysiempre wrote: post #253

Eisenstein wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I mean, many others have used the same tactics with civil suits—being stripped of all of one’s money might be marginally better than being put in prison, but I’d argue it’s still on the same spectrum, so it makes for a hell of a lot of leverage. So if one thing is terrible let's use that to justify something worse?

I’m just not convinced they are different things. Instead, what you’ve said sounds like a general argument against allowing people (and other legal entities) to bring others to court.

A prosecutor has broad powers to force a person to defend themselves in court and take a chance that they may lose -- this is incredibly coercive.

You are letting a profit motivated entity hold those powers over its own contractors in order to threaten them with lengthy jail sentences unless they agree to pay back the contested money and plead guilty to a lessor crime (which then makes it impossible to ever assert you were wrongly convicted and shouldn't have to pay).

To add to this, a corporation is does not have a corporeal presence that can be held to account for doing something egregious -- they just get fined and anyone involved almost always says 'I was just doing my job, a cog in the machine' and that's the end of that, whereas if a public prosecutor was extorting the community to pay them large sums of money or face an uncertain trial where they cannot access the evidence needed to prove their innocence, then that prosecutor could be put on trial themselves.

Re: Fujitsu bugs that sent innocent people to prison were known "from the start"

#259

Post by Eisenstein » Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 4:19 PM UTC

graemep wrote: post #255

wonderwonder wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So a company with money and a good lawyer could really just essentially have you thrown in jail? Seems really not good.

A company or an individual can bring a private prosecute. They would have to prove the case against you beyond reasonable doubt though. The real real problem is that the courts (not just in this case) assume computer records are sufficient of guilt without independent verification they are correct. There have been previous HN discussions on the law behind this. The Crown Prosecution Service can take over a private pr…

I don't get trivializing forcing someone to have to stand trial. Have you ever been through the process? I don't know how custody works over there, but in the USA generally when dealing with a criminal proceeding you have to either spend the pre-trial and trial period in jail until you are acquitted or you have put up a bond for release which is a substantial amount of money.

Re: Fujitsu bugs that sent innocent people to prison were known "from the start"

#260

Post by denton-scratch » Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 5:34 PM UTC

amiga386 wrote: post #256

denton-scratch wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, Sewell (Fujitsu security team manager) was asked about these bonuses, and denied that they related to prosecutions; they were just for doing their job well. To be unfair , the job they were tasked with was providing evidence to support the prosecutions. And Sewell was a strikingly unconvincing witness; "It was 2008. I don't remember." Apparently he remembered almost nothing that might have a bearing on th…

In this case I was talking about the Post Office investigators, not Fujitsu, although it's also very depressing about the Fujitsu side of things. From the article: > Mr Thomas, of the Post Office security team, told the inquiry there were “bonus objectives”, including a 40 per cent “loss recovery objective”, available to his team. > Asked if that influenced his behaviour as an investigator, he said: “I’d probably be…

I haven't seen that session. I guess I'll dig it out and watch.