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

1. Immediately after Horizon was rolled out, issues were reported. But ignored

2. Prosecutors didn't bother to verify if there is another explanation before accusing thousands of people of stealing? Isn't it common sense to pause for a second and think, "could we please double check the evidence? how can thousands of postal workers suddenly turn into thieves?"

3. local newspaper had published a photo of her and labeled her the “pregnant thief.” - of course, UK tabloids. Click baits and write whatever the fuck they want, no matter whose lives are destroyed

4. post office has said that it does not have the means to provide redress for that many people - so they have the means to falsely prosecute and destroy the lives of thousands of people, but they don't have the means to correct their blunders?

This happened more than a decade ago. Citizens are expected to do everything on time (pay taxes, renew drivers license...) or get fined/jailed, but the government can sit on their butt for 10 YEARS and do nothing about a blunder they caused?

What about Fujitsu? Why can't the government make Fujitsu pay for the destruction caused by their shitty software?

Jeez. This is just fucking nuts

One thing I would say is that if somebody is convicted in the UK, it's acceptable legally and culturally to call them by the crime they committed.

The problem is that in this case the Post Office had unique legal powers, and was being run by people who did not want to "harm the brand" by admitting they had made mistakes, so kept digging.

There is also a fundamental flaw in how the courts - and the Post Office prosecutors - were instructed to think about the evidence in common law.

Bizarrely, it was not (and may still not), be an acceptable defense to say that computer records are wrong. They are assumed correct in UK courts. IT systems were legally considered infallible, and if your evidence contradicts an IT systems evidence, you were considered a liar by the court, and a jury might be instructed accordingly.

Yes, that's awful. Yes, it's ruined lives.

But also, I think all involved have realised pointing fingers at one or two individuals to blame hasn't really helped fix things. Like an air accident, you have to have several things go wrong and compound errors to get into this amount of trouble, normally. There were systemic failing across procurement, implementation, governance, investigations, prosecutions, within the justice system and beyond.

I already know people who have worked for Fujitsu in the UK are not exactly shouting about it. And yet, they're still getting awarded contracts before the compensation has been paid out...

run by people who did not want to "harm the brand"

Oh well, now their precious brand has been harmed, how exactly do they expect to gain the trust, respect of the people back? Maybe they think the public will forget and move on? These people suck...

Fujitsu falsely claimed that they couldn't remotely modify data.

They used technical info to obfuscate things for the accused and the judges.

They genuinely thought that the new software was uncovering a lot of theft that previously went undetected. This actually spurred them on even further thinking that the software was a godsend.

The sickening part is the people responsible won't ever see the inside of a prison cell despite sending many to prison for their failures.

Which certainly contributed to the suicides.

A government with the power to censor the tabloids is also a government with the power to censor the news outlets that you do like. I'd be careful about opening that can of worms.

Is this not the case in other countries?

[1] https://cambridgeblog.org/2023/05/a-journey-into-the-shaken-...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37650402

This will change when elected officials start getting hoisted by their own electronic petards.

The Venn diagram of midwit enterprise developers who build systems with audit trails yet could not swear under penalty of perjury that the audit trail is absolutely correct in every case is almost a circle.

GP was saying the government should do something. What more can the government do?

Rather than throwing our hands in the air, maybe we could expect our governments to craft laws in such a way that we can punish people for willful lies resulting in death while still preserving our right to free speech and the press.

Lots of people in my replies are telling me that I'm wrong, but no-one has yet answered my question: what specifically should the government do?

Yikes, such people shouldn't be in working in law enforcement then

The link is to a book by a PhD neuroscientist investigation the scientific basis for shaken baby syndrome.

[1] UK has 1/4th of the population of the US but The Sun has 4x the circulation of The New York Post. The Daily Mirror every day puts out 4x the number of papers that The National Enquirer puts out in a week.

Words can have multiple similar definitions with small variations. If I look up "defamation" I get:

> Defamation is a legal term that refers to any statement made by a person, whether verbal or printed, that causes harm to another person’s reputation or character. --- https://legaldictionary.net/defamation/

> Defamation is a communication that injures a third party's reputation and causes a legally redressable injury. The precise legal definition of defamation varies from country to country. It is not necessarily restricted to making assertions that are falsifiable, and can extend to concepts that are more abstract than reputation – like dignity and honour. --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defamation

But I genuinely didn't know that other countries do things differently. What does defamation even mean if it doesn't include the concept of untruth?

If legislation, jurisdiction and law enforcement forget about basic principles and human rights in favour of looking productive, collateral damage is pretty much more or less expected.

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

I don't like the idea of prosecuting people for this, but I don't think it's illogical.

What could be done: (1) Stronger penalties, perhaps tied to proportionate burdens of proof. (2) Criminal penalties.

A weak burden of proof with mediocre penalties is just a cost of doing business.

FWIW I'm only really familiar with the American usual.

Perhaps you mean slander/libel?

Because the software didn't cause it.

Look, by all accounts the software was/is a piece of piss, but what made it such an egregious scandal is how the Post Office leadership dealt with things. There was really no good reason for that to happen. They just ignored reports of problems (proper reports written by auditors, not vague rumours). They lied to postmasters by saying that no one has problems (when, in fact, there were hundreds of people). Lots has been written about all of this and I won't repeat it all here.

So I must object to the phrasing of "caused by their shitty software". Of course lots can be said about the failings of the software itself and Fujitsu also lied and covered their tracks so they are not entirely blameless. But they emphatically did not "cause" any of this: it was the Post Office leadership who primarily caused this mess.

Lots of things go wrong in the world, lots of things are defective. What often matters the most is not so much the mistake or defect itself, but what the response to that is.

It is not too much to ask for prosecutors to be a bit more careful, bit more factual, understand the powers that come with their position and use it wisely. If they are not able to do that, they should pick some other profession which has lesser potential to cause damage than law enforcement.

Also - now that the software has proven defective, are they doing to go after Fujitsu or those who tested/signed off on the software? Probably not, maybe they will find a scapegoat at best.

Fujitsu/ICL won the contract to develop and run Horizon. They got a commission on every EFTPOS sale. They paid for all the computers, all the network setup, all the staff training. They literally ran the helpline. If you were a sub-postmaster and had a problem with Horizon, you called Fujitsu.

It was Fujitsu that then told you that the bug you found in Horizon wasn't a bug and nobody else was experiencing it, at exactly the same time their internal IT tickets had fully documented the bug and their staff were trying to patch up that bug before it happened to anyone else.

Fujitsu also claimed, in many court cases, that they had no remote access to Horizon. But they did. They also let engineers use it, and push one-off code fixes, to "fix-up" known errors that had been made in ledgers on the computer in your Post Office, so there was no source of truth anywhere in the system. If courts had known this, almost every Post Office private prosecution would have been thrown in the bin for unreliable evidence. Instead, courts ran on the belief that computers were like calculators, and can be assumed to be reliable unless proven faulty.

It was Fujitsu not volunteering this fact, and indeed barristers coaching Fujitsu expert witnesses on what to say and what not to reveal, ignoring procedural rules that the barristers knew had to be followed that say you have to reveal pertinent facts to the defence.

Fujitsu were in it up to their necks along with the Post Office. They made material gains by denying bugs existed, denying they had remote access, falsely claiming their system was reliable, and having their staff perjure themselves in prosecutions brought by the Post Office.

Without Fujitsu's complicity and mendacity, the Post Office might not have succeeded in prosecuting anyone - and of course, without the phantom losses caused by their broken software, they'd have no cases to prosecute.

Also, I never hear anybody talk about what the tabloids are reporting. There's a lot of social stigma attached to them in the US.

Libel = defamation in writing. Slander = defamation in speech.

But everybody is like this to an extent, so you need to fix this in other ways too. This is why reasonable countries have a whole bunch of process around legal punishment, and don't just throw someone in prison after a police officer says so. All the restrictions on how evidence is gathered and what kind of proof needs to be provided are ways to work around this problem. The police and prosecutor might decide someone is guilty, but they still have to convince twelve ordinary people. (Or whatever the process is in your country of choice.)

It sounds like this is where things really fell apart with the postal scandal, and the courts were willing to convict with insufficient evidence.

I was attempting to emphasize the absurdity of any software system being “absolutely correct at all times”. I don’t believe such a system can exist, at least not in such strong terms.

English libel law is an evolution of the former English law known as scandalum magnatum -- "scandalizing the mighty". Basically, if you say bad things about powerful people, those powerful people will crush you with the law.

As an example, Robert Maxwell embezzled millions from his company's pension fund, and also used that money to sue anyone who slighted him - including anyone who said he was embezzling from his company's pension fund. He was never prosecuted for embezzling millions from his company's pension fund.

It is the prosecutors conduct that is maddening here. They need to have higher standards - it is their job to prosecute actual criminal behavior, and not be lazy in fact checking

There are incentives to cheat

There is moral panic about "undeserving poor"

Increase taxes and make services and benefits free, including a UBI.

Increase and collect taxes.

He escaped that. By dying. Probably suicide.

The walls were closing in

Secondly, I don't think you understand the situation if you talk about the "prosecutors conduct". The Post Office itself - a private company (owned by the government at arms length) - was the entity doing the prosecuting. These were private prosecutions.

You're hearing it right. The aggrieved party is also the prosecutor, in the criminal courts. They are not a claimant in the civil courts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prosecution#England_an...

The Crown Prosecution Service (who work with the police, act for the government and prosecute most criminal cases in England and Wales) were not involved. In fact, much of the criticism of the CPS in the Post Office scandal is that they could have been involved; they had the statutory right to take over a prosecution, and if appropriate, discontinue it due to lack of evidence. But they did not intervene.

I was a lead Technical Architect and authority on behalf of HM Treasury for a while, and I will tell you this: this is just the tip of the iceberg in government procurement.

I've witnessed faulty systems in DVLA, DEFRA, DWP, Home Office, MOJ and Scottish Government. Systems that have directly resulted in suicide, false convictions, corruption and loss of money to the public purse.

The problem with Horizon and Fujitsu is that in the end the government has to sign it off, and there will be someone who is the Accountable Officer (AO). More often than not, all parties (customer and supplier) become incredibly motivated to protect the AO because it protects profits, protects reputational damage and essentially builds a good news story around the whole thing.

It's just elitism, wrapped up in cronyism, veiled in lies so that AOs can fail upwards into positions with suppliers. I've seen it too many times and I'm fed-up with it. Government is completely and utterly corrupt.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day-care_sex-abuse_hysteria

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/10/us/the-trial-that-unleash...

The whole privatized postoffice setup was a profoundly unattractive investment-- at least to those who thought of it on investment grounds (e.g. return on investment+costs)-- and so there was a presumption before the computer system went in that many must have been in it to steal.

> Is there some kind of perverse incentive for the prosecutors

One of the broken things here is that the postoffice themselves were able to criminally prosecute-- so the criminal cases lacked "have to deserve the state prosecutors time" protection.

The only people who received criminal charges were the sub postmasters.

We've seen this time and again. Organizations would rather throw people under the bus than damage the organizations reputation/brand. For example, the Church of England has tried to cover up numerous sexual abuse scandals. This is a recent and particularly nasty case:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cje0y3gqw1po

The irony is that the coverups generally don't work for long, and the reputational damage is all the worse for the coverup.

Describes pretty much the vast majority of people. All groups/institutions/enterprises made of such people will follow a similar path. Point being - there is no hope.