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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’

#31
post #4

An (IMO) Interesting question is how to reduce the risks of things like this happening. Where evidence from IT systems is being used as a large part of a prosecution, it seems that it should have some kind of scrutiny as to how those systems operate. One option would be allowing the defence to see details of how the system works, testing that was done and known bugs, but that would require a lot of expensive work by…

> An (IMO) Interesting question is how to reduce the risks of things like this happening.

I look forward to finding out if this was a “fraud system gone wrong” or a more basic ledger system failing to do sums correctly.

Partially addressing your question though, if you were to insert the words “AI” and “bias” into the sentence we as an industry are starting to figure this out. The certification and testing processes you mentioned are there in cases where a team’s mature enough to have both a data and model lifecycle worked out. You see words like MLOps trying to describe how to do that effectively in production.

For example, my work has both a design approach (in both the product design touchy/feely sense and software architecture sense) that includes questions and practices that will help to reason through data needed to address a problem, what can go wrong with that, and how things look when it goes wrong. The last bit is the most interesting one to me. In terms of practical engineering, inference results generally should have some sense of lineage - of data, model, and training services which explain how you got to a given answer, including what inputs were considered or ignored.

An interesting side topic with this is that poor implementations can result in inexcusable differences that affect downstream systems. For example, if a particular model has predicted something like “this transaction is suspected to be fraud” it better be consistent from run to run, and the input data better be consistent over time. If either of those changed - explaining that to the consumers of the data is essential to them understanding that either the model changed, the data changed, or both.

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

#33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>considering what exactly is the likelihood of hundreds of postmasters simultaneously becoming thieves overnight I mean, I don't think anyone assumed they suddenly and inexplicably became thieves, just that the fancy new software finally caught people who have been scamming the post office for years. Obviously the software was completely wrong and it's criminal what happened to those people.

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?

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

#34

A lesson to test your code and take action based on costumer feedback. I’m curious to learn what was Fujitsu’s position during those investigations.

Not sure I'd take action based on what someone who makes fancy dress/theatrical clothes suggests tbh.

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

#35
Software is in the walls. At some point legislators are going to come and ask the question how we stop things like this happening and if the Fujitsu's of the world don't have an answer then we can expect regulation that will likely embed practices that don't help.

I don't think we take software reliability seriously enough, most of our focus is on speed of release, ever quicker cycles and it being OK to break things. This culture ruined these peoples lives. Things must change. This isn't a unique issue to Fujitsu it is something most of the software industry is doing, this story could be about just about any piece of software.

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

#37

Software is in the walls. At some point legislators are going to come and ask the question how we stop things like this happening and if the Fujitsu's of the world don't have an answer then we can expect regulation that will likely embed practices that don't help. I don't think we take software reliability seriously enough, most of our focus is on speed of release, ever quicker cycles and it being OK to break things.…

> I don't think we take software reliability seriously enough, most of our focus is on speed of release, ever quicker cycles and it being OK to break things.

The phrase "move fast and break things" should be seen as cautionary, not aspirational.

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

#39
Private Eye magazine (a satirical investigative news magazine) has covered this for many years, and have an excellent report for anyone interested: https://www.private-eye.co.uk/pictures/special_reports/justi... [PDF]

Glad to see them finally have their names cleared, and can only hope prosecutions will follow as a result, utterly shameful how the Post Office, Fujitsu and others behaved. For example:

> A Fujitsu programmer from the time, Richard Roll, who would become a key witness in the sub-postmasters’ high court case against the Post Office in 2019, told the Eye that Horizon was one the company’s few profitable contracts. Among other private sector deals, it was also lining up a key role in the mother of all government IT splurges, New Labour’s £12bn NHS IT project (Eyes passim ad nauseam). Fujitsu could ill-afford either bad publicity or the penalties that came with software faults. “We would have been fined,” said Roll, who worked at the company between 2001 and 2004. “So the incentive was to pretend it [software error] didn’t happen”, while running “a constant rolling programme of patches to fix the bugs”. Fujitsu “would basically tell the Post Office what they wanted to hear”. So prolific did Roll’s bug-fixing team become it won the company’s President’s Award for outstanding corporate contribution in 2002. And the quick-fix, ask-no-questions approach that suited Fujitsu financially enabled the Post Office to hold the line that blame for all branch shortfalls must lie with the sub-postmaster.The Fujitsu insider concluded that errors leaving sub-postmasters out of pocket were inevitable. Could that mean hundreds of them? “Given there were [about] 20,000 post offices when I was at Fujitsu and the sort of problems we were dealing with all the time, yeah,” he told the Eye. “Sounds reasonable.”

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

#40

Software is in the walls. At some point legislators are going to come and ask the question how we stop things like this happening and if the Fujitsu's of the world don't have an answer then we can expect regulation that will likely embed practices that don't help. I don't think we take software reliability seriously enough, most of our focus is on speed of release, ever quicker cycles and it being OK to break things.…

I still think https://xkcd.com/2030/ has to be taken seriously. You can put a whole load of verification effort into your software, which will undoubtedly make it more reliable. But you are still likely to have some kind of corner case where it breaks down. Software is complex enough for this to be universally true.

The key is how we respond when the software fails. The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25 case shows an example of what not to do - when hospitals started reporting their machines giving lethal radiation doses to people, the manufacturer doubled down on the computers-are-infallible rhetoric, where they should have put every last effort into investigating. Likewise, the post office should have noticed that a rather excessive number of postmasters were apparently fiddling the books, and investigated. Instead, after it was fairly obvious that the computer was wrong, they pushed the computers-are-infallible line right through the courts, and that is what earned them the "affront to justice" judgment.

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