At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says

To the NY Times: please don't say they died by suicide. The passive voice makes it sound like some act of God, something regrettable but unavoidable that just somehow happened. It's important not to sugarcoat what happened: the postmasters killed themselves because the British state was imprisoning them for crimes they didn't commit, based on evidence from a buggy financial accounting system. Don't blur the details of what happened by making it sound like a natural disaster.

Horizon is the case that should replace Therac-25 as a study in what can go wrong if software developers screw up. Therac-25 injured/killed six people, Horizon has ruined hundreds of lives and ended dozens. And the horrifying thing is, Horizon wasn't something anyone would have previously identified as safety-critical software. It was just an ordinary point-of-sale and accounting system. The suicides weren't directly caused by the software, but from an out of control justice and social system in which people blindly believed in public institutions that were actually engaged in a massive deep state cover-up.

It is reasonable to blame the suicides on the legal and political system that allowed the Post Office to act in that way, and which put such low quality people in charge. Perhaps also on the software engineer who testified repeatedly under oath that the system worked fine, even as the bug tracker filled up with cases where it didn't. But this is HN, so from a software engineering perspective what can be learned?

Some glitches were of their time and wouldn't occur these days, e.g. malfunctions in resistive touch screens that caused random clicks on POS screens to occur overnight. But most were bugs due to loss of transactionality or lack of proper auditing controls. Think message replays lacking proper idempotency, things like that. Transactions were logged that never really occurred, and when the cash was counted some appeared to be missing, so the Post Office accused the postmasters of stealing from the business. They hadn't done so, but this took place over decades, and decades ago people had more faith in institutions than they do now. And these post offices were often in small villages where the post office was the center of the community, so the false allegations against postmasters were devastating to their social and business lives.

Put simply - check your transactions! And make sure developers can't rewrite databases in prod.

"The passive voice makes it sound like some act of God, something regrettable but unavoidable that just somehow happened. "

That's a really odd take.

I don't think the NY Times reads HN comments.

> odd take

It's not odd when the sentiment is widespread, for example, look at the other comments in this thread that talk about it.

>if software developers screw up

Well, yes, they did screw up, but the fallout was amplified 100x by bad management.

It's not that odd - it's simply pointing out that phrasing can and does play a rather large role in how we internalize and react to news.

It was an extremely common criticism of the passive voice. Yours is the weird take.

> please don't say they died by suicide

I encourage you to read the current thinking on this evolving language, which offers some explanation as to why we're moving away from damaging language like "committing" suicide.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_terminology#%22Committ... https://www.iasp.info/languageguidelines/

"died by suicide" is just a modern replacement for "committed suicide", because that phrase dates back to when it was a crime, so it's regarded as making the victim look bad.

"The Horizon IT system contained "hundreds" of bugs[0]."

If your accounting software has hundreds of bugs then you are really in the deep shit.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal#:~...

I say this as someone whose father killed himself when I was in 5th grade:

The "victims" who suffer after a suicide are the living, not the dead. These kinds of "modernizations" are transparent PC nonsense made up by well-intentioned do-gooders who have no idea how to represent the interests of other people who have a lived experience that they don't understand.

The person is dead either way. There's literally no way to sugarcoat this fact. We'd rather you just speak in plain, honest language than trying to make it sound less bad somehow.

Well not really, no one should be committing suicide due to a buggy system. If you know the details of the case it was widespread but the post office decided to gaslight everyone and put people in debt and prison. That’s what caused this, the bugs were just a catalyst for shitty humans to do shitty things

For context: Suicide was a crime in the United Kingdom until 1961.

* https://legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Eliz2/9-10/60/contents

* https://bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14374296

That's a really hard thing to go through. I'm sorry you had to bear that as a fifth grader.

It's possible that both you and your dad are victims in different ways.

Yea management failed but wouldn't the most logical thing be to call in computer forensics experts and quality test the software, reverse engineering it and try to catch the bugs. This wasn't the classic case of financial fraud, this was all about faulty software.

While there is no real doubt that most, if not all, of these suicides were a direct consequence of the appalling way this monumental failure and its investigation was handled, reporting the news responsibly has become a minefield in which any deviation from what is strictly known is liable to be exploited by those who do not want their role in events to become public.

As you want to call a spade a spade, can we agree that the software engineer who testified repeatedly under oath that the system worked fine, even as the bug tracker filled up with cases where it didn't, is undoubtedly among those who are morally (if not legally) culpable to a considerable extent?

What makes “committed suicide” any more plain or honest than “died by suicide”?

But it was the decision to gaslight and charge the postmasters with crimes that caused the suicides, not the bugs in the code. If they had just admitted that the accounting issues were due to bugs in the system then I really doubt anyone would have committed suicide.

The Post Office management knew about the bugs but didn't want to take the blame for the accounting issues they caused (since it was management that purchased and approved the software some blame would have fallen on them).

I don't have a big issue with that particular phrase itself. Although the passive voice is designed to conceal or obscure the actor, which doesn't accomplish anything here. Attributing a suicide to anyone other than the actor starts to appear oxymoronic very quickly. Yes life is complex and whatnot -- that's a given, we don't need a reminder every time anything happens.

But really it's the transparent and ham-handed attempts by some others to smooth over the sharp edges of reality merely by re-phrasing how things are written.

People generally don't want pity, but these re-phrasings accomplish nothing other than to make clear that one person feels sorry for another.

I think they are saying that the current title ("people died ... amid scandal") muddies the water when it comes to the causal relation, arguably "people were led to suicide by baseless accusations" _might_ be a more faithful descriptor of who's at fault here, but I understand journalists don't want to risk being sued (and neither do I, hence my use of _might_)

Fujitsu was all to blame, after all they created and maintained the software. It just blows my mind why would courts pursue the individuals and not the creator of the software, when they realized that this mess was widespread and not isolated.

Oh, well if everyone else is parroting it, then it must be correct.

I suspect the point was that they were driven to suicide. As in pushed into a corner by external, human forces.

Because the latter implies some external attribute to it?

I hope you see the irony of “ everyone else is parroting it, then it must be correct”.

It assigns agency to the person who died.

Think about it this way: I have relative who is vegan, so she has been trying to convince me to kill myself for many years now.

I can still choose whether I do it though, and obviously I chose not to so far, although during COVID I didn’t have much other social interaction, so I nearly went through with it.

I had agency throughout though. I’m not dead because I chose not to go through with it.

That’s the difference.

> Perhaps also on the software engineer who testified repeatedly under oath that the system worked fine, even as the bug tracker filled up with cases where it didn't

I don't think you needed to ask for agreement.

"damaging", in no quantifiable way whatsoever. It's just the euphemism treadmill at work, nothing more.

> To the NY Times: please don't say they died by suicide. The passive voice

“X died by suicide” is a sentence in the active voice. “Die” is an intransitive verb and cannot be passivized in English.

So long as the jury understands this, it's all fine.

If you're on trial for doing X and your jury is told by a prosecution witness "mrkramer did X" and under cross they admit that's based on computer records which are often bogus, inconsistent, total nonsense, it doesn't take the world's best defence lawyer to secure an "innocent" verdict. That's not a fun experience, but it probably won't drive you to suicide.

One of the many interlocking failures here is that the Post Office, historically a government function, was allowed to prosecute people.

Suppose I work not for the Post Office (by this point a private company which is just owned in full by the government) but for say, an Asda, next door. I'm the most senior member of staff on weekends, so I have keys, I accept deliveries, all that stuff. Asda's crap computer system says I accepted £25000 of Amazon Gift Cards which it says came on a truck from the depot on Saturday. I never saw them, I deny it, there are no Gift Cards in stock at our store.

Asda can't prosecute me. They could try to sue, but more likely they'd call the police. If the police think I stole these Amazon cards, they give the file to a Crown Prosecutor, who works for the government to prosecute criminals. They don't work for Asda and they're looking at a bunch of "tests" which decide whether it makes sense to prosecute people.

https://www.cps.gov.uk/about-cps/how-we-make-our-decisions

But because the Sub-postmasters worked under contract to the Post Office, it could and did in many cases just prosecute them, it was empowered to do that. That's an obvious mistake, in many of these cases if you show a copper, let alone a CPS lawyer your laughable "case" that although this buggy garbage is often wrong you think there's signs of theft, they'll tell you that you can't imprison people on this basis, piss off.

A worse failure is that Post Office people were allowed to lie to a court about how reliable this information was, and indeed they repeatedly lied in later cases where it's directly about the earlier lying. That's the point where it undoubtedly goes from "Why were supposedly incompetent morons given this important job?" where maybe they're morons or maybe they're liars, to "Lying to a court is wrong, send them to jail".

Except colloquially no one today thinks the word has any bearing on whether the victim looks bad. It just means they're responsible for the act.

I guess some people take comfort in the idea that suicide is thrust on people and they take no responsibility for their actions.

> Yea management failed but wouldn't the most logical thing be to call in computer forensics experts

Yea and who is responsible for engaging them?

I meant courts should've called in multiple expert witnesses and even computer forensics companies. This case looks like government or in this case courts colluded with British Post Office.

> Some glitches were of their time and wouldn't occur these days, e.g. malfunctions in resistive touch screens that caused random clicks on POS screens to occur overnight.

These still occur on modern touchscreen laptops (work-provided Dell Latitude 7450 and mandated to use Windows with a lot of restrictions). It's not an everyday issue, but a once a month one.

Other than that, completely agree with your assessment: the ruining of those lives was a completely avoidable tragedy that was grossly mishandled.

This seems to be a common topic in the current pendulum swing.

Where are you getting the idea that anyone suggested this?

At any rate, it was the persecuted postal workers who committed suicide, not the software developers.

I meant top management is in deep shit if their finical departments run low quality buggy accounting software not the staff. Or in this case post office branches run the buggy software. All in all, decentralized nature of post office system was the thing that drove everything to this madness.

> massive deep state cover-up

Let’s not use conspiracy-theory language.

It was a coverup by Fujitsu and The Post Office.

MPs and ministers (part of the state) used their parliamentary privilege to expose it after the campaign by the postmasters brought the issue to light.

No ‘deep state’ conspiracy, it’s just an arse covering cover-up (pared with outright incompetence) which had particularly devastating consequences.

For what it's worth, I agree. It never crossed my mind that the phrasing could lead anyone to believe the suicides were "unavoidable" or an "act of God", especially when the title clearly ties the suicides to a causation.

The phrasing could be made more accusatory, but I don't think that's inherently better.

because UK law says (said?) the computer can't be wrong

and the post office management had no interest in proving otherwise

they should be going after the management

I would say it's not the treadmill at work in this case. It's not simply a replacement.

The article linked by the parent comment explains it well and references plenty of considered material. But the tldr is that committing suicide aligns with an active criminal/immoral act, while dying by suicide is a factual cause of death with many possible causes.

Consider how people would like your death, or the death of a loved one, described by others. And if you can't, maybe consider how others might be affected.

"Deep state" is, or at least to be, a perfectly respectable political term for bodies that retain power across changing governments.

> please don't say they died by suicide. The passive voice makes it sound like some act of God, something regrettable but unavoidable that just somehow happened.

I mean, common. Everyone knows what suicide is or means. No, it does not make it sound like an act of God for anyone who is above A1 level of English.

This is not at all what happened or what anyone suggested, yikes.

It’s still suicide. The wrongfully imprisoned can be acquitted. That’s part of the argument against the death penalty: if justice is imperfect then don’t take actions that are permanent. You can’t classify every instance of miscarriage of justice as state murder. I really don’t see the issue you’re trying to raise. It’s more problematic to invent new language because it feels yucky than to be precise and accurate in our reporting.

No question, they should be tried for corporate manslaughter and criminal enterprise for the cover up along with all their management. They should all be serving very long sentences, they killed many people with their lies.

Or in other words: the state. No ‘deep’ needed unless you’re trying to be emotive. Fujitsu is not part of the state and although the Post Office is owned by the state, it’s a stand-alone company.

> “Perfectly respectable”

Maybe in some fringe circles, but this term is certainly attached to a huge amount extreme propaganda and conspiracy that attempts to undermine western democracy and institutions.

The post office is a quasi quango, they are technically private but they maintain state functions like the ability to prosecute their post masters. So despite its private ownership it is a partially a state body and in the way in which it caused these deaths its the state quasi quango function that did it.

edit: lol wut? The more I think about this the less it makes sense. The stigma of suicide is from the societal attitude that it's wrong and you should never do it. Using a verb isn't the bit that tells everyone it is wrong. If you want to remove the stigma take away all the signs for 998 and perfunctory statements that help is available, and replace them all with "do it. no balls, do it."

Isn't the stigma desired anyway? It keeps people from going through with it. That's why society deliberately creates and actively cultivates the stigma.

I doubt removing "committed" removes any stigma to seek help. What sucks about suicidality is that everyone is so sterile about it. Removing the word is more of that. IMO the sterility discourages the not-yet-at-rock-bottom suicidal from reaching out.

My pre-edit comment was that just about sterility and linking to: "Envying the dead: SkyKing in memoriam" https://eggreport.substack.com/p/rehosting-envying-the-dead-...

> Although the passive voice is designed to conceal or obscure the actor, which doesn't accomplish anything here.

No, passive voice is not in general designed to conceal or obscure the actor. Especially not in the sentence here.

There were valid similar complains about crime reporting. But the language there was different. The sentence "The innocent McKay family was inadvertently affected by this enforcement operation" is trying to hide culpability. We can discuss that. These two are incomparable:

- A deputy-involved shooting occurred. (Ok, we are avoiding the actor. We do not know who was shooting.)

- A person died by Suicide. (Clear to anyone who done what.)

The horizon post office scandal is the first thing I taught in my "database design" course, to show that we're not creating self-serving academic exercises. We are creating systems that affect people's lives.

I try to give the legal and ethical perspectives. These systems should be auditable and help and not hurt people.

UK law said that there was a presumption that computer systems were working correctly unless there was evidence to the contrary. That’s not inherently nuts. It makes roughly as much sense as assuming that, say, a dishwasher is in working order unless there’s evidence to the contrary. This presumption in and of itself could just as well aid a person’s defense as hinder it (e.g. if they have an alibi based on computer records).

In this case it should have been very easy to provide evidence to override the presumption that the Horizon system was working correctly. That this didn’t happen seems to have resulted from a combination of bad lawyering and shameless mendacity on the part of Fujitsu and the Post Office.

Don’t get me wrong — the whole thing is a giant scandal. I’m just not sure if this particular presumption of UK law is the appropriate scapegoat.

Not arguing against that at all. It is a function of the state. My issue was purely about the emotive language of “deep state”, which is used (in my experience) to delegitimise all aspects of the state.

The legacy of the Post Office having prosecution powers was clearly a big part of the problem.

We are incapable of returning life-time taken. False imprisonment is still racking up centimorts instead of delivering 1 mort.

I don't think they're arguing that the headline should be "13 UK postmasters murdered by the state", just that the extremely passive "died by suicide" lacks context and largely leaves out the UK Post Office's role in their death. I think they would prefer some thing along the lines of "At Least 13 People Killed Themselves After False Accusations From U.K. Post Office, Report Says".

> If you're on trial for doing X and your jury is told by a prosecution witness "mrkramer did X" and under cross they admit that's based on computer records which are often bogus, inconsistent, total nonsense, it doesn't take the world's best defence lawyer to secure an "innocent" verdict. That's not a fun experience, but it probably won't drive you to suicide.

I imagine digital records are involved in nearly every trial at this point. Good luck getting this point admitted by the justice system.

I know the term "deep state" is now extremely political and you've only heard it in the context of conspiracy theorists but it's a real term that is completely appropriate here.

>UK law said that there was a presumption that computer systems were working correctly unless there was evidence to the contrary.

Defense had to prove that only one Horizon/Fujitsu accounting software was buggy and the whole prosecution falls apart e.g. If John's Horizon/Fujitsu accounting software has bugs then Peter's Horizon/Fujitsu accounting software most probably has bugs too.

You should probably just state what your opinion on it is, instead of bouncing between different complaints.

> You can’t classify every instance of miscarriage of justice as state murder.

It's literally what we call it in Norway. In English it's compared to miscarriage (i.e. spontaneous abortion), "miscarriage of justice". Here we call it murder of justice (justismord), whether anyone actually died or not.

I do think it gets the seriousness across, and the focus on it as a deliberate act, rather than an accident as in English. Some people actually made a deliberate act to let innocent people take the blame.

> Asda can't prosecute me.

They can, actually. Anyone in the UK can launch a private prosecution. It's rare because it's expensive and the CPS can (and often do) take over any private prosecution then drop it.

Nevertheless, the power exists and has been intentionally protected by parliament. I think most would agree it needs reform, however.

There is no "deep state", just the state. Calling things "the deep state" tries to partition the state in two parts, a good one and a bad one.

There is also no "deep Amazon" or "deep Meta". Amazon is Amazon, Meta is Meta and the state is the state. People working for or representing the state have their own agenda, have their cliques, have their CYA like people everywhere else. And the state as an organization prioritizes survival and self defense above all other goals it might have.

In principle, yes. It may be that the bar was set too high and that there needs to be some clarification of exactly what the presumption means.

I’d argue that some kind of weak presumption along these lines clearly makes sense and is probably universal across legal systems. For example, suppose the police find that X has an incriminating email from Y after searching X’s laptop. Are they required to prove that GMail doesn’t have a bug causing it to corrupt email contents or send emails to the wrong recipients? Presumably not.

The suicide victims weren't programmers, they were postmasters, who had been falsely accused of fraud by the software.

The point, I think, is that that The Post Office acted like part of the state, notably in that they acted like an unconstrained branch of the CPS in bringing prosecutions against thousands of people.

> Maybe in some fringe circles

I would say the fringe circles co-opted it over the last couple of decades, and the term's obviously become heavily associated with them in some people's minds (eg. yours). But it's an older term than that.

Edit: Why would the loons have adopted it, if it was such a disreputable term?

It's worse than that - in UK law you cannot question the evidence produced by a computer unless you can prove the computer is not operating correctly - it's an inversion of the normal burden of proof.

They've started the process of thinking about if that law makes sense given this case: https://www.gov.uk/government/calls-for-evidence/use-of-evid...

Fair. I use the term to refer to the parts of the state that are somehow buried deep, beyond most people's awareness. In this case the problems started with a government contractor, and were then covered up by people inside the post office. It wasn't a top-down conspiracy of politicians, or of civil servants following their orders.

It's quite possible he will end up going to prison, and absolutely, that would be the right outcome. It's hard to know what was going through his mind as he made that decision.

> The point, I think, is that that The Post Office acted like part of the state

I agree. The are part of the state. They are a standalone company, but wholly owned by the state. But other aspects of the state (eventually) reacted to the injustice: MPs, select committees, ministers, the public inquiry, and hopefully next the legal system as some of these people should be in jail.

> But it's an older term than that.

Fine, I’m happy to accept that. Just like I’m happy to accept that R&B has nothing to do with BB King any more (well, actuality I still struggle with that).

Definitions and usage change. The current usage is the one that matters. Not the legacy definition.

When the original poster wrote “massive deep state cover-up” I think the implication is that shadowy figures throughout the state are pulling cover-up levers, when it was one privately owned company and one publicly owned company. The rest of the state moved (albeit slowly) to expose this and make it right.

Indeed. "Deep" is a weasel word. "State" is all the operations of governance which don't change when the government changes.

However, the state is not a monolith. It's an organization of all sorts of sub-organizations run by individuals with their own agendas. They have names, faces, and honors: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-67925304

(The honors systems is deeply problematic because about half of them are handed out to insiders for complicity in god knows what and the other half are handed out to celebrities as cover for the first half)

I’m fine with that. And I agree with the sentiment, just not the conclusion that we should be reporting these as not-suicide. If the original comment was indeed that tempered then I have no issue.

I'm not sure that's really fair. Within any organization there are subgroups. For instance there was an entire branch of AT&T that was dedicated to illegally spying on Americans for the NSA.

Most employees of AT&T had no idea it was even going on, so to lump every AT&T employee into the same batch of "you're bad because th company you work for was doing X" when they had no idea the company was doing X isn't really fair.

By the same vein, Stephen Miller trying to round up and cage innocent civilians just trying to live their life is a very different part of the government than Suzanne at NASA who's trying to better the future of mankind. To act as if there's no distinguishing between the two is just silly.

Whether you have an issue with the specific term "deep state" I'll leave be. But please don't try to oversimplify large organizations. The higher up the chain the more responsibility you can place for what the organization as a whole does, but the reverse isn't true when speaking outside of their specific area of ownership.

Or, if you are designing software to kill people, that you actually do a good job.

https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/cia-allegedly-bought-flawe...

Interesting.

> Some people actually made a deliberate act to let innocent people take the blame.

And those people are at fault and should be criminally prosecuted for the harm they caused.

That's good to hear. I'm sure the story makes an impact!

It is the passive voice, not the word suicide that is the issue.

Indeed. This is not about Horizon's bugs. It is about management that was incurious and perhaps politically and financially motivated to ignore Horizon's shortcomings, enough so to knowingly destroy lives. Charges of murder should be laid.

Arguably, it happens today on a modern iPhone capacitive screen. I've had issues where the UI performs a "bait and switch" and swaps a target that I inadvertently press. ios26 is worse because of some lag at certain times.

IIRC one issue was that every time someone advanced the theory something was wrong with Horizon, the Post Office kept claiming that nobody else was experiencing any issues. They also lied under oath, claiming no bugs that could cause such situations were known. Given this most the of defence lawyers abandoned that line of inquiry (they were nothing special, seeing as village postmasters aren't rich).

It's the lack of clarity in what happened. I think the rephrasing mike suggested is much clearer:

> The postmasters killed themselves because the British state was imprisoning them for crimes they didn't commit, based on evidence from a buggy financial accounting system.

That's just better writing!

He should be charged with perjury and sued by the families.

Partly on account of the "perhaps" in the original, and partly because I have seen (elsewhere) "just doing his job" defenses.

In corner cases, culpability for uncertain expertise can be a tricky issue - you may recall the case of the Italian geologists, a few years back, indicted for minimizing the risk of an earthquake shortly before one occurred - but the case here seems pretty clear-cut (again, I'm speaking morally, not legally.)

What?

I think your struggle with shifting meanings is a worthwhile one. At least, if you said BB King was an R&B artist, and somebody tried to correct you, you'd be within your rights to stand your ground.

But particularly with regard to politics, I don't think you should let go of useful ideas because arseholes pollute them. At least, it feels uncomfortably like letting the arseholes win, to me.

Surely the engineer wasn't acting alone, lying in court without some inside pressure?

Every system has bugs, even deployed, high visibility accounting systems. Debian stable, which I personally view as the gold standard for a robust general purpose OS, has hundreds of bugs.

That is not to say that bugs are good. They are bad and should be squashed. But the Horizon failure, IMO, is with the management, that pretended that the system was bug free and, faced with the evidence to the contrary, put the blame on postmasters. My 2c.

Please don't do this kind of tangential grammar nitpicking here. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less.

It’s only an inversion of the usual burden of proof if you assume that evidence from a computer can only ever be used to aid the prosecution. It can also be used to aid the defense, in which case this presumption makes it harder to convict someone, not easier.

Well said. I really wish we had a better word for someone who is bullied into suicide. It’s tantamount to manslaughter imho.

Recently, a snark/bullying community on Reddit resulted in the suicide of their target (a woman responsible for rescuing foxes).

That kind of targeting and bullying is horrific for any individual to process, let alone people who don’t have the press teams and training that celebrities do.

It's a surprising take to blame developers and software development for what is a prime example of corruption within the UK establishment, an uncaring and incompetent court system, and the lying senior managers of the UK Post Office. The faults were known and this is a case of cover-up.

Software development was merely an accessory to the crime in this case.

This sets a bad precedent. There is a wide gamut of emotional resilience in people. What is a funny insult to one person, can be rope-fuel to another.

Would you want to be called that if you make a light jab at a middle aged bald guy?

> Attributing a suicide to anyone other than the actor starts to appear oxymoronic very quickly.

No one is an island. We’re all deeply intertwined/interconnected. We’re the sum total of our lived experiences and without a doubt some have lived far more challenging lives than others and are influenced by factors that would lead just about anyone down a dark path.

The grief felt by those left behind is the result of that aforementioned interconnectedness.

Getting back to the quoted bit, isn’t this a bit like saying “attributing grief to anyone other than the person experiencing it is oxymoronic”?

My point is not to diminish the impact on those left behind in any way. Clearly this is a traumatic event that causes excruciating grief.

But I think we also need to be honest about the environmental factors that lead to suicide. Hopelessness is one of the large causes. If there are systemic reasons causing people to feel hopeless, and if those systemic problems could theoretically be changed/improved, and such improvement lowered the suicide rate, there’s a strong case to be made that the systemic factors share the responsibility.

> Yes life is complex and whatnot -- that's a given, we don't need a reminder every time anything happens.

I don’t think it’s a given. Clearly some lives are far more complicated than others. There exists a subset of people for whom that complication will become an insurmountable problem. Often those people have been traumatized, or have never learned the tools necessary to work through their feelings.

Some people are bullied into killing themselves. Should that be attributed wholly to the person who was bullied?

whats veganism got to do with comitting suicide?

A juror can, and should IMHO, however consider that evidence based entirely upon computer records may potentially be erroneous and therefore unable to secure proof 'beyond a reasonable doubt'. If I were a juror, I'd default to non-guilty if a case were based entirely upon the results of an algorithm or computerised records because they introduce doubt.

Deep State makes kind of sense here, because the U.K. Post Office, had there own Law Enforcement. They can act like the state in several ways. I think the correct term is "Private prosecution". And as fare as I understand it, the U.K. Post Office was able to have there own judge.

There’s incredible utility to the term.

It refers to people in the government with a lot of power and little public exposure, and perhaps some indication of using their power against the will of the general public, and yes there’s tons of these people, and it’s quite good to have the public generally worried about them.

American political history is littered with deep state plots that turned out to be true - Iraq war being a big recent one, the insurance policy FBI agents another.

Sounds unrealistic they would blame it all on one remark like that.

I'd be more afraid people would kill themselves just to get retribution on their tormentors and it would increase suicides.

Me: "have their cliques" You: "I'm not sure that's really fair. Within any organization there are subgroups."

"you're bad because th[e] company you work for was doing X"

Which I didn't write.

All the other parts about Suzanne, also not what I wrote.

"But please don't try to oversimplify large organizations."

I didn't, I feel your comment misrepresents what I've said.

"The higher up the chain the more responsibility you can place for what the organization as a whole does"

No. Al Capone killed no one himself. People did that for him. They share the responsibility. My boss made me do it is not an excuse.

Many vegans think everyone else is evil/demonic for eating meat. “Meat is murder” etc etc. So the natural conclusion to that is, according to several vegans I know, that everyone who eats meat should be forced to either stop being a mass murderer or kill themselves.

Keep in mind there was a point where I was vegan, I know several vegans, so I know what I’m talking about.

They’re not shy about it either—look up That Vegan Teacher on YouTube for relatively middle-of-the-road vegan behavior in action.

Agency is the ability to act. If someone dies against their own will, they don’t have agency, which is why we don’t use language like “they committed their own death” to refer to such instances.

Iraq war was definitely not the work of any deep state, if you follow your definition. It was pushed by the president and his government, not faceless bureaucrats.

Certainly the pressure on them and the “intel” they saw on WMD was in part the work of the deep state, that the president was captured by them is sort of the point.

> in no quantifiable way whatsoever

You may disagree with my assertion, but there has been considerable research into the role of media and reporting in suicide, indicating that contagion is real and that words matter when reporting on these issues.

Source: https://reportingonsuicide.org/research/

> Horizon is the case that should replace Therac-25 as a study in what can go wrong if software developers screw up.

Hum, no. Horizon had nothing to do with problems of software development.

It's a case of unaccountable judges, lying attorneys, and the entire police system acting in a conspiracy to hide information and gaslight the society at large. The fact that there is a software error there somewhere isn't relevant at all.

There are plenty of examples, Light Blue Touchpaper talks about this a bunch. You do have a problem that courts will believe technicians very broadly unless somebody competent is cross-examining to highlight where the limits of their evidence are. So your defence will need to hire such an expert and your legal team need to get the judge to understand why everybody is going to listen to nerd stuff for however long when they thought this was a case about, say, theft.

Proving bugs can be pretty hard if you don't have access to software & source code. That is similar to the US, courts usually won't give you access to source code to verify if software is operating correctly, you generally only get cross examine the company representative & person who performed the test. DNA tests are one good example.

One case where defense did get access to the code (FST developed by NYC) led to discoveries (https://www.propublica.org/article/federal-judge-unseals-new...) that led to it being retired from use.

OT but what a shit site that is. A third of the page is taken up by a “best prime day deals” countdown banner. What a consumerist piece of shit website.

This is Technically Correct, which is, I admit, the Best Kind of Correct, but in practical terms it won't happen.

[Edited: Got the Futurama quote wrong, fixed that]

You need adblock

I'd be shocked if any piece of software large enough to qualify as an "accounting system" didn't contain at least hundreds of bugs. We're just not that good at building software. Especially if you consider that the system encompasses all of the dependencies, so you should count bugs in the OS, CPU, any relevant firmware, etc.

Comparing nagging from a relative to wrongful prosecution is asinine. You might as well say that you had heartburn and it didn't kill you, so what's with all these people dying from heart attacks?

That's what makes the latter more accurate.

Healthy, sane people in good situations don't kill themselves.

It follows from that fact that if someone kills themselves, at least one of those things was not true. And those things can and often are thrust on people, or at least occur against the will of the person.

In this case, a bad situation was thrust on a whole bunch of people, and it ended up killing some of them.

No, the Post Office doesn't have its own "law enforcement" (if you mean something like a police force) or its own judges.

Any company has the right to bring a private prosecution under UK law, and this was the basis for the prosecutions in question. It just means that the company pays for some of the costs involved.

Whether or not private prosecutions should be allowed is certainly a legitimate topic of discussion. Let's not muddy the waters with misinformation about the Post Office having some kind of parallel police and courts system. It just doesn't.

You've got it backwards, at least in your description.

They went after the intel they wanted to find to justify their position. It didn't matter if it was real or true, it just needed to come from the intelligence apparatus.

> There’s incredible utility to the term.

It’s a red flag, so there’s that.

If any large system wasn’t constantly logging errors I’d immediately assume there was something wrong with the error logging system. Only trivial software is bug free.

That's completely backwards.

The CIA was very clear that there was nothing there, and the publicly appointed leadership (Rumsfeld, Feith, Cheney, etc) badgered them until they gave in and made some wishy-washy statement that Powell could pretend was real.

The war was led from the top - Sec Def and VP. That Bush was a moron and appointed liars to Sec Def and VP is on him. Cheney and Rumsfeld had a long history of making things up, going back to the 70s.

> I meant courts should've called in multiple expert witnesses and even computer forensics companies.

UK courts don’t (can’t) do that, that’s up to the plaintiffs or defendants.

The latter implies that suicide just happened to the person, like they got hit by a bus.

The former correctly attributes the action to the person who killed themselves. Certainly the motivations and causes that drive people to suicide are complex, but ultimately it is a choice the person makes.

"Committed" is perhaps not the best word, since it's associated with crimes (and suicide is not a crime in many places anymore), but it's at least more active.

I was vegan for 7 years, one of my vegan friends had the opinion that human hospitals should be banned and only animal hospitals should be allowed.

I’m not nitpicking the poster’s grammar, I’m nitpicking the claim about the grammatical structure of a particular sentence that’s the factual basis of their criticism of the article.

But we hold engineers to much higher ethical standards than management. One does not expect management to blow the whistle - or even understand whats what when dealing with complex issues in distributed systems. If the engineers start lying - its game over.

I cried when I was reading the book. So much suffering. Bought a copy for all the it architects in my company and asked all of them to read it. Should be part of curriculum for aspiring software engineers.

> Healthy, sane people in good situations don't kill themselves.

Correct. This has no bearing.

> it ended up killing some of them.

No, and it's irresponsible and unhelpful to act like agency and choice is not part of the equation. As if to say that basically everyone chooses the same way (euthanasia) in the face of terminal illness, or depression.

Tautologically, if you want to convey that help is out there and that a better life is possible, then you're saying people have a choice to make.

Read the book, if you havent already. The senior technical staff was actively obfuscating and lying. Developers knew the system had synchronization issues, operations knew as well, as they were apparently routinely doing manual data fixes in production. Senior engineering staff are the most to blame. They messed up and then covered up. The fact that their management covered up some more can be partially excused by technical illiteracy.

> But the tldr is that committing suicide aligns with an active criminal/immoral act, while dying by suicide is a factual cause of death with many possible causes.

The projections are doing the work here. Colloquially today what's understood is that "commit" merely means they did the deed. People can judge that to be immoral or not regardless; most people don't, except through the lens of religion.

They might judge it to be the wrong choice, as I surely do, and I don't think it helps to diminish agency as though suicide is an inevitability following any given circumstance.

Unfortunately the "its rare" isnt true. it is more common now than it was back in the horizon days. It also isnt necessarily expensive since you can apply for costs with the default being for it to be paid (unless good reason not to). As such whilst its not an option for the average person who cant afford the upfront cost it is very practical for large businesses especially if they engage in it often and hence can stand up a department for it.

Its one of the offerings from TM-Eye aka one of the "private police forces". https://tm-eye.co.uk/what-we-do/private-prosecutions/

It is an actual example of a two tier justice system since those who can afford the private prosecution skip the queue for the public system but will still normally have the taxpayer pay for it.

There is currently a consultation underway as per below article which, incidentally, mentions a more recent dubious example of private prosecutions which got slapped down.

https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/oversight-and-re...

> Some glitches were of their time and wouldn't occur these days, e.g. malfunctions in resistive touch screens that caused random clicks on POS screens to occur overnight

I think there’s still a lesson to be learned here about computers needing to be locked when not in use. I find it utterly bizarre how many experienced technical employees will leave their computer unlocked when they step away from it for extended periods of time.

That words matter is why I'm in opposition, as this diminishes agency in people.

Today I would say that framing suicide as "immoral" in secular society is banal and has no traction, but most, excepting certain circumstances, would suggest it is a bad choice. That surely follows if you as well as I would try to talk an able person out of suicide.

I don't think it helps to diminish agency as though suicide is an inevitability following tough circumstances. That's the message I am getting from the euphemism treadmill game, and I reject it.

The message should be that you can go through hell and recover, and you still have a choice. And granted there's always nature vs nurture; just as we are not entirely the product of our environment, the environment does shape us. But it's not all-or-nothing.

Source being that ridiculous fanfic Cheney movie? You’re even further off than me, even high level CIA was divided, along many other orgs that supported it. Where did Colin Powell get his evidence from? And the OSP?

Even if we agreed Iraq wasn’t a good example, it’s irrelevant to the point as I don’t think anyone actually thinks there aren’t powerful and largely behind the scenes figures - defense, lobbying, billionaires, and so on that aren’t actively steering the government away from the will of the people.

That explanation based on lies by the tech staff, is another variation of the Volkswagen explanation that the emissions scandal, were just some low level engineers.

The essence of this story is how the UK establishment can lie, and be corrupt to levels that will shame big time criminals.

[1] "...Vennells was the CEO of Post Office Ltd during the latter part of the Post Office scandal, which involved more than 900 subpostmasters being wrongly convicted of theft, false accounting and fraud between 1999 and 2015 because of shortfalls at their branches that were in fact errors of the Horizon accounting software used by the Post Office.Thousands of subpostmasters paid for shortfalls caused by Horizon and/or had their contracts terminated. The actions of the Post Office caused the loss of jobs, bankruptcy, family breakdown, criminal convictions, prison sentences and at least four suicides. In total, over 4,000 subpostmasters would eventually become eligible for compensation..."

"...In 2013, Post Office Limited hired forensic accounting firm Second Sight, headed by Ron Warmington, to investigate the Horizon software losses. Warmington discovered the system was flawed and faulty, but Vennells was unhappy with Warmington's report and terminated their contract. Prior to her role as CEO, Vennells was the Chief Operating Officer of Post Office Ltd, a position in which – according to the evidence of the then CEO, David Smith – she had responsibility for management of the "operational use" of the Horizon software...."

"...During the case, the Post Office's conduct under Vennells's leadership was described as an instance of "appalling and shameful behaviour..."

"...During her testimony, Vennells consistently stated she was unaware of the facts or, when confronted with documents that showed she had been made aware of them, said she had not understood them..."

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paula_Vennells

Thanks for setting the record straight. For me, as a non-Brit, the movie and the term “prosecution” helped me to misunderstand.

When people say "deep state" they mean "invisible state". Not "bad state". If you realize this, suddenly you'll understand what people are talking about a lot more.

Mental illnesses usually occur in conjunction with other mental illnesses.

There's a lot of agency in heart attacks too, but we still say that the heart attack killed them, not that they killed themselves with a heart attack.

There is agency, but it's equally irresponsible and unhelpful to act like outside factors are not part of the equation, and that someone who drives a person to suicide is blameless.

Let's say someone jumps out of a burning building and they're killed by the fall. Did they have agency? Responsibility? Should we describe that as "committed suicide"?

A 90 year old is much more physically fragile than a 20 year old. If you hit a 20 year old and they are bruised you get an assault charge, if you hit a 90 year old and they die you get a murder charge, despite using the same amount of force.

I do agree with the sibling post that suicide would be weaponized which is the real problem.

The person you are replying to shared some research by experts on the topic giving recommendations. You can argue for or against anything, but it’s useful to at least engage with the evidence being presented.

> Isn't the stigma desired anyway? It keeps people from going through with it. That's why society deliberately creates and actively cultivates the stigma.

That’s a very optimistic take on how “rational” society tends to be. The thought that “if things are in a certain way in society, then it must make sense (from a moral or societal point of view) for them to be that way.”

They knew there were no WMD.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/mar/18/panorama-iraq-...

That shows some set of intelligence had some sources that told them they don’t, far from proof of anything let alone anything relevant here. And we know several high up yet largely unknown to the public defense ops claimed the opposite, ie, the deep state.

Yes I already said that life is complicate because I KNEW that someone would write this very comment. But reminding people that life isn't simple isn't the PSA that you believe it to be.

Yes, everything causes everything, there is no one single thing to blame. Life is hard and complicated. Every rule has exceptions. Every truth has contradictions. Every one is a hypocrite. The world is big and complex.

We all know this already. We don't need this disclaimer to every statement that anyone makes. At a certain point, it just becomes noise.

Why is she not in jail?

Most people who commit suicide were not hounded to the end of their rope, these people were murdered by torture via the legal system. The proximal cause of their death was their own hand, sure, but their deaths should properly be seen as some form of murder or at least manslaughter.

These deaths had an unambiguous causal actor other than/in addition to themselves.

It's an exceptional condition particularly since if you are harassed by any ordinary person you have a multitude of recourse-- up to fleeing or going into hiding and so we should be very very hesitant to attribute suicide to the actions of a third party in general. But in the case of harassment perpetrated by or via state power the victims are far closer to an inescapable situation and because of the vastly greater power the state must carry vastly greater responsibility for the total consequences of their malicious and improper actions.

Damn! That's dark. I should've read the article first, but I did not. Sorry.

I kinda understand the false guilt these postmasters must have felt when they were wrongfully accused. These people should not be dead like that, those who puts them into that living hell should.

Oddly though, the justice of this world usually don't work like that. Usually, it's the people at the lowest level who suffer the worst fate/abuse, simply because they are the most defenseless, while the people "on the top" pets themselves for "resolving" the problem they created.

It's a odd place to mention, but from one of Donald Trump's story (The Verrazano-Narrows Bridge one where he noticed the unnoticed engineer) I've learned it is important that one must actively take what they deserved (recognition in his story, justice in this case), and at least don't be silent when other people is stealing it away. This is "a nasty world", and if you want to make things right, you must "Fight! Fight! Fight!" and never give up.

A single comment is not really bullying. Continued harassment is.

And much like assessing how physical violence might contribute to the end result, so could this be actually assessed. I don’t know why people reach for binary classifications strawmans like this.

Do you see a lot of people harming themselves physically and framing people in their suicides?

This is the same organization that talks about Palestinians dying, while Hamas slaughters Jews by the millions. Don't expect unbiased voice.

How come?

Because there often is an external attribute, especially if you consider illness to be “external” as is conventional for most deaths caused by illness.

"littered with deep state plots"

My argument is that these are not deep state plots, these are just plots. This are plots that states are doing. This is the state. This is an organization of millions of people. There is no deep state. The state is just like any other large organization.

Take for example the eBay stalking scandal.

"The eBay stalking scandal was a campaign conducted in 2019 by eBay and contractors. The scandal involved the aggressive stalking and harassment of two e-commerce bloggers, Ina and David Steiner, who wrote frequent commentary about eBay on their website EcommerceBytes"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_stalking_scandal

The CEO was not involved.

There is no "deep eBay", there is just eBay. We don't use the phrase "deep eBay" for a reason. And in the same way "deep State" does not make any sense.

> Damn! That's dark. I should've read the article first, but I did not. Sorry.

Now you will remember to at least skim the article before posting.

> Any company has the right to bring a private prosecution under UK law

That's a simplification. The Post Office has a more privileged position due to its history; it has both formal access (e.g. to police computers) and informal deference from CPS that regular companies do not enjoy.

I am not pointing fingers at low level engineers - I specifically blame their senior tech staff. The lead architect who later became their CTO (and is since retired). Tha guy knew full well.

I dont deny the management was criminally complicit in the cover up, but it starts with bugs, then lies and dishonesty and cowardess of technical staff - and only then it has a chance of becoming what it became because of atrociously unethical management. They all belong in case studies taught to both tech and business majors.

That’s true, but it’s unclear the extent to which any of that was a factor. For example, how was the Post Office’s access to the PNC relevant here?

It may be that the CPS would have taken over these prosecutions and dropped them if the company in question had been, say, Tesco. But I don’t see how we can be sure of this.