Were Still More UK Postmasters Also Wrongly Prosecuted Over Accounting Bug? (computerweekly.com) 41
U.K. postmasters were mistakenly sent to prison due to a bug in their "Horizon" accounting software — as first reported by Computer Weekly back in 2009. Nearly 16 years later, the same site reports that now the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission "is attempting to contact any former subpostmasters that could have been prosecuted for unexplained losses on the Post Office's pre-Horizon Capture software.
"There are former subpostmasters that, like Horizon users, could have been convicted of crimes based on data from these systems..." Since the Post Office Horizon scandal hit the mainstream in January 2024 — revealing to a wide audience the suffering experienced by subpostmasters who were blamed for errors in the Horizon accounting system — users of Post Office software that predated Horizon have come forward... to tell their stories, which echoed those of victims of the Horizon scandal. The Criminal Cases Review Commission for England and Wales is now reviewing 21 cases of potential wrongful conviction... where the Capture IT system could be a factor...
The SCCRC is now calling on people that might have been convicted based on Capture accounts to come forward. "The commission encourages anyone who believes that their criminal conviction, or that of a relative, might have been affected by the Capture system to make contact with it," it said. The statutory body is also investigating a third Post Office system, known as Ecco+, which was also error-prone...
A total of 64 former subpostmasters in Scotland have now had their convictions overturned through the legislation brought through Scottish Parliament. So far, 97 convicted subpostmasters have come forward, and 86 have been assessed, out of which the 64 have been overturned. However, 22 have been rejected and another 11 are still to be assessed. An independent group, fronted by a former Scottish subpostmaster, is also calling on users of any of the Post Office systems to come forward to tell their stories, and for support in seeking justice and redress.
"There are former subpostmasters that, like Horizon users, could have been convicted of crimes based on data from these systems..." Since the Post Office Horizon scandal hit the mainstream in January 2024 — revealing to a wide audience the suffering experienced by subpostmasters who were blamed for errors in the Horizon accounting system — users of Post Office software that predated Horizon have come forward... to tell their stories, which echoed those of victims of the Horizon scandal. The Criminal Cases Review Commission for England and Wales is now reviewing 21 cases of potential wrongful conviction... where the Capture IT system could be a factor...
The SCCRC is now calling on people that might have been convicted based on Capture accounts to come forward. "The commission encourages anyone who believes that their criminal conviction, or that of a relative, might have been affected by the Capture system to make contact with it," it said. The statutory body is also investigating a third Post Office system, known as Ecco+, which was also error-prone...
A total of 64 former subpostmasters in Scotland have now had their convictions overturned through the legislation brought through Scottish Parliament. So far, 97 convicted subpostmasters have come forward, and 86 have been assessed, out of which the 64 have been overturned. However, 22 have been rejected and another 11 are still to be assessed. An independent group, fronted by a former Scottish subpostmaster, is also calling on users of any of the Post Office systems to come forward to tell their stories, and for support in seeking justice and redress.
Not just the Brits: Now coming to you! [Re:Crappy] (Score:3)
Who wrote this crappy software? It is amazing that double entry bookkeeping systems can make these kind of errors.
Bugs happen. It's not enough to just write code, you have to debug it and stress test it and look for edge cases and unexpected behavior.
The US is going to match and outdo Britain, though. The DOGies have promised that they will rewrite the Social Security code base, 60 million lines of code, from scratch... and have it complete in three months.
Not ambitious enough? They are simultaneously going to rewrite the IRS code base, and do it even faster, because they're going to do a hackathon [wired.com]!
But don't worry.
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The DOGies have promised that they will rewrite the Social Security code base, 60 million lines of code, from scratch... and have it complete in three months.
And provide an API (with help from Palantir), which will certainly be secure and will never be abused.
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Who wrote this crappy software? It is amazing that double entry bookkeeping systems can make these kind of errors.
Bugs happen. It's not enough to just write code, you have to debug it and stress test it and look for edge cases and unexpected behavior.
The US is going to match and outdo Britain, though. The DOGies have promised that they will rewrite the Social Security code base, 60 million lines of code, from scratch... and have it complete in three months.
Not ambitious enough? They are simultaneously going to rewrite the IRS code base, and do it even faster, because they're going to do a hackathon [wired.com]!
But don't worry. It will all work perfectly because they're going to use AI. What could possibly go wrong?
https://www.wired.com/story/do... [wired.com]
https://www.wired.com/story/do... [wired.com]
https://finance.yahoo.com/news... [yahoo.com]
https://www.bloomberg.com/opin... [bloomberg.com]
I don't think the "3 months" estimate came from DOGE. I believe they said "In a matter of months", which could mean anything. No doubt that this project can be completed in months, maybe around 120 of them.
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The common English language interpretation of the use of a plural of a measure such as "months", "days", or "years" is that it will be more than one, but less than the next larger measure. So days is up to 7. Weeks is up to 4, months is up to 12. By the time you get to years, it tends to just mean a long time, but technically means up to 10.
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The common English language interpretation of the use of a plural of a measure such as "months", "days", or "years" is that it will be more than one, but less than the next larger measure. So days is up to 7. Weeks is up to 4, months is up to 12. By the time you get to years, it tends to just mean a long time, but technically means up to 10.
Have you ever gone out on a sales visit to a client? Salespeople couch things in vague weasel words. I was the tech at a sales lunch and the sales guy kept referring to the "raft" and "slew" of techs like me back at the office. Afterwards I asked him about it since I was the only one. He said, "well, how many is a slew? How big is a raft anyway?" So "a matter of months" in sales-speak can mean different things.
BTW this was the company that sold the IRS on a multi-billion dollar computing upgrade years
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I m all too familiar with sales speak. I just call it lies because no matter how you try to wrap it, the intent is to mis-inform.
Political lies this outrageous, much like sales lies, tend to mean it'll never happen but it'll still cost plenty.
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ICL PLC, formerly known ad International Computers Limited, but was later bought out by Fujitsu.
Although the software was crappy, the real issue was the lies about it. The lie that changes could not be made by people at Fujitsu's operations center -- when they had a whole group of people making overnight corrections.
There was a level of maliciousness to the actions of these people. When one of the subpostmasters' union reps was inadvertently told about the capability to make changes, the next day, his accou
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The even larger issue is a justice system that allows people to be convicted of serious crimes based solely on the "word" of crappy software. "Computer says no" is a terrible basis for a criminal conviction.
Everybody is to blame (Score:5, Informative)
Absolutely every part of this whole thing stinks, at every level. Not one instituion involved in it comes out looking in any way clean.
1. That the software was so shody in the first place.
2. The the Post Office knew about it and continued to use it anyway.
3. That the Post Office knew that the software allows remote access to the sub-postmaster's accounts and could make remote changes tot heir data, and lied about.
4. That Fujitsu appears to have lied to the UK counts on issue 3 above, and so have committed perjury.
5. That the Post Office knew they were making proesecutions based on false/fraudulant evidence.
6. That the Post Office (basically a private company with a government charter) can make prosecutions at all (why aren't they required to just delegate it to the police and CPS like everyone else).
7. That everyone has known about this since it was first reported in aroud 2015, but everyone has done their best to conspicuously ignore it.
8. That the courts and the judges presiding over them prosecuted and sentences these people on such nonsense evidence.
9. That there was no oversight over these prosecutions. How is it possible that no one noticed a pattern, a trend. There was a hughe spike in a particular type of presecution of a particular type of defendant all with the Post Office as the prosecuting body, all with the same basic claims about the reliability of their software as the deciding factor. Are we really to believe that no one noticed a pattern here?
10. That the government has known about this, and it has been spoken about in partiliament since about 2019.
11. That successive governments have done nothing about it.
12. That it took a hit TV show to make the problem impossible to ignore any longer.
13. That the police have known about this enourmous miscarrige of justice, and have had an open case against Fujitsu for perjury, for about 10 years, and have done nothing.
14. That we all know that absolutely everyone in power who had a part to play in this (the managers of the Post Office, the judges who issued the ridiculous sentences, the politicians who turned a blind eye, the police who knew about a miscarrige of justice and did nothing) will get away with it without any sanction of any kind whatsoever.
I've probably missed a few, there's plenty of shame to go around here...
Re:Everybody is to blame (Score:5, Informative)
7. That everyone has known about this since it was first reported in aroud 2015, but everyone has done their best to conspicuously ignore it.
It was first reported long before then, from 2009 according to the wikipedia article. I remember reading about it in https://www.theregister.com/ [theregister.com] at about that time, and saw articles in Private Eye not long after.
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Yes: remember reading about it in Private Eye, also Computer Weekly since 2008 [computerweekly.com]. But it was an inconvenient truth and so ignored by many; much as today much media ignores, or lies about, the genocide done by Israel in Palestine; just the latest being IDF making up excuses why it killed ambulance workers in cold blood [bbc.co.uk].
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Private Eye does some excellent investigative journalism. One of the few outlets still doing it, in fact. It's the only periodical I subscribe to.
Re:Everybody is to blame (Score:5, Insightful)
Everybody is to blame
When everyone is at fault, no one is at fault. That's why we design systems to dilute responsibility as perfectly as possible.
Re:Everybody is to blame (Score:5, Insightful)
You forgot the worst part of this: while this scandal has utterly destroyed the lives of the affected (sub)postmasters (including death, as some killed themselves over this travesty of justice), it has so far not had any adverse consequences for the perpetrators. None of them have been inconvenienced beyond some name calling in the media and maybe a few firings. Reckless car drivers have been convicted for murder in Europe, while these crooks don't even have a criminal record yet.
Corporate and political behavior will not change unless such a series of acts carry decade long prison sentences and salary clawbacks for the perpetrators.
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The idea that something like 1 in 10 of all subpostmasters were fiddling the books should have been a huge red flag.
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And the people making the decisions are often all too eager to believe this; since a number of the popular theories about the people beneath you more or less strongly sugges
Re:Everybody is to blame (Score:4, Informative)
Subpostmasters aren't really "lower orders". They are solidly middle class, having paid a substantial amount to buy their franchise.
US concepts of social class don't match UK concepts. For example, whereas the US used to have lots of factory floor workers who were considered middle class because of their incomes, in the UK, the fact that they were doing a job that required little to no academic education consigns them to the working class, irrespective of income.
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It also goes to show that any piece of software can take a life. Even boring ones like accounting software. Anyone who works as a programmer needs to take that into account that bugs in software can kill, even if there's no clear connection how.
UK (Score:2)
Has becime such an inept country it's inconceivable anyone still lives there. Postoffice, brexit, dole, ulez, wars, woke, need I say more?
Re:UK (Score:4, Interesting)
Has becime such an inept country it's inconceivable anyone still lives there. Postoffice, brexit, dole, ulez, wars, woke, need I say more?
You should say considerably less. Brexit was anti-woke, wars are anti-woke...
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I wouldn't say support of Putin is woke. And that's what not supporting Ukraine is. Given that the GP hates "woke", he probably has a soft spot for Putin, and so consideres the support of Ukraine to be party of the woke agenda whatever the fuck that is.
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Woke is anything grifters can spin their confected outrage over a phony far right culture war.
The far right culture war is real, though they did launch it for phony reasons. It's not like they actually give two fucks about the culture.
Not monolithic [Re:UK] (Score:2)
The far right culture war is real, though they did launch it for phony reasons. It's not like they actually give two fucks about the culture.
"They"? The right, and the far right, is not one person. It is a lot of individuals who are different and different goals. Yes, some of them are passionately obsessed with what they see as degradation of our culture. And others are interested only to exploit the passion for their own goals. And some don't care one way or another, that's not their particular issue.
The right is not monolithic. They seemed monolithic when viewed from a distance. But the more they gain power, the harder it is getting for them
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The far right culture war is real, though they did launch it for phony reasons. It's not like they actually give two fucks about the culture.
"They"? The right, and the far right, is not one person.
We're not talking about one person, nor are we talking about all of the people on the far right. We are talking about the portion of the far right which launched the culture war. Try to stay on topic, if you can figure out what the topic is.
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"They"? The right, and the far right, is not one person.
We're not talking about one person, nor are we talking about all of the people on the far right. We are talking about the portion of the far right which launched the culture war.
And they are not monolithic. This is important.
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And they are not monolithic. This is important.
They act together. They vote as a unified bloc the vast majority of the time, and in almost every other case they only vote disparately when it doesn't matter. They behave in a monolithic fashion, which is why they are able to be effective. This is not just important, it is fundamental and critical. While you're telling us they are not a single group, they are acting as a single group.
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Liberals and progressives are being fed a line that the right-wing is solid and unbreakable. They are not.
This misbelief is demoralizing liberals. The first step to breaking the right wing coalition is to understand that they are not solid and unbreakable.
Until the left can figure out how to break it, it's never going to be over.
They vote as a unified bloc the vast majority of the time, and in almost every other case they only vote disparately when it doesn't matter. They behave in a monolithic fashion, which is why they are able to be effective.
The fact that they act in a monolithic fashion is exactly why it is important to break the coalition. This is not just important, it is fundamental and critical.
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Liberals and progressives are being fed a line that the right-wing is solid and unbreakable. They are not.
Nobody said they were unbreakable. What was said was that they cooperate. Democrats should try it.
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The woke agenda is to stop systematic injustice that he doesn't believe exists, so it confuses him bigly.
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It's honestly a trifle puzzling how they manage to get on as well as they do. The "We love the police because t
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The "We love the police because the truth is Normal Rockwell" and the "We love the police specifically for the extrajudicial execution of poors and ethnic undesirables" seem like they would fall into disagreement more readily.
Those are just two different takes on the same white nationalism. In the first case they are doing the terrible things while pretending they don't like doing them, but they have to because the bad bad brown people are making them do it. In the second case, they are just enjoying it. They both have the same goals, and the only thing different is the cosplay, so they are natural allies.
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Do please enlighten us all on how to fix it.
Re: UK (Score:1)
Why would you want to fix it? You voted for the very series of morons that brought you all the fun and games john major warned you about 20 years ago. You wanted all that so here's a tea spoon, have some more of your own excrement.
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There's documented evidence showing external election interference. I don't think it's right to say that people voted with sound mind. So please, do elaborate on how to fix.
Sad part.. (Score:3)