Despite 16-Year Glitch, UK Law Still Considers Computers 'Reliable' By Default (theguardian.com) 96
Long-time Slashdot reader Geoffrey.landis writes:
Hundreds of British postal workers wrongly convicted of theft due to faulty accounting software could have their convictions reversed, according to a story from the BBC. Between 1999 and 2015, the Post Office prosecuted 700 sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses — an average of one a week — based on information from a computer system called Horizon, after faulty software wrongly made it look like money was missing. Some 283 more cases were brought by other bodies including the Crown Prosecution Service.
2024 began with a four-part dramatization of the scandal airing on British television, and the BBC reporting today that its reporters originally investigating the story confronted "lobbying, misinformation and outright lies."
Yet the Guardian notes that to this day in English and Welsh law, computers are still assumed to be "reliable" unless and until proven otherwise. But critics of this approach say this reverses the burden of proof normally applied in criminal cases. Stephen Mason, a barrister and expert on electronic evidence, said: "It says, for the person who's saying 'there's something wrong with this computer', that they have to prove it. Even if it's the person accusing them who has the information...."
He and colleagues had been expressing alarm about the presumption as far back as 2009. "My view is that the Post Office would never have got anywhere near as far as it did if this presumption wasn't in place," Mason said... [W]hen post office operators were accused of having stolen money, the hallucinatory evidence of the Horizon system was deemed sufficient proof. Without any evidence to the contrary, the defendants could not force the system to be tested in court and their loss was all but guaranteed.
The influence of English common law internationally means that the presumption of reliability is widespread. Mason cites cases from New Zealand, Singapore and the U.S. that upheld the standard and just one notable case where the opposite happened... The rise of AI systems made it even more pressing to reassess the law, said Noah Waisberg, the co-founder and CEO of the legal AI platform Zuva.
Thanks to Slashdot reader Bruce66423 for sharing the article.
2024 began with a four-part dramatization of the scandal airing on British television, and the BBC reporting today that its reporters originally investigating the story confronted "lobbying, misinformation and outright lies."
Yet the Guardian notes that to this day in English and Welsh law, computers are still assumed to be "reliable" unless and until proven otherwise. But critics of this approach say this reverses the burden of proof normally applied in criminal cases. Stephen Mason, a barrister and expert on electronic evidence, said: "It says, for the person who's saying 'there's something wrong with this computer', that they have to prove it. Even if it's the person accusing them who has the information...."
He and colleagues had been expressing alarm about the presumption as far back as 2009. "My view is that the Post Office would never have got anywhere near as far as it did if this presumption wasn't in place," Mason said... [W]hen post office operators were accused of having stolen money, the hallucinatory evidence of the Horizon system was deemed sufficient proof. Without any evidence to the contrary, the defendants could not force the system to be tested in court and their loss was all but guaranteed.
The influence of English common law internationally means that the presumption of reliability is widespread. Mason cites cases from New Zealand, Singapore and the U.S. that upheld the standard and just one notable case where the opposite happened... The rise of AI systems made it even more pressing to reassess the law, said Noah Waisberg, the co-founder and CEO of the legal AI platform Zuva.
Thanks to Slashdot reader Bruce66423 for sharing the article.
Criminal fraud? (Score:5, Interesting)
The Post Office "Investigators" knew that there were many reports of problems with the Horizon system.
They lied to postmasters about the number of cases.
They presented falsehoods to get the postmasters to compensate the Post Office.
Isn't that fraud (obtaining money by deception)? How about some criminal prosecutions for the "investigators"?
There is also a case where a postmaster was convicted on killing his wife, with the motive being the apparent shortfall in the accounts (really, bugs or deliberate theft by Fujitsu) and, in that case, where it benefited the Post Office, the Post Office investigator said that the time that claims of shortfalls being due to the Horizon system were very common -- in direct conflict with what they were telling other postmasters, in order to obtain confessions and defraud them of money.
The police are investigating the Post Office (Score:3)
Though it feels like they are taking a long time about it. Let's hope for some senior people get heavily punished.
Re:The police are investigating the Post Office (Score:5, Insightful)
Slow? The police claim to have been investigating for almost 4 years, and in that time, they have interviewed a grand total of two people under caution.
Corruption runs deep in this scandal.
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CPS involved in up to 99 Post Office prosecutions, leaked letter shows [telegraph.co.uk]
“Scale of possible Horizon cases outlined in document is much higher than 11 the service has confirmed it prosecuted”
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Note all the prosecutions in Scotland were brought by the Procurator Fiscal which is part of the Crown Office and is thus the government because Scotland has a separate legal system from England and Wales the Post Office are not able to bring private prosecutions.
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Corruption runs deep in this scandal.
You misspelled incompetence. This is a government we are talking about.
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You misspelled incompetence. This is a government we are talking about.
No, I didn't. This was corruption. There may have been a few incompetent people, but the lies are clearly indicative of corruption.
Honestly it sounds like a purge to me (Score:2)
That said our postal service is heavily politicized right now because our right wing party is undermining it to privatize it.
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but here in the States if you saw something like that it would be a political purge of some kind.
Really? Did you see the politics in the Sates? Take your head out of the sand.
Re:Honestly it sounds like a purge to me (Score:5, Interesting)
This scandal is political only in the sense that the Crown Prosecution Service & the UK courts abandoned the presumption of innocence thereby denying the defendants the right to a fair trial. It smacks more of incompetence than conspiracy but then there may well have been conspiracy in the cover-up. It's always the cover-up where the worst crimes are committed.
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Political also in the sense that the Post Office is its own prosecuting authority in England (and possibly Wales, not Scotland), and brought most of the prosecutions itself. It looks like they are going to lose their prosecuting powers in England. I haven't been following proceedings in the Senedd so I don't know what is happening in Wales.
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>It's always the cover-up where the worst crimes are committed.
Hardly. However, it's often times the only thing that gets prosecuted. Sorry but the crimes are generally much worse that lying.
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Another political aspect is that a few years back the government changed the law so that people who are wrongly convicted and sent to prison can only get compensation if they can prove their innocence. They might be let out because the conviction is based on evidence that is later refuted, as is the case here were the software has been discredited, but they have to reach the an almost impossible standard of proof of innocence to get any compensation.
As such most of the affected people will have to sue to ge
Re: Criminal fraud? (Score:4, Informative)
That's not what "double entry bookkeeping" means, at all. And no they aren't.
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Then tell me what it means, because where I work, we have two independent teams that work on "purchasing" and "finance". They have their own "books" (meaning software) and they must match (what goes out to a vendor on a purchase order, must come out of a corresponding account) and in a really big firm, you even have a third audit that happens on the actual bank ledger because big companies have tons of internal transactions as well.
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Businesses are required to have two independently auditable books
Err ... LOL? The only businesses which have two independently audible books are those who are convicted of fraud, or are those who will be. Having two sets of books is a huge red flag.
I think it's time you redo highschool accounting classes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
"Computers considered reliable" (Score:2)
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UK can stop spending money on software upgrades.
What they have is presumed to be reliable.
(dumb judges don't like difficult cases)
Mr Bates vs The Post Office: The Real Story (Score:5, Interesting)
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How lazy and terrible.
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Incapable of Error (Score:1)
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Wait until you see your future AI judges... (Score:2)
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at least you still have an jury
computers are reliable (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: computers are reliable (Score:4, Interesting)
Any piece of equipment or software is a piece of shit Potemkin artifact made of duct tape and bailing wire by the lowest bidder, unless exhaustively tested to conform to specification.
Re: computers are reliable (Score:5, Funny)
Re: computers are reliable (Score:2)
Could you point actual fraud made with electronic voting. And please do not come with Venezuela as an example. The fraud there had nothing to do with the voting machines.
Re: computers are reliable (Score:2)
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Every time these voting machines are scrutinized by experts, lots of vulnerabilities are found.
More importantly, we do not need them. We can accurately hand-count paper ballots, and they offer less potential for malfeasance.
This is one thing that security-minded people on "both sides" of the aisle should be able to agree on, unlike mail-in ballots — and for the record, I am in favor of absentee voting.
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It doesn't even matter if computer voting were more reliable. It's not auditable; you can't have someone verify that the code is bug-free and wasn't swapped out nor overridden by the hardware, which you also can't verify. Also it's a lot easier to argue that someone swapped out some thumb drives rather than that they created and hid in their pocket 1,500,000 kg of paper.
Elections don't just have to be accurate, people have to trust them.
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As if you could audit paper ballots. Once you cast it, you cannot be sure of what is done with it. Someone with a small truck could swap 3,500 kg of paper, which would amount to 1,5 million votes, if each ballot was an ISO A5 piece of paper (It must be enough, I think. I've never seen a paper ballot.). The people counting votes could miscount them intentionally, or forced to do so. After the votes are counted manually, do you think they are summed up manually again? What if someone tamper the program that m
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As you said, someone with a truck vs someone with a pocket. It's also harder to sneak a truck into a voting booth than a pocket. Everything that makes paper a heavy, bulky, expensive, annoying pain in the ass also works as a minor security improvement. My area uses machine-counted paper ballots, with occasional manual recounts.
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You can do both. Have the evoting machine spit out a marked paper ballot. The voter can the visually inspect this ballot for accuracy before handing it in. If there is any question about the accuracy of the electronic total, just tally the paper ballots. They can even be made machine readable to speed recounts.
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Reliable is fine. Assuming they're infallible is not.
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It's no different from saying that any given person is reliable. It means they are known to not be prone to lying or embellishing events. It does not mean that they can't misremember something. Basically; unless someone speaks directly against them you can probably assume that what they say is the truth without further digging.
And yes, such assumptions are necessary even in a trial. Otherwise you start having to verify if the witness tells the truth, and if the guy verifying is telling the truth about the w
Re:computers are reliable (Score:5, Interesting)
If a witness says he saw a person in New York at 10am and on the same day he also saw a different person in Chicago at 11am we can reasonably assume he is a liar and his testimony should be ignored.
In the Horizon scandal the *ONLY* evidence that the money was missing was the computer system and the Post Office/Fujitsu claimed it was 100% bug free and reliable. *NO* software system is 100% bug free and reliable so they obviously lied.
Hell in one the cases 30,000GBP of stamps where suddenly missing from a Post Office branch. This is when a first class stamp cost less than 50p so you are talking well over 60,000 stamps magically went missing. That is a huge quantity of physical stuff to go missing and they could not provide any evidence the Post Office had even been delivered that amount of stamps which is over a years supply gone missing. The Judges should have been throwing that sort of evidence out as preposterous.
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Re: computers are reliable (Score:2)
Whoosh...
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Liar. That computer program said there is one, so there is.
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Camilla is Queen of England. Yes she is a Queen Consort rather than a Queen Regent like Elizabeth was, but still a Queen.
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There have been lots of instances of hardware and firmware bugs.
Notable that the show is misleading... (Score:5, Informative)
(source: https://infosec.exchange/@Goss... [infosec.exchange])
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The show may have been misleading but the underlying system and problems with it were definitely not. I mean the Wikipedia entry listing just the court cases and the outcomes is more detailed that those for whole countries and their histories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]. There was a *LOT* which happened here, and very little of it was good.
demand source code or you must aquit! (Score:2)
demand source code or you must aquit!
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Name and shame FUJITSU (Score:4, Informative)
Fujitsu wrote the system and were actively involved in its maintenance. This 'maintenance' included direct, unaudited, access to the live data files of a financial system. I believe it was the revelation that this was happening that finally derailed the whole pattern of abuse; if you ever discover that your company allows this to critical, court ready data run away, very very fast.
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This was pretty routine when I worked at a claims clearinghouse. We had routine access to claims and remits at 100s of hospitals. Not saying it was good, but it was a common practice when outsourcing this stuff.
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That is silly. Name and shame what actually cause the problem: A lowest bidder, ill defined contract by someone who had no idea how to define what they wanted, for a poorly run project.
It doesn't matter who is the vendor. There's a reason why government run IT projects end in a colossal disaster over and over again while the same contractors have zero problems delivering for other projects. Pointing the finger at any one person or company is completely and utterly failing to address the cause of the problem
Source code for discovery (Score:4)
And "Phoenix" (Score:5, Informative)
I am so glad that the department that I retired from was not, at least at that time, using Phoenix.
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I'm posting anon because I don't want my wife to lose her job. We can't lay all the blame at IBM's feet: yeah, the system is shot and a lot of it is their fault, but the problem is they aren't the whole issue. The biggest problem was Judy Foote, who was Minister of Public Services and Procurement Canada, who ignored IBM's pleas to delay the rollout of Phoenix because they were still fixing bugs and various issues. She was desperate to get it launched under her tenure as Minister, and the delay would have me
Report on the EPOSS PinICL Task Force (Score:3)
‘This extract from EPOSSCore.d11 has been written to reverse the sign of a number and is equivalent to the command : d = - d’
-------
Public Function ReverseSign(d)
If d
Else d = d - (d * 2)
End
If ReverseSign = d
End Function
-------
‘Whoever wrote this code clearly has no understanding of elementary mathematics or the most basic rules of programming.’
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Maybe they were paid by the line of code.
Re:Developer not computer glitch (Score:4, Informative)
It is indeed - the software had faults, and at least some of these faults were known about by Fujitsu (and likely the Post Office management too).
However, this situation (faulty software) would not normally lead to innocent people being prosecuted for theft and fraud. That requires several of the people who wrote and use the software to have lied about its faults (potentially in a court of law, as is alledged to be the case for some of Fujitsu's representatives).
F00F (Score:1)
Re: Well, duh! (Score:2)
If a financial system is using floating point, then that's your first mistake, right there.
More about the attempt to cover up the story (Score:4, Interesting)
Scary
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-... [bbc.co.uk]
Post Office executives appear to have lied on camera. The only real solution to this is to have all statements by such people to be made as legal depositions so that if they are later proved to have lied, they can be quickly imprisoned for perjury.
Re:More about the attempt to cover up the story (Score:4, Insightful)
This is the real issue-- It's not that the computer was wrong, and people went to jail-- which did happened.
It's that Fujitsu and the Royal Mail KNEW there was a problem with their software, and they covered it up for TWENTY YEARS. This wasn't the work of a single corrupt person, or a bad policy-- this was a systematic cover-up of a badly written piece of software that was deemed secure and infallible, and in fact, was neither.
Lives were destroyed. At least four people falsely accused committed suicide.
Ian Hislop deserves a medal for the work he and Private Eye have put into this case.
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Post Office executives appear to have lied on camera. The only real solution to this is to have all statements by such people to be made as legal depositions so that if they are later proved to have lied, they can be quickly imprisoned for perjury.
The real issue here is that nobody will be prosecuted.
a 16 year glitch (Score:2)
Burning the most valuable resource (Score:5, Insightful)
The single most valuable asset of the courts (in any country) is the faith, respect and trust of the public. Once those erode, even the most extraordinary effort may only partially restore them. Once fully eroded, the courts, police, and the government behind them are in for a long slow bloody death.
Police and the courts in the U.S. risk the same with "civil asset forfeiture" and minimally punished prosecutorial misconduct
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That's a different problem. I'm not trying to minimize it, but to characterize that as an execution is disingenuous-- that is murder. And it's becoming increasingly considered as such. It's not legal, even though police officers do get away with it far too often.
What @sjames is referring to is that regardless of your race, for instance, if the police can prove your vehicle transported as little as a couple grams of a schedule 1 drug (even if the drug in question doesn't meet the standard for schedule 1),
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And it's also illegal, they are doing things explicitly forbidden to the Federal government but pretending it's allowed by the Interstate Commerce clause.
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They're getting away with it to the tune of BILLIONS of dollars.
Apparently no one told them it's illegal.
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It's a terrible problem for certain, but unless and until it is understood to be TWO problems or even three, it won't tear the whole society apart or bring the government down.
The primary problem is that too many cops have become violent murderous goons. They will get violent with ANYONE of any race if they think they can get away with it. The violence and being quick to use lethal force not a racism problem. That they believe (and sadly correctly) that they are more likely to get away with it if the victim
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The single most valuable asset of the courts (in any country) is the faith, respect and trust of the public.
In that case, the UK is certainly doomed. (As is the USA).
Open Source in Procurement (Score:3)
Around the time of Horizon Online appearing in 2010 (not original pre-2k Horizon), the UK government, also the sole shareholder of the Post Office, was at the cutting edge [parliament.uk] of bringing open source into public procurement and increasing technical transparency.
What surprises me is that, at this point, there is very little questioning of whether single-purpose government contract closed source is automatically the right choice - there's a case for open and for closed, but Github is a lot easier to access for an expert witness. While there were also issues with the reference data, it is hard to think of a starker example of why having access for third-parties, even just to the code, matters (yes ironic, but did a Medium [medium.com] article few days back if anyone wants some more context links for this point).
This has become my go-to answer to "whether government money means public code only impacts technical people".
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Default? (Score:2)
"Without any evidence to the contrary, the defendants could not force the system to be tested in court"
I don't get it... even if it was considered reliable by default, why would you not be able to test the system in court? There's a lot of things that the court might consider true by default, but you can still challenge them.
Like, take official records, say the list of births, deaths and marriages... It would take a lot to challenge something in that, the records are kept carefully, nobody generally has any
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Sure, but the starting assumption is not that the official records are wrong. You'd have to prove it.
Whut. (Score:2)
Trivial to reverse the burden of proof (Score:2)
print "The other computer is unreliable"
Now the burden of proof is on the alleged unreliable computer's operator or creator to prove that it is in fact reliable, since the computer running the code above is presumed correct unless proven otherwise (which would require proving the alleged unreliable computer is in fact reliable). If you remove the presumption that computers are always correct, then again, a proof is required to show the computer reliability.
I find it baffling - seriously (Score:2)
That not one of them went postal.
Blame it on the tech. 16 years, come on -- it doesn't deserve a pass - not one bit. Pun necessary, and intended
I don't understand (Score:3)
So some proverbial guilty light on some machine lights up... didn't people have a right to the underlying information that informed the bulb lighting up in their legal defenses?
computers might be reliable (Score:2)
computers might be reliable but what goes into it is not always so. As they say, garbage in, garbage out and that is what happened in the UK.
not a glitch (Score:2)
A glitch is a transient voltage spike, the bane of analog anything. "Journalists" have expanded the term to mean anything outside of human control, because in the game of journalizm, using the latest cool word is worth 20 points. This was not a glitch, it was a bug. Also, the word is now 60 years old in the public vocabulary; no longer cool.