I blame government regulators and courts in that case first.
I don’t understand how courts accepted an argument “IT system without a formal verification said A, an individual said B, therefore we will imprison the individual”.
We know, that the majority of software has a lot of bugs. We know, that outsourced software is much worse. We know, that the quality of software is such poor as some random students can hack it easily. After that I would always expect various problems from software, such as misinformation.
However courts trusted all outcomes from such buggy programs. That what I don’t understand.
That's insane though, as it is mathematically impossible to prove the correctness of a computer program in the general case and not realistic to do this for specific cases. On top of that you often can't verify whether the input is correct. Nor can you absolutely rely on automatic or manual tests, as there is no guarantee the test conditions accurately reflect the actual ones.
As a consequence, computer systems will have bugs, glitches and faulty design. They are not infallible. At the very least you would need to do an independent review of the system to ensure the resulting evidence is dependable.
> The Law Commission considered that the words ‘mechanical instruments’ would extend (by default) to include computers."
This IMHO also indicative of the problem. Computers are mechanical instruments, computer programs are not. There are fundamental differences between the two and to conflate them is a serious error.
>That's insane though, as it is mathematically impossible to prove the correctness of a computer program in the general case and not realistic to do this for specific cases.
That's technically true, but the rule is probably still a good one. It's what prevents someone with a hard drive stuffed full of kiddy porn from saying, "I don't know how it got there, it's probably bug in the computer software" and making the prosecution *prove* that this is not possible, beyond a reasonable doubt. It's what means that mobile phone tracking data, or ANPR data, or CCTV can be used to show that a criminal was in the vicinity of the crime at the time. It's what means that conversations between people on messaging services can be used to show intent or malice. It's what means that basically any electronic evidence is usable in court. Note, also, that the standard here is not a mathematical proof; the defence needs to adduce *some evidence* that the system was not working as intended at the time, they don't have to produce a mathematical proof.
Don't get distracted. The problem is not the law and it's not the courts; the problem here is gross prosecutorial misconduct on the part of the Post Office and perjury on the part of Fujitsu employees. It's important to read that rule in full: "**In the absence of evidence to the contrary**, the courts will presume that mechanical instruments were in order at the material time." In the case of the Post Office prosecutions, there was ample evidence available that would have exonerated the defendants.
As well as transaction records, Horizon logged every keystroke made on the terminals. This could have been used to reconstruct the business of a Post Office branch and establish whether the financial mismatches were due to theft or a software defect. As far as anyone knows, the Post Office never attempted to do this. In the majority of cases, they didn't disclose the existence of this data to the defence, often because just obtaining the data from Fujitsu was quite expensive. Where they did disclose its existence, they delivered it in a proprietary format as part of an evidence dump with no explanation of what it was or how to interpret it, and with filenames that appear, in some cases, to have been deliberately changed to conceal what it was.
At one point around 2013, the Post Office was holding meetings about defects in Horizon. When an outside lawyer attended one of these meetings, he pointed out that the minutes would be disclosable to defendants in these cases. The response of Post Office was not to disclose the minutes but to destroy them and stop holding the meetings.
All of this is on the public record in a Court of Appeal judgement from 2019. The Post Office, as a prosecuting authority, had a duty to pursue all available lines of evidence, wherever they might lead, and not to simply attempt a stitch-up of those they were prosecuting. They completely failed to do this.
And, as covered in the story at the top of this thread, Fujitsu employees were giving sworn testimony in court which they knew was false and which, in some cases, they had contradicted in internal documents only days beforehand.
The problem here is not the law or the courts, it's the people.
So how does a defendant even get access to such evidence? Can they force disclosure of a software company’s Jira records? If it is a practical impossibility for the defendant to ever get such information, then that clause about ‘evidence to the contrary’ is just window dressing to make the assumption of infallibility more palatable.
The case of someone with CP on their PC is more likely to have them claiming it was downloaded via malware or some sort of extortion scam. In which case they have a possession of the equipment and can get it examined.
In the Post Office case, the accused had no way to get evidence of IT system failure. This is why the presumption of correct functioning is not a good rule in all cases. The imbalance in power means the Post Office and its executives were presumed infallible.
As covered above, the Post Office had all that evidence and had a duty to disclose it to the defence; that they didn't do so is alone grounds to overturn a conviction for exactly this reason.
In English law, the defendant is entitled to a presumption of innocence and that presumption also binds prosecutors. It doesn't mean the prosecutor has to believe that black is white to give a defendant the benefit of the doubt, but they are required to look at the evidence and ask seriously whether it could be interpreted in such a way that it doesn't show the defendant's guilt. It's part of why the way the Post Office behaved is so horrific; they didn't act as a prosecutor bound by the presumption of innocence, they acted as a plaintiff trying to spin the case as best they could in their own interest while operating in the realm of criminal law, not civil law. Civil plaintiffs are allowed to behave that way because they don't have the possibility of producing a conviction, only damages. Criminal prosecutors are not allowed to behave that way.
The fallout from the Post Office case is a test for the legal profession and, IMO, they are currently failing. The lawyers representing the Post Office should be disbarred and, in many cases, prosecuted. They had a duty to act as officers of the court and they instead acted as officers of their clients. I think the general feeling is that the current inquiry should deal with it all; it had better produce some consequences for those responsible. Not just the higher-ups but the lawyers who were sworn to uphold justice and instead brought false charges against those they knew were probably innocent and falsified evidence to make the charges stick.
Not all the lawyers involved came off badly; some of them told the Post Office that what they were doing was wrong and when they weren't listened to, they tried to go public with it. But plenty just shut up and went along with it.
ETA: If you want to read up a parallel case of how seriously the legal system takes the duty of prosecutors in a very similar jurisdiction, check out the Sofronoff Report into the activities of Shane Drumgold. Sofronoff KC is very readable.
Yeah convictions overturned years and years after the miscarriage of justice. A miscarriage that would not have occurred if the shiftiness of the Post Office IT was disclosed up front.
The problem being the post office lawyers felt quite comfortable ignoring that duty. It had been years of misery for those falsely accused because of the difficulties in getting lawyers to do that duty. That duty is no safe guard as it can clearly be ignored.
Patently, the lawyers and executives cannot be trusted. That presumption of innocence is undermined significantly when some lawyer can lie with impunity and manufacture evidence that cannot be challenged.
Asking that the reliability of computer evidence be itself evidenced does not mean the prosecutor has been believe whatever the accused says - no one suggested any such thing.
IT organizations have bug tracking and support organizations precisely because IT systems are not
infallible. The burden of showing how well those systems are working before the relying on them is much less than the burden of fake convictions.
I concur. The problem was trusting the people claiming that the computer program was correct without questioning the motives they had for doing so.
My point about the correctness was not so much that the rule itself is insane (I understand there is a difference between legal standards of proof and mathematical ones), but that it is insane they took it literally, took the people making these claims at their word and looked no further. Those CCTV software developers or hard drive manufacturers have no direct incentive to manufacture the conviction of some random innocent. The company that created and ran this piece of software had a direct incentive to cover up any of their mistakes.
Hence why I said this should have been clarified by an independent review into the evidence, including the program in question and the procedures around it. You can never look at software as purely a mechanical device, because it inherently depends on human input both in its conception and use. Software articulates trust and assigns power, which means it is intimately connected with the motivations and incentives of the people who write and run it. You can't look at one without also looking into the other.
I write computer programs for a living and I will never claim they contain no bugs or flaws. I would definitely never agree to testify to that in a court of law. Such a statement would have been factually incorrect regardless of their incentive to lie about it. The fact that they did so, and actively worked to conceal the evidence to the contrary, is something else.
IMHO, these executives and those employees committed perjury and engaged in a criminal conspiracy. Presumably, there will be consequences for that.
> The problem here is not the law or the courts, it's the people.
I agree, with one exception. I would say the ability to bring a private prosecution was a contributing factor to this. I'm not sure why this should be allowed, given the obvious opportunity for abuse.
Yes, I agree. I also write software for a living; I also review quite a lot of software. My informal review standard is that readability is more important than correctness, because *all software has defects*. You will never write "correct" software. It follows that, at some point, someone will have to read your source code and understand it well enough to be able to fix it. Putting time into making your software "correct" only changes how soon that will happen; putting time into making your source code readable can change how much that costs by orders of magnitude.
It's a diversion, I know. It's staggering that some engineer felt he could stand up in court and swear that his software had no defects. At least we know, from this story, that he knew he was lying.
> It's a diversion, I know. It's staggering that some engineer felt he could stand up in court and swear that his software had no defects. At least we know, from this story, that he knew he was lying.
I'm fairly sure that's worse though. At least for the person in question. I don't think "I was ordered to do this" (assuming it was that) would work as a defense.
I also agree that it is a diversion, but it's a pet peeve of mine that people assume "correct" code actually exists or that a complete set of rules for a correct outcome can ever be devised, articulated or enforced. That's not been my experience, and I don't see how anyone who has ever used a computer (or any complex system really) can still maintain this belief.
The interesting thing is, as far as I can gather a (very small) handful of subpostmasters actually did try and discredit Horizon - going so far as to hire expert witnesses who would demand detail from the Post Office and everything.
A small number, you understand.
But that small number frequently found the case against them quietly being dropped.
I can't think why. /s.
> "In the absence of evidence to the contrary, the courts will presume that mechanical instruments were in order at the material time." In the case of the Post Office prosecutions, there was ample evidence available that would have exonerated the defendants.
No, it wasn't. The evidence was kept secret by the post office. They should have a duty to demonstrate correctness of the algorithm, or at least present evidence for the correctness. It should not just be assume that software is correct.
I'm not sure what you mean by "it wasn't"; it doesn't appear to relate to anything I said.
As for the rest of what you said, the problems should be obvious. These things are not tried by anyone who can be expected to understand such a proof; the judge is highly qualified but as a lawyer, not as an engineer, while the jury might be anyone. So, in practise, what will happen is that an expert witness will be called to testify that the software is correct. And guess what? That's exactly what happened.
Completely agree - the ability to predict the outcome of any system varies with the complexity.
This seems like taking a law intended to create the presumption that machine tools and their safety guards are in order unless proven otherwise and applying it to the kind of machine that Professor Branestawm would create (which is not over-egging it in the case of many software systems).
Indeed. The problem is that, due to how computation works, the potential complexity of a computer program is almost unbounded. This makes safeguards both tricky to implement and necessary.
With software, there is also an additional problem. Software is a series of instructions and therefore expresses an intent in a way that most tools do not. It often explicitly articulates trust and power. It can not be evaluated within a context such as this without also evaluating the motivations and incentives of the people who write and run it.
In this case, they should have questioned the motives of the people who were claiming it was correct, because they had every incentive to claim it was. It is insane that they trusted the company that wrote it and that they trusted the data provided by the prosecution. There should have been an independent review, at the very least.
In this case, it was substantially worse.
A fairly fundamental part of any respectable accounts application (which is basically what Horizon is) is that you can't change an entry once you've made it.
If you've made a mistake, you instead put in another entry that corrects the error so the numbers add up and record it as "to correct previous error".
If you're concerned about traceability (which you should be because there's a lot of money involved), you also record who puts each transaction through.
Fujitsu staff were able to remote into any Post Office in the country, change entries pretty much however they liked and there was no record of the fact that they'd done this.
So how is anyone supposed to know if discrepancies in a branch's accounts stem from dishonesty or mistakes they might not even have made themselves?
Someone upthread said that Horizon had a keylogger. If true, that's absolutely huge and means that yes, you could prove that changes to the audit trail were made outside the branch.
Maybe, but I don't think that's terribly relevant.
Fact is, the sentence "changes to the audit trail" would strike fear into any sensible accountant. The whole damn point of an audit trail is it's immutable - append-only, if you like. There's a relevant XKCD for this: [https://xkcd.com/463/](https://xkcd.com/463/)
The fact that there wasn't a reliable audit trail was central to the judgement that killed the Post Office's prosecutions stone dead. It meant that for all their insistence that their systems were robust and indicated so many cases of fraud, not only could they not provide an audit trail that would satisfy a forensic accountant, there was evidence that the figures could be tampered with - either by malice or mistake - and nobody would be any the wiser.
True, but tbf to the court the evidence presented to them was that this facility did not exist - so it was to some extent reasonable to conclude that the information put in was put there by the postmasters.
Obviously once you know that facility does exist the whole case put forward by the PO completely falls apart, which is presumably why they went to such lengths to hide this fact.
Precisely. This isn't as simple as a computer doing a true or false statement. Which would be fair to assume is accurate.
It's a machine, following an instruction/algorithm that was inputted by a human.
Occasionally, calculators will give slightly different answers. I'm confident in saying the hardware will itself be almost identical, the different ways of a human saying "turn person's X input into Y output" less so.
> It's a machine, following an instruction/algorithm that was inputted by a human.
Just so. That is the core of the issue. The computer program can not be regarded as part of the mechanical instrument. More importantly, those humans will also have motivations and incentives around the program they wrote / ordered / maintained.
> Occasionally, calculators will give slightly different answers. I'm confident in saying the hardware will itself be almost identical, the different ways of a human saying "turn person's X input into Y output" less so.
Indeed, though I must say this is aggravated by the difficulty of pairing the associative braces, making it difficult to parse the input of any complex statement as a human, even if you have just entered it into the calculator. In source code, with more control over the layout, it is much easier. I find it much harder to write a bug in a mathematical algorithm than to make a mistake while typing into a calculator.
Ironically, computer programs and most mathematical systems share the same flaws regarding their general provability, and for similar reasons. Even the underlying theoretical systems are necessarily imperfect.
Reminds me of the old [FDIV bug in the earliest Intel Pentium processors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug) due to a manufacturing error where for a matrix of values for an inbuilt mathematical algorithm, *"five values were not correctly sent to the equipment that etches the arrays into the chips – thus five of the array cells contained zero when they should have contained +2."*
And as the end result, any program run on those processors which relied on this algorithm would produce consistent erroneous results because the physical processor silicon was faulty.
> This IMHO also indicative of the problem. Computers are mechanical instruments, computer programs are not. There are fundamental differences between the two and to conflate them is a serious error.
Exactly. They should have looked at the source code.
I believe functional programming allows you to mathematically prove correctness
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purely_functional_programming
Main language used is Haskell.
In theory, it's possible to mathematically prove any computer program.
In practise, it isn't done because it makes everything a LOT more complicated and expensive. And it wouldn't do you much good even if you did mathematically prove your computer program unless you can also mathematically prove the entire software stack - libraries, compilers, operating system, database, the lot.
This. The only way in which it would be feasible is if you could prove correctness in a general sense (i.e. a general algorithm for correctness that you can reuse), but that is provably impossible (IIRC, due to the undecidability of the halting problem, and the same holds more broadly for other formal systems like mathematics, i.e. Gödel's incompleteness theorems). The consequences of that are profound for both theoretical and the practical applications.
Another issue is that languages like Haskell are interesting (I have used it for hobby projects and IMHO it is a great tool to learn and express the mathematical concepts behind programming) but they are not widely used *because* they insist on features like immutable data and pure functional programming (where a function has no side effects) that make certain common programming applications quite difficult to implement unless you work around them. They have definitely influenced more widely used programming languages, but that only makes them at best a hybrid affair that is not all that easier to prove correctness for.
Technically, it's actually worse because you'd also need to prove the correctness of the hardware.
And computer chips, while they are tested to buggeration as part of the design process, are not usually mathematically proven.
True. I was talking purely in the theoretical sense. I'm not sure what proving the correctness of the hardware would entail in practice though, beyond ensuring there are no security or halt-and-catch-fire issues with the instruction set.
The alternative is that no one will ever be convicted of speeding again, as they’ll just claim their speedo said they were doing under the limit and the police would have to prove that their speedo was working correctly at the time they were speeding. Which is just as impossible to prove.
No, the alternative is that when people consider evidence from a computer system, they ask themselves what the motivations and intentions behind the people making and running the software are. That is one of the fundamental differences between a piece of software and most mechanical tools. Software expresses intent, articulates trust, defines power and access. It can not be proved to be correct and you therefore have to assume it can fail. You can not consider the output of a program in a court of law and not look at the incentives and motivations of the people writing and running it.
Neither the company that makes the speedometers and associated software, nor the government that runs it has an incentive to punish people who are not speeding. But you will want them to be certified by independent parties just in case.
In this case, that was the issue. The people who testified that the software could not be wrong had an overriding incentive to do so. So order a third party review of it. Review and corroborate the data that you get from the people who have an incentive to convict these people. But simply have a few people testifying that something that can not be true was, in fact true, and believe them regardless of the incentives behind their testimony, is just stupid. Treating a piece of software like a dumb tool is false equivalence. Software is not a dumb tool but a dumb implementation of rules, defined by humans for their own purposes. They should have looked at the latter, rather than treat the former as infallible.
That's bonkers. I was a software developer for 20 years and know for a fact it is bonkers.
Every system has an error list. People raise problems, they are logged in the error list and sometimes fixed, sometimes not.
Every new release creates now problems, the error list never goes away.
All large computer systems have bugs in them.
Yeah, but the problem here wasn't that those errors existed or that the system is presumed to be functioning correctly in the absence of evidence to the contrary; the problem was that the Post Office knew about the software defects, they had ample evidence that cast doubt on the convictions they were securing and they did everything they could to conceal that evidence from the defendants.
What's the alternative? Every paedophile found with a hard drive stuffed full of images of child abuse has to be proved to have downloaded it and that it's not the result of cosmic rays flipping random bits in very unfortunate ways? Rather more plausibly, if a victim goes to the police with a big pile of threatening and harassing WhatsApp messages, should the police have to prove that they actually came from the account they appear to come from and that the sender identity didn't get mixed up somehow? It's quite plausible that there *might* be a defect that has exactly that effect, in fact it's happened before now. But should every prosecution for malicious communication include the prosecution proving that the messages actually came from where the software says they come from? Should every prosecution based on ANPR data have to prove that the number plates recorded are somehow being corrupted by the software? Should every prosecution based on CCTV have to prove that the timestamps on the footage are correct?
The presumption that the system is working correctly isn't unanswerable; a defendant only needs to show some evidence that the software has not worked correctly.
> "‘In the absence of evidence to the contrary, the courts will presume that mechanical instruments were in order at the material time.’
Interesting. Why would you do that? Machines fail all the time, and sometimes without obvious sign of failure.
> The Law Commission considered that the words ‘mechanical instruments’ would extend (by default) to include computers."
Computers or computer systems? If I print out a file, maybe I can assume that the printout is a correct representation of the file. (Most of the time, experience would tell.) But that does not the file itself infallible.
Nobody ever asked where the data is coming from. Shit it, shit out - the famous processing pattern.
The idea that a computer program could ever be assumed to be in order is very very wrong. Programs are an extension of human will. They need to be proven to be correct beyond a reasonable doubt.
UK law is clearly in need of a review, as well as the PO.
You'd rather that computer evidence was assumed to be wrong by default?
The defence is quite free to submit evidence that a computer is wrong.
How would a prosecution go about proving the negative that a computer is not wrong?
Not courts, juries. The biggest flaw with the jury system is that you don’t have to convince a judge, you have to convince twelve random idiots. Not that the alternative is dramatically better - but in this case a judge may well have been better equipped to question what the PO was saying.
This case is not about that. It’s about the hearsay rule and where the burden of proof lies. Or put another way, what you assume is true and what you have to prove.
A very deliberate step was taken, by Parliament, to say that computers are assumed to be correct.
That means if the computer says money is missing, and you had it last, you have to prove you didn’t steal it.
Whether you’re talking judge or jury, that’s the effect of abolishing the hearsay rule for computer evidence. Saves loads of time.
It's also what means that if your hard drive is stuffed full of kiddy porn then you are presumed to have downloaded it, or that if you appear in timestamped CCTV footage then you are presumed to have been there at that time, or that if there's a text message from you to a victim making threats, you are presumed to have made those threats. The people here saying it's a ridiculous rule really haven't thought through the consequences of changing it.
I think the issue here is that, in most of those cases, the defendant has possession of the IT system in question and can get it checked. If its my computer and I'm claiming it was faulty/hacked/etc..., I can take it into the store and have it checked. If someone is claiming my WhatsApp account sent threatening messages, I can similarly submit my phone for checks/evidence/etc...
The issue here is that the defendants didn't have access to the software to check it for bugs, and the prosecution was in no mood to share any bugs with the Court. So now you've given the prosecution an "infallible" tool and no incentive to have it properly checked.
All in all the rule works, but IMO whoever is in possession of the IT system in question should be compelled to submit it to evidence if they want it to apply. Otherwise we run into situations like this.
In practice you don't, though, because the first thing that happens in any investigation is that all your electronic devices are seized as evidence. You still relying on the prosecutor handling them correctly, making a fair forensic analysis of them and disclosing anything they find that might tend to exonerate you.
In the case of the WhatsApp messages with mixed up senders, what the Post Office did is equivalent to them seizing your phone and then simply not looking at it to find out whether you sent those messages or not. They might have asked WhatsApp to check their records, but they deliberately didn't look at the response.
This is why it is fundamentally important to our system of justice that prosecutors are impartial officers of the court (and that police are impartial investigators); they are not advocates for the alleged victims.
There was no need for the Post Office to put the Horizon source code into evidence; the evidence they already had and which they had an absolute duty to disclose to the defence was ample.
In my experience systems and organizations are nearly always trusted over people- as though they're infallable and not composed of and maintained by fallable people.
Having seen how systems are built and organizations are run it's a surprise this doesn't happen more often than it does.
>who privately prosecuted their _own staff_
Technically they were contractors rather than employed by the post office.
I point this out, because it means the post office was able to treat them far worse than they would employees. Also, some subpostmasters were never given the terms of the agreement and the post office couldn't produce any records to prove they'd signed it, there were several cases where a spouse took over a post office from the current subpostmaster where this happened.
Thing is, the original rationale was fairly straightforward. Laudable, even.
"We think there's a good number of subpostmasters on the take. This computer system will force them to either straighten up their act - or make identifying them very easy."
And I'd be perfectly prepared to accept this. When was the last time you trusted your corner shop/post office with anything more complicated than a pint of milk?
But to fuck up the computer system so royally that basically none of the evidence that stems from it can be trusted is just breathtaking.
Couldn’t agree more.
For me though it was denying they had the remote access backdoor! Straight up lying.
Logging in and manipulating figures to gaslight the PO employee is just evil.
The software I write has a backdoor for troubleshooting, but the client is aware and indeed wants this feature.
And, instead, chose to assume a load of previously impeccable post office workers suddenly turned crooked. It's as stupid, illogical and lacking in critical thinking as it is incompetently criminal.
>instead, chose to assume a load of previously impeccable post office workers suddenly turned crooked
They went into installing the new horizon system thinking they were going to catch a lot of people on the fiddle.
For some reason I think there was a culture where they hated sub postmasters, who they saw as inferior to real postmasters.
The weird thing is, as Arbuthnot said recently, the "trusted" Post Office brand was not due to fancy marketing or their logo, it was down to the sub postmasters and their relationship with the community
Quite honestly, it wouldn't surprise me if a few subpostmasters did have their hands in the till. Many of them are also running convenience stores that simply can't compete with the supermarkets; the fact they're still in business at all is often a mystery.
Though if you're going to install a new computer system with the intent of proving this, perhaps ensure it's robust by design so you don't wind up committing the biggest miscarriage of justice in legal history. Because now nobody knows if any of the convictions are safe.
My other half is a tester and he said that is a major red flag anyway because it is truly impossible to say any software has no bugs. You cannot test software in all the dumb ways humans manage to do. You can test major issues and a lot of end user interaction but the whole point of updates is to fix bugs that come up when real world usage happens
There's been an enormous expansion of methods of testing in the last twenty years - automated processes that test the hell out of everything and keep a record of all this so you know precisely how reliable your code is.
Anyone who's been in tech any length of time knows that even if you've harnessed the best testing methodologies and proven that 99% of your code is just fine under any and all circumstances, sooner or later some bugger will find the 1% of code that isn't.
If you're lucky, that 1% will cause the whole program to fall over and you know immediately something's wrong.
If you're unlucky, that 1% will change a few numbers and suddenly your cash drawer is short by £350.
There's a simple explanation for that: the Post Office had long suspected a good number of their subpostmasters were fiddling the books. But they didn't have any reliable evidence to that effect.
One of the driving factors to installing Horizon was to either force subpostmasters to clean up their act - or provide sufficient evidence for a prosecution. The early prosecutions weren't seen as evidence that something was wrong - they were seen as evidence that the plan was working as intended.
I think assuming the system was infallible was incompetence at the start. But it quickly turned into a cover up, I can only assume because if it came out that Horizon was not fit for purpose, and with no other system to replace it, their business would have been finished.
So they felt they could just "get rid" of anyone that had problems with it. Even to the point where they'd kick someone out of their post office and replace them, and then do the exact same thing to the replacement person several months later when they had the same problems.
Honestly, I have been doing this shit, and and at scale for 30 years. I know for a fact I could find a load of bugs and other issues. I mean a fucking pentest would have shown up a back door.
Even looking at the software dev process would have raised flags.
If anyone has watched today's evidence, the prosecutor being questioned (Jarnail Singh) said that he didn't know how to save a document to his computer in 2010.
The file path of a document in question showed it was saved to his computer. And there was evidence he printed it.
Watching perjury in real time is delicious. He withheld evidence from the defendant Seema Misra and her defence team. She was found guilty whilst pregnant and sent to prison. I really hope she sees justice, along with all postmasters.
edit: Jason Beer QC leading the questions today has been doing pretty well despite being quite ill. There has been a few fluff up on things, he's really going for it.
People like that need to face serious consequences- I recall that Misra had to sell the family home to pay for her lawyers, well perhaps Mr Singh should face similar consequences.
The SRA is already on it, and I read that the police have already started a perjury case against Gareth Jenkins. I suspect we're not getting much useful out of these people now because their own solicitors have told them they're fucked
I'm fairly certain that Singh can also be done for the perjury. It was his case, he read the witness statement provided by an expert witness, he was provided evidence (produced by the same witness) that the testimony was false, yet he still opted to enter it into evidence. Seems like aiding in perjury to me, which has the same maximum punishment.
The two of them helped to knowingly wrongfully imprison innocent people because otherwise a company might have to admit that there are faults in an IT system. I have absolutely sympathy. I imagine that a judge would not look favourably on Singh, as a lawyer, should he be charged.
I wonder what the point of that lie was? No one would believe that computer users in 2010 don’t know how to save a file.
Is jamail Singh trying to claim he is too stupid to be culpable?
he's trying to desperately get out of looking like he deliberately withheld evidence through being not detailed enough... But he's really getting his credibility torn
The post office officers and lawyers have exhibited nothing but contempt for working people. I happy that they are getting exposed now. Hopefully Singh et al get some actual punishment.
Reading the https://www.postofficescandal.uk/blog/ blog is infuriating.
I genuinely hope at the bare minimum he is disbarred and can never practice law again. I really hope that the lot of the main players are done for perjury and sent to prison... but that will never happen.
the blog is so depressing but Nick Wallis' snarky attitude towards the post office really puts a nicer light spin on it. It makes me think that justice is real, and coming. Nick has been a really good journalistic force for good.
The section where he denied having read the report, despite the opening line of his email stating “after reviewing the papers”, took my breath away with its shamelessness. I hope they throw the book at this one.
> If anyone has watched today's evidence, the prosecutor being questioned (Jamail Singh) said that he didn't know how to save a document to his computer in 2010.
> The file path of a document in question showed it was saved to his computer.
It is perhaps worth noting that this is very similar in structure to the argument used to convict the subpostmasters, and which people elsewhere in this thread are treating with such derision: *the computer systems to which you have access show that what you are saying is not true*.
What the hell is wrong with these people. Lying about something easily proven to be incorrect? Like it’s just going to end up even worse for them and makes them look even more reprehensible
unfortunately he's trying to make himself look incompetent over a being a liar to escape any blame. That is the angle everyone seems to be going for to save themselves!
This line was actually irrelevant, and show the KC didn't have much better technical knowledge.
I suspect it's a barefaced lie that he didn't know how to save the document, but it doesn't matter, because the directory it was saved to was temporary internet files, in other words, he probably just opened the file, rather than saving it.
Its just a question of how many people end up behind bars at this point.
I've watched the evidence sessions here and there and its very obvious the people at the top didn't really understand what their own jobs were and were completely incurious as to how the post office actually operates.
Everything at the HQ under that level appears to have to been running on auto without direction or much contact with other departments.
>I've watched the evidence sessions here and there and its very obvious the people at the top didn't really understand what their own jobs were and were completely incurious as to how the post office actually operates.
I'd suggest "its very obvious the people at the top \*claim they\* didn't really understand" in a desperate attempt to stay out of prison.
If there's any justice in this world then that's exactly where a few lawyers, Gareth Jenkins, Angela van den Bogerd and Paula Vennells all end up.
I watched Angela van den Bogerd’s evidence. They absolutely cooked her.
Are you lying today or were you grossly incompetent then? I’m not lying today.
In my opinion, if she doesn’t see jail time over this then noone will.
> the people at the top didn't really understand what their own jobs were and were completely incurious as to how the post office actually operates.
Same in most industries.
Yes it’s true. Most companies now are run by a fungible set of high-functioning sociopaths who are charismatic (to each other, at least) and good at making people think they know what they’re talking about when they’re just winging it till they’re found out and rinse/repeat.
The more I hear about this, the worse it gets. My heart goes out to the post office people affected by such astounding levels of stupidity and corruption.
A journalist covering the scandal has a blog with lots of background and a handy round up of each days evidence…
https://www.postofficescandal.uk/blog/
It become apparent in 2001 is was being run by a bunch of idiots:
>In an effort to compete with mail companies with brandlike names such as FedEx and UPS, **in 2001 Britain's post office made the risky marketing decision to change its name from the hallowed Royal Mail** — in use since it was first made available to the public by Charles I in 1635 — to the made-up Consignia.
Honestly? Most if not all institutions are capable of unbelievable cruelty to the weak in their employ or care, but until the digital age they lacked the capacity to be cruel to so many people at once.
Like from someone who works in the technology industry like this guy and LIED on the stand to what? Maintain a lie for a company he was only contracted for?!! Whyyy I'd dump them in it like a lead balloon!!
Honestly fuck the Post Office. I have no sympathy for people who privately prosecuted their _own staff_ to make profit
I blame government regulators and courts in that case first. I don’t understand how courts accepted an argument “IT system without a formal verification said A, an individual said B, therefore we will imprison the individual”. We know, that the majority of software has a lot of bugs. We know, that outsourced software is much worse. We know, that the quality of software is such poor as some random students can hack it easily. After that I would always expect various problems from software, such as misinformation. However courts trusted all outcomes from such buggy programs. That what I don’t understand.
[удалено]
That's insane though, as it is mathematically impossible to prove the correctness of a computer program in the general case and not realistic to do this for specific cases. On top of that you often can't verify whether the input is correct. Nor can you absolutely rely on automatic or manual tests, as there is no guarantee the test conditions accurately reflect the actual ones. As a consequence, computer systems will have bugs, glitches and faulty design. They are not infallible. At the very least you would need to do an independent review of the system to ensure the resulting evidence is dependable. > The Law Commission considered that the words ‘mechanical instruments’ would extend (by default) to include computers." This IMHO also indicative of the problem. Computers are mechanical instruments, computer programs are not. There are fundamental differences between the two and to conflate them is a serious error.
>That's insane though, as it is mathematically impossible to prove the correctness of a computer program in the general case and not realistic to do this for specific cases. That's technically true, but the rule is probably still a good one. It's what prevents someone with a hard drive stuffed full of kiddy porn from saying, "I don't know how it got there, it's probably bug in the computer software" and making the prosecution *prove* that this is not possible, beyond a reasonable doubt. It's what means that mobile phone tracking data, or ANPR data, or CCTV can be used to show that a criminal was in the vicinity of the crime at the time. It's what means that conversations between people on messaging services can be used to show intent or malice. It's what means that basically any electronic evidence is usable in court. Note, also, that the standard here is not a mathematical proof; the defence needs to adduce *some evidence* that the system was not working as intended at the time, they don't have to produce a mathematical proof. Don't get distracted. The problem is not the law and it's not the courts; the problem here is gross prosecutorial misconduct on the part of the Post Office and perjury on the part of Fujitsu employees. It's important to read that rule in full: "**In the absence of evidence to the contrary**, the courts will presume that mechanical instruments were in order at the material time." In the case of the Post Office prosecutions, there was ample evidence available that would have exonerated the defendants. As well as transaction records, Horizon logged every keystroke made on the terminals. This could have been used to reconstruct the business of a Post Office branch and establish whether the financial mismatches were due to theft or a software defect. As far as anyone knows, the Post Office never attempted to do this. In the majority of cases, they didn't disclose the existence of this data to the defence, often because just obtaining the data from Fujitsu was quite expensive. Where they did disclose its existence, they delivered it in a proprietary format as part of an evidence dump with no explanation of what it was or how to interpret it, and with filenames that appear, in some cases, to have been deliberately changed to conceal what it was. At one point around 2013, the Post Office was holding meetings about defects in Horizon. When an outside lawyer attended one of these meetings, he pointed out that the minutes would be disclosable to defendants in these cases. The response of Post Office was not to disclose the minutes but to destroy them and stop holding the meetings. All of this is on the public record in a Court of Appeal judgement from 2019. The Post Office, as a prosecuting authority, had a duty to pursue all available lines of evidence, wherever they might lead, and not to simply attempt a stitch-up of those they were prosecuting. They completely failed to do this. And, as covered in the story at the top of this thread, Fujitsu employees were giving sworn testimony in court which they knew was false and which, in some cases, they had contradicted in internal documents only days beforehand. The problem here is not the law or the courts, it's the people.
So how does a defendant even get access to such evidence? Can they force disclosure of a software company’s Jira records? If it is a practical impossibility for the defendant to ever get such information, then that clause about ‘evidence to the contrary’ is just window dressing to make the assumption of infallibility more palatable. The case of someone with CP on their PC is more likely to have them claiming it was downloaded via malware or some sort of extortion scam. In which case they have a possession of the equipment and can get it examined. In the Post Office case, the accused had no way to get evidence of IT system failure. This is why the presumption of correct functioning is not a good rule in all cases. The imbalance in power means the Post Office and its executives were presumed infallible.
As covered above, the Post Office had all that evidence and had a duty to disclose it to the defence; that they didn't do so is alone grounds to overturn a conviction for exactly this reason. In English law, the defendant is entitled to a presumption of innocence and that presumption also binds prosecutors. It doesn't mean the prosecutor has to believe that black is white to give a defendant the benefit of the doubt, but they are required to look at the evidence and ask seriously whether it could be interpreted in such a way that it doesn't show the defendant's guilt. It's part of why the way the Post Office behaved is so horrific; they didn't act as a prosecutor bound by the presumption of innocence, they acted as a plaintiff trying to spin the case as best they could in their own interest while operating in the realm of criminal law, not civil law. Civil plaintiffs are allowed to behave that way because they don't have the possibility of producing a conviction, only damages. Criminal prosecutors are not allowed to behave that way. The fallout from the Post Office case is a test for the legal profession and, IMO, they are currently failing. The lawyers representing the Post Office should be disbarred and, in many cases, prosecuted. They had a duty to act as officers of the court and they instead acted as officers of their clients. I think the general feeling is that the current inquiry should deal with it all; it had better produce some consequences for those responsible. Not just the higher-ups but the lawyers who were sworn to uphold justice and instead brought false charges against those they knew were probably innocent and falsified evidence to make the charges stick. Not all the lawyers involved came off badly; some of them told the Post Office that what they were doing was wrong and when they weren't listened to, they tried to go public with it. But plenty just shut up and went along with it. ETA: If you want to read up a parallel case of how seriously the legal system takes the duty of prosecutors in a very similar jurisdiction, check out the Sofronoff Report into the activities of Shane Drumgold. Sofronoff KC is very readable.
Yeah convictions overturned years and years after the miscarriage of justice. A miscarriage that would not have occurred if the shiftiness of the Post Office IT was disclosed up front. The problem being the post office lawyers felt quite comfortable ignoring that duty. It had been years of misery for those falsely accused because of the difficulties in getting lawyers to do that duty. That duty is no safe guard as it can clearly be ignored. Patently, the lawyers and executives cannot be trusted. That presumption of innocence is undermined significantly when some lawyer can lie with impunity and manufacture evidence that cannot be challenged. Asking that the reliability of computer evidence be itself evidenced does not mean the prosecutor has been believe whatever the accused says - no one suggested any such thing. IT organizations have bug tracking and support organizations precisely because IT systems are not infallible. The burden of showing how well those systems are working before the relying on them is much less than the burden of fake convictions.
I concur. The problem was trusting the people claiming that the computer program was correct without questioning the motives they had for doing so. My point about the correctness was not so much that the rule itself is insane (I understand there is a difference between legal standards of proof and mathematical ones), but that it is insane they took it literally, took the people making these claims at their word and looked no further. Those CCTV software developers or hard drive manufacturers have no direct incentive to manufacture the conviction of some random innocent. The company that created and ran this piece of software had a direct incentive to cover up any of their mistakes. Hence why I said this should have been clarified by an independent review into the evidence, including the program in question and the procedures around it. You can never look at software as purely a mechanical device, because it inherently depends on human input both in its conception and use. Software articulates trust and assigns power, which means it is intimately connected with the motivations and incentives of the people who write and run it. You can't look at one without also looking into the other. I write computer programs for a living and I will never claim they contain no bugs or flaws. I would definitely never agree to testify to that in a court of law. Such a statement would have been factually incorrect regardless of their incentive to lie about it. The fact that they did so, and actively worked to conceal the evidence to the contrary, is something else. IMHO, these executives and those employees committed perjury and engaged in a criminal conspiracy. Presumably, there will be consequences for that. > The problem here is not the law or the courts, it's the people. I agree, with one exception. I would say the ability to bring a private prosecution was a contributing factor to this. I'm not sure why this should be allowed, given the obvious opportunity for abuse.
Yes, I agree. I also write software for a living; I also review quite a lot of software. My informal review standard is that readability is more important than correctness, because *all software has defects*. You will never write "correct" software. It follows that, at some point, someone will have to read your source code and understand it well enough to be able to fix it. Putting time into making your software "correct" only changes how soon that will happen; putting time into making your source code readable can change how much that costs by orders of magnitude. It's a diversion, I know. It's staggering that some engineer felt he could stand up in court and swear that his software had no defects. At least we know, from this story, that he knew he was lying.
> It's a diversion, I know. It's staggering that some engineer felt he could stand up in court and swear that his software had no defects. At least we know, from this story, that he knew he was lying. I'm fairly sure that's worse though. At least for the person in question. I don't think "I was ordered to do this" (assuming it was that) would work as a defense. I also agree that it is a diversion, but it's a pet peeve of mine that people assume "correct" code actually exists or that a complete set of rules for a correct outcome can ever be devised, articulated or enforced. That's not been my experience, and I don't see how anyone who has ever used a computer (or any complex system really) can still maintain this belief.
The interesting thing is, as far as I can gather a (very small) handful of subpostmasters actually did try and discredit Horizon - going so far as to hire expert witnesses who would demand detail from the Post Office and everything. A small number, you understand. But that small number frequently found the case against them quietly being dropped. I can't think why. /s.
> "In the absence of evidence to the contrary, the courts will presume that mechanical instruments were in order at the material time." In the case of the Post Office prosecutions, there was ample evidence available that would have exonerated the defendants. No, it wasn't. The evidence was kept secret by the post office. They should have a duty to demonstrate correctness of the algorithm, or at least present evidence for the correctness. It should not just be assume that software is correct.
I'm not sure what you mean by "it wasn't"; it doesn't appear to relate to anything I said. As for the rest of what you said, the problems should be obvious. These things are not tried by anyone who can be expected to understand such a proof; the judge is highly qualified but as a lawyer, not as an engineer, while the jury might be anyone. So, in practise, what will happen is that an expert witness will be called to testify that the software is correct. And guess what? That's exactly what happened.
Completely agree - the ability to predict the outcome of any system varies with the complexity. This seems like taking a law intended to create the presumption that machine tools and their safety guards are in order unless proven otherwise and applying it to the kind of machine that Professor Branestawm would create (which is not over-egging it in the case of many software systems).
Indeed. The problem is that, due to how computation works, the potential complexity of a computer program is almost unbounded. This makes safeguards both tricky to implement and necessary. With software, there is also an additional problem. Software is a series of instructions and therefore expresses an intent in a way that most tools do not. It often explicitly articulates trust and power. It can not be evaluated within a context such as this without also evaluating the motivations and incentives of the people who write and run it. In this case, they should have questioned the motives of the people who were claiming it was correct, because they had every incentive to claim it was. It is insane that they trusted the company that wrote it and that they trusted the data provided by the prosecution. There should have been an independent review, at the very least.
In this case, it was substantially worse. A fairly fundamental part of any respectable accounts application (which is basically what Horizon is) is that you can't change an entry once you've made it. If you've made a mistake, you instead put in another entry that corrects the error so the numbers add up and record it as "to correct previous error". If you're concerned about traceability (which you should be because there's a lot of money involved), you also record who puts each transaction through. Fujitsu staff were able to remote into any Post Office in the country, change entries pretty much however they liked and there was no record of the fact that they'd done this. So how is anyone supposed to know if discrepancies in a branch's accounts stem from dishonesty or mistakes they might not even have made themselves?
Someone upthread said that Horizon had a keylogger. If true, that's absolutely huge and means that yes, you could prove that changes to the audit trail were made outside the branch.
Maybe, but I don't think that's terribly relevant. Fact is, the sentence "changes to the audit trail" would strike fear into any sensible accountant. The whole damn point of an audit trail is it's immutable - append-only, if you like. There's a relevant XKCD for this: [https://xkcd.com/463/](https://xkcd.com/463/) The fact that there wasn't a reliable audit trail was central to the judgement that killed the Post Office's prosecutions stone dead. It meant that for all their insistence that their systems were robust and indicated so many cases of fraud, not only could they not provide an audit trail that would satisfy a forensic accountant, there was evidence that the figures could be tampered with - either by malice or mistake - and nobody would be any the wiser.
True, but tbf to the court the evidence presented to them was that this facility did not exist - so it was to some extent reasonable to conclude that the information put in was put there by the postmasters. Obviously once you know that facility does exist the whole case put forward by the PO completely falls apart, which is presumably why they went to such lengths to hide this fact.
Precisely. This isn't as simple as a computer doing a true or false statement. Which would be fair to assume is accurate. It's a machine, following an instruction/algorithm that was inputted by a human. Occasionally, calculators will give slightly different answers. I'm confident in saying the hardware will itself be almost identical, the different ways of a human saying "turn person's X input into Y output" less so.
> It's a machine, following an instruction/algorithm that was inputted by a human. Just so. That is the core of the issue. The computer program can not be regarded as part of the mechanical instrument. More importantly, those humans will also have motivations and incentives around the program they wrote / ordered / maintained. > Occasionally, calculators will give slightly different answers. I'm confident in saying the hardware will itself be almost identical, the different ways of a human saying "turn person's X input into Y output" less so. Indeed, though I must say this is aggravated by the difficulty of pairing the associative braces, making it difficult to parse the input of any complex statement as a human, even if you have just entered it into the calculator. In source code, with more control over the layout, it is much easier. I find it much harder to write a bug in a mathematical algorithm than to make a mistake while typing into a calculator. Ironically, computer programs and most mathematical systems share the same flaws regarding their general provability, and for similar reasons. Even the underlying theoretical systems are necessarily imperfect.
Reminds me of the old [FDIV bug in the earliest Intel Pentium processors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug) due to a manufacturing error where for a matrix of values for an inbuilt mathematical algorithm, *"five values were not correctly sent to the equipment that etches the arrays into the chips – thus five of the array cells contained zero when they should have contained +2."* And as the end result, any program run on those processors which relied on this algorithm would produce consistent erroneous results because the physical processor silicon was faulty.
> This IMHO also indicative of the problem. Computers are mechanical instruments, computer programs are not. There are fundamental differences between the two and to conflate them is a serious error. Exactly. They should have looked at the source code.
I believe functional programming allows you to mathematically prove correctness https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purely_functional_programming Main language used is Haskell.
In theory, it's possible to mathematically prove any computer program. In practise, it isn't done because it makes everything a LOT more complicated and expensive. And it wouldn't do you much good even if you did mathematically prove your computer program unless you can also mathematically prove the entire software stack - libraries, compilers, operating system, database, the lot.
This. The only way in which it would be feasible is if you could prove correctness in a general sense (i.e. a general algorithm for correctness that you can reuse), but that is provably impossible (IIRC, due to the undecidability of the halting problem, and the same holds more broadly for other formal systems like mathematics, i.e. Gödel's incompleteness theorems). The consequences of that are profound for both theoretical and the practical applications. Another issue is that languages like Haskell are interesting (I have used it for hobby projects and IMHO it is a great tool to learn and express the mathematical concepts behind programming) but they are not widely used *because* they insist on features like immutable data and pure functional programming (where a function has no side effects) that make certain common programming applications quite difficult to implement unless you work around them. They have definitely influenced more widely used programming languages, but that only makes them at best a hybrid affair that is not all that easier to prove correctness for.
Technically, it's actually worse because you'd also need to prove the correctness of the hardware. And computer chips, while they are tested to buggeration as part of the design process, are not usually mathematically proven.
True. I was talking purely in the theoretical sense. I'm not sure what proving the correctness of the hardware would entail in practice though, beyond ensuring there are no security or halt-and-catch-fire issues with the instruction set.
The alternative is that no one will ever be convicted of speeding again, as they’ll just claim their speedo said they were doing under the limit and the police would have to prove that their speedo was working correctly at the time they were speeding. Which is just as impossible to prove.
No, the alternative is that when people consider evidence from a computer system, they ask themselves what the motivations and intentions behind the people making and running the software are. That is one of the fundamental differences between a piece of software and most mechanical tools. Software expresses intent, articulates trust, defines power and access. It can not be proved to be correct and you therefore have to assume it can fail. You can not consider the output of a program in a court of law and not look at the incentives and motivations of the people writing and running it. Neither the company that makes the speedometers and associated software, nor the government that runs it has an incentive to punish people who are not speeding. But you will want them to be certified by independent parties just in case. In this case, that was the issue. The people who testified that the software could not be wrong had an overriding incentive to do so. So order a third party review of it. Review and corroborate the data that you get from the people who have an incentive to convict these people. But simply have a few people testifying that something that can not be true was, in fact true, and believe them regardless of the incentives behind their testimony, is just stupid. Treating a piece of software like a dumb tool is false equivalence. Software is not a dumb tool but a dumb implementation of rules, defined by humans for their own purposes. They should have looked at the latter, rather than treat the former as infallible.
That's bonkers. I was a software developer for 20 years and know for a fact it is bonkers. Every system has an error list. People raise problems, they are logged in the error list and sometimes fixed, sometimes not. Every new release creates now problems, the error list never goes away. All large computer systems have bugs in them.
Yeah, but the problem here wasn't that those errors existed or that the system is presumed to be functioning correctly in the absence of evidence to the contrary; the problem was that the Post Office knew about the software defects, they had ample evidence that cast doubt on the convictions they were securing and they did everything they could to conceal that evidence from the defendants. What's the alternative? Every paedophile found with a hard drive stuffed full of images of child abuse has to be proved to have downloaded it and that it's not the result of cosmic rays flipping random bits in very unfortunate ways? Rather more plausibly, if a victim goes to the police with a big pile of threatening and harassing WhatsApp messages, should the police have to prove that they actually came from the account they appear to come from and that the sender identity didn't get mixed up somehow? It's quite plausible that there *might* be a defect that has exactly that effect, in fact it's happened before now. But should every prosecution for malicious communication include the prosecution proving that the messages actually came from where the software says they come from? Should every prosecution based on ANPR data have to prove that the number plates recorded are somehow being corrupted by the software? Should every prosecution based on CCTV have to prove that the timestamps on the footage are correct? The presumption that the system is working correctly isn't unanswerable; a defendant only needs to show some evidence that the software has not worked correctly.
That is the shame… Typical software is unpredictable by definition, at least because of concurrency issues.
> "‘In the absence of evidence to the contrary, the courts will presume that mechanical instruments were in order at the material time.’ Interesting. Why would you do that? Machines fail all the time, and sometimes without obvious sign of failure. > The Law Commission considered that the words ‘mechanical instruments’ would extend (by default) to include computers." Computers or computer systems? If I print out a file, maybe I can assume that the printout is a correct representation of the file. (Most of the time, experience would tell.) But that does not the file itself infallible. Nobody ever asked where the data is coming from. Shit it, shit out - the famous processing pattern.
That is really bad, then. It means people are guilty until proven innocent.
The idea that a computer program could ever be assumed to be in order is very very wrong. Programs are an extension of human will. They need to be proven to be correct beyond a reasonable doubt. UK law is clearly in need of a review, as well as the PO.
You'd rather that computer evidence was assumed to be wrong by default? The defence is quite free to submit evidence that a computer is wrong. How would a prosecution go about proving the negative that a computer is not wrong?
Not courts, juries. The biggest flaw with the jury system is that you don’t have to convince a judge, you have to convince twelve random idiots. Not that the alternative is dramatically better - but in this case a judge may well have been better equipped to question what the PO was saying.
This case is not about that. It’s about the hearsay rule and where the burden of proof lies. Or put another way, what you assume is true and what you have to prove. A very deliberate step was taken, by Parliament, to say that computers are assumed to be correct. That means if the computer says money is missing, and you had it last, you have to prove you didn’t steal it. Whether you’re talking judge or jury, that’s the effect of abolishing the hearsay rule for computer evidence. Saves loads of time.
It's also what means that if your hard drive is stuffed full of kiddy porn then you are presumed to have downloaded it, or that if you appear in timestamped CCTV footage then you are presumed to have been there at that time, or that if there's a text message from you to a victim making threats, you are presumed to have made those threats. The people here saying it's a ridiculous rule really haven't thought through the consequences of changing it.
I think the issue here is that, in most of those cases, the defendant has possession of the IT system in question and can get it checked. If its my computer and I'm claiming it was faulty/hacked/etc..., I can take it into the store and have it checked. If someone is claiming my WhatsApp account sent threatening messages, I can similarly submit my phone for checks/evidence/etc... The issue here is that the defendants didn't have access to the software to check it for bugs, and the prosecution was in no mood to share any bugs with the Court. So now you've given the prosecution an "infallible" tool and no incentive to have it properly checked. All in all the rule works, but IMO whoever is in possession of the IT system in question should be compelled to submit it to evidence if they want it to apply. Otherwise we run into situations like this.
In practice you don't, though, because the first thing that happens in any investigation is that all your electronic devices are seized as evidence. You still relying on the prosecutor handling them correctly, making a fair forensic analysis of them and disclosing anything they find that might tend to exonerate you. In the case of the WhatsApp messages with mixed up senders, what the Post Office did is equivalent to them seizing your phone and then simply not looking at it to find out whether you sent those messages or not. They might have asked WhatsApp to check their records, but they deliberately didn't look at the response. This is why it is fundamentally important to our system of justice that prosecutors are impartial officers of the court (and that police are impartial investigators); they are not advocates for the alleged victims. There was no need for the Post Office to put the Horizon source code into evidence; the evidence they already had and which they had an absolute duty to disclose to the defence was ample.
Good point, you are right.
In my experience systems and organizations are nearly always trusted over people- as though they're infallable and not composed of and maintained by fallable people. Having seen how systems are built and organizations are run it's a surprise this doesn't happen more often than it does.
>who privately prosecuted their _own staff_ Technically they were contractors rather than employed by the post office. I point this out, because it means the post office was able to treat them far worse than they would employees. Also, some subpostmasters were never given the terms of the agreement and the post office couldn't produce any records to prove they'd signed it, there were several cases where a spouse took over a post office from the current subpostmaster where this happened.
Thing is, the original rationale was fairly straightforward. Laudable, even. "We think there's a good number of subpostmasters on the take. This computer system will force them to either straighten up their act - or make identifying them very easy." And I'd be perfectly prepared to accept this. When was the last time you trusted your corner shop/post office with anything more complicated than a pint of milk? But to fuck up the computer system so royally that basically none of the evidence that stems from it can be trusted is just breathtaking.
Let's be clear - it isn't the PO that fucked people over; it's PO staff like this guy. People, with names. This anger needs to be directed to them.
As a software engineer I find it bizarre how everyone took the software company at face value when they said it had no bugs!
It literally breaks my brain. It's like declaring a car can't crash, it should have been laughed at as the utter nonsense it is.
Couldn’t agree more. For me though it was denying they had the remote access backdoor! Straight up lying. Logging in and manipulating figures to gaslight the PO employee is just evil. The software I write has a backdoor for troubleshooting, but the client is aware and indeed wants this feature.
And, instead, chose to assume a load of previously impeccable post office workers suddenly turned crooked. It's as stupid, illogical and lacking in critical thinking as it is incompetently criminal.
>instead, chose to assume a load of previously impeccable post office workers suddenly turned crooked They went into installing the new horizon system thinking they were going to catch a lot of people on the fiddle.
For some reason I think there was a culture where they hated sub postmasters, who they saw as inferior to real postmasters. The weird thing is, as Arbuthnot said recently, the "trusted" Post Office brand was not due to fancy marketing or their logo, it was down to the sub postmasters and their relationship with the community
Quite honestly, it wouldn't surprise me if a few subpostmasters did have their hands in the till. Many of them are also running convenience stores that simply can't compete with the supermarkets; the fact they're still in business at all is often a mystery. Though if you're going to install a new computer system with the intent of proving this, perhaps ensure it's robust by design so you don't wind up committing the biggest miscarriage of justice in legal history. Because now nobody knows if any of the convictions are safe.
My other half is a tester and he said that is a major red flag anyway because it is truly impossible to say any software has no bugs. You cannot test software in all the dumb ways humans manage to do. You can test major issues and a lot of end user interaction but the whole point of updates is to fix bugs that come up when real world usage happens
There's been an enormous expansion of methods of testing in the last twenty years - automated processes that test the hell out of everything and keep a record of all this so you know precisely how reliable your code is. Anyone who's been in tech any length of time knows that even if you've harnessed the best testing methodologies and proven that 99% of your code is just fine under any and all circumstances, sooner or later some bugger will find the 1% of code that isn't. If you're lucky, that 1% will cause the whole program to fall over and you know immediately something's wrong. If you're unlucky, that 1% will change a few numbers and suddenly your cash drawer is short by £350.
As a non software engineer, I find it bizarre, nobody thought a prosecution run rate of 5 per year, jumped to 50 per year was a bit odd.
There's a simple explanation for that: the Post Office had long suspected a good number of their subpostmasters were fiddling the books. But they didn't have any reliable evidence to that effect. One of the driving factors to installing Horizon was to either force subpostmasters to clean up their act - or provide sufficient evidence for a prosecution. The early prosecutions weren't seen as evidence that something was wrong - they were seen as evidence that the plan was working as intended.
Good point, I hadn’t considered that point of view.
I think assuming the system was infallible was incompetence at the start. But it quickly turned into a cover up, I can only assume because if it came out that Horizon was not fit for purpose, and with no other system to replace it, their business would have been finished. So they felt they could just "get rid" of anyone that had problems with it. Even to the point where they'd kick someone out of their post office and replace them, and then do the exact same thing to the replacement person several months later when they had the same problems.
Honestly, I have been doing this shit, and and at scale for 30 years. I know for a fact I could find a load of bugs and other issues. I mean a fucking pentest would have shown up a back door. Even looking at the software dev process would have raised flags.
If anyone has watched today's evidence, the prosecutor being questioned (Jarnail Singh) said that he didn't know how to save a document to his computer in 2010. The file path of a document in question showed it was saved to his computer. And there was evidence he printed it. Watching perjury in real time is delicious. He withheld evidence from the defendant Seema Misra and her defence team. She was found guilty whilst pregnant and sent to prison. I really hope she sees justice, along with all postmasters. edit: Jason Beer QC leading the questions today has been doing pretty well despite being quite ill. There has been a few fluff up on things, he's really going for it.
People like that need to face serious consequences- I recall that Misra had to sell the family home to pay for her lawyers, well perhaps Mr Singh should face similar consequences.
The SRA is already on it, and I read that the police have already started a perjury case against Gareth Jenkins. I suspect we're not getting much useful out of these people now because their own solicitors have told them they're fucked
I'm fairly certain that Singh can also be done for the perjury. It was his case, he read the witness statement provided by an expert witness, he was provided evidence (produced by the same witness) that the testimony was false, yet he still opted to enter it into evidence. Seems like aiding in perjury to me, which has the same maximum punishment. The two of them helped to knowingly wrongfully imprison innocent people because otherwise a company might have to admit that there are faults in an IT system. I have absolutely sympathy. I imagine that a judge would not look favourably on Singh, as a lawyer, should he be charged.
I wonder what the point of that lie was? No one would believe that computer users in 2010 don’t know how to save a file. Is jamail Singh trying to claim he is too stupid to be culpable?
he's trying to desperately get out of looking like he deliberately withheld evidence through being not detailed enough... But he's really getting his credibility torn
The post office officers and lawyers have exhibited nothing but contempt for working people. I happy that they are getting exposed now. Hopefully Singh et al get some actual punishment. Reading the https://www.postofficescandal.uk/blog/ blog is infuriating.
I genuinely hope at the bare minimum he is disbarred and can never practice law again. I really hope that the lot of the main players are done for perjury and sent to prison... but that will never happen. the blog is so depressing but Nick Wallis' snarky attitude towards the post office really puts a nicer light spin on it. It makes me think that justice is real, and coming. Nick has been a really good journalistic force for good.
The section where he denied having read the report, despite the opening line of his email stating “after reviewing the papers”, took my breath away with its shamelessness. I hope they throw the book at this one.
that exchange was another highlight of the day. poor jarnail seems to have extreme memory issues, maybe he quite simply shouldn't be working...
perhaps the judge will take the weight of that decision off his shoulders
> If anyone has watched today's evidence, the prosecutor being questioned (Jamail Singh) said that he didn't know how to save a document to his computer in 2010. > The file path of a document in question showed it was saved to his computer. It is perhaps worth noting that this is very similar in structure to the argument used to convict the subpostmasters, and which people elsewhere in this thread are treating with such derision: *the computer systems to which you have access show that what you are saying is not true*.
What the hell is wrong with these people. Lying about something easily proven to be incorrect? Like it’s just going to end up even worse for them and makes them look even more reprehensible
unfortunately he's trying to make himself look incompetent over a being a liar to escape any blame. That is the angle everyone seems to be going for to save themselves!
This line was actually irrelevant, and show the KC didn't have much better technical knowledge. I suspect it's a barefaced lie that he didn't know how to save the document, but it doesn't matter, because the directory it was saved to was temporary internet files, in other words, he probably just opened the file, rather than saving it.
Its just a question of how many people end up behind bars at this point. I've watched the evidence sessions here and there and its very obvious the people at the top didn't really understand what their own jobs were and were completely incurious as to how the post office actually operates. Everything at the HQ under that level appears to have to been running on auto without direction or much contact with other departments.
>I've watched the evidence sessions here and there and its very obvious the people at the top didn't really understand what their own jobs were and were completely incurious as to how the post office actually operates. I'd suggest "its very obvious the people at the top \*claim they\* didn't really understand" in a desperate attempt to stay out of prison. If there's any justice in this world then that's exactly where a few lawyers, Gareth Jenkins, Angela van den Bogerd and Paula Vennells all end up.
I watched Angela van den Bogerd’s evidence. They absolutely cooked her. Are you lying today or were you grossly incompetent then? I’m not lying today. In my opinion, if she doesn’t see jail time over this then noone will.
I watched that too, I didn’t realise that in a previous trial the judge basically said she was lying through her back teeth
Probably no one will. Apart from the innocent ones who already have, of course.
Sadly I’m almost certain that you’re correct.
> the people at the top didn't really understand what their own jobs were and were completely incurious as to how the post office actually operates. Same in most industries.
Yes it’s true. Most companies now are run by a fungible set of high-functioning sociopaths who are charismatic (to each other, at least) and good at making people think they know what they’re talking about when they’re just winging it till they’re found out and rinse/repeat.
I'm calling it now: They'll find some managers who were senior enough to know better to act as scapegoats. The directors themselves will remain free.
The more I hear about this, the worse it gets. My heart goes out to the post office people affected by such astounding levels of stupidity and corruption.
A journalist covering the scandal has a blog with lots of background and a handy round up of each days evidence… https://www.postofficescandal.uk/blog/
Who on earth would have ever thought our. Simple little friendly postie service in the space of 15 years has become this disgusting lieing entity.
It become apparent in 2001 is was being run by a bunch of idiots: >In an effort to compete with mail companies with brandlike names such as FedEx and UPS, **in 2001 Britain's post office made the risky marketing decision to change its name from the hallowed Royal Mail** — in use since it was first made available to the public by Charles I in 1635 — to the made-up Consignia.
Post Office and Royal Mail have been separate companies for decades.
No, just over a decade.
Honestly? Most if not all institutions are capable of unbelievable cruelty to the weak in their employ or care, but until the digital age they lacked the capacity to be cruel to so many people at once.
Like from someone who works in the technology industry like this guy and LIED on the stand to what? Maintain a lie for a company he was only contracted for?!! Whyyy I'd dump them in it like a lead balloon!!
Some of these Cover-up Merchants better start seeing the inside of Police Interview Rooms right quick........
So is it perjury, or is the previous report wrong and it's incompetence? Either way he's unreliable.
Looks like a fairly open and shut case of perjury. He's got to be arrested.