This is unreal. Shitty software sending people to prison without anyone in the process considering what exactly is the likelihood of hundreds of postmasters simultaneously becoming thieves overnight.
Yeah, this is the part I'm having trouble understanding. A few people, sure. But all these postal workers committing fraud, with many insisting there must be something wrong with the software? How did this not get discovered before they were all convicted and sentenced?
And according to the article, the full number may actually be something like 900 people.
>Campaigners believe that as many as 900 operators, often known as subpostmasters, may have been prosecuted and convicted between 2000 and 2014.
How do you make this mistake almost 1000 times over 14 years before someone suspects the system data may not be quite right? Also, even if you do completely believe the data, how can you convict them all without additional supporting evidence, like new purchases that don't seem to fit their salary, suspicious bank transactions or balances, records of unusual system access or them actually manipulating data, etc.
It pains a very bad picture of the Post Office, including:
- an expert witness from Fujitsu, who developed the system, "had been aware of at least two bugs which had affected Horizon Online[...], but had failed to say anything about them or about any Horizon issues in his statements";
- POL arranged a number of conference calls to discuss problems with the system; "instruction was then given that those emails and minutes should be, and have been, destroyed";
- "there was a culture, amongst at least some in positions of responsibility within POL, of seeking to avoid legal obligations when fulfilment of those obligations would be inconvenient and/or costly"
Further, once a number of convictions had been secured, the Post Office then used those convictions in later trials as evidence that the Horizon system was robust and reliable.
All in all, a prima facie criminal conspiracy by the Post Office.
There must be two source of independent evidence for someone to be convicted of a crime. I'll be interested to see (if there's genuinely no corroborating evidence beyond the computer records) how many prosecutions went ahead north of the border.
Given this appeal took place in England (and not in the Supreme Court), it was all English verdicts which were overturned as I understand.
The requirement for corroboration in such a situation would probably be met by having someone "speak to" the digital evidence and audit trail.
For example, if you have CCTV evidence, the CCTV is one piece of evidence, and it would be corroborated by a witness statement of the victim identifying them from the CCTV.
Corroboration is an important and useful safeguard, but I don't think it would necessarily have outright prevented this. Perhaps it would - maybe it would have raised the bar on scrutiny of the evidence, by there being a general higher expectation?
Hmn possibly. I suppose I am interested to see if there is a practical difference because there's some debate about whether corroboration is a good thing to have or not, when you can have one piece of evidence (like DNA evidence) which is very high certainty.
I'd expect there was prosecutions north of the border seeing as the post office is UK-wide so be good to see how they went.
>>considering what exactly is the likelihood of hundreds of postmasters simultaneously becoming thieves overnight
I mean, I don't think anyone assumed they suddenly and inexplicably became thieves, just that the fancy new software finally caught people who have been scamming the post office for years. Obviously the software was completely wrong and it's criminal what happened to those people.
yes, this reasoning does make sense. but given the human cost it should only make sense if there's a significant prior: in most of these cases there was no previous evidence whatsoever, just a new system, and boom, thieves.
I think the core point here is how imbalanced this process was: postal system builds a new accounting program that shows money is missing. these people were convicted solely on the evidence that software said so, there was no burden on them to show that the money was actually missing. I mean, hard for me to grasp how is that possible. anyone can write a program that shows something. how is this sufficient proof to send people to prison? does it not need to touch some objective reality at some point?
Yeah I mean if your brand new software discovered that a retail shop was suddenly missing £50k/month in income, surely you'd do full inventory to confirm £50k worth of goods is actually missing. No idea how you would do that in a post office, but I guess take an inventory of stamps and any other services sold?
This would normally be the role of a forensic accountant.
My suspicion is that the Post Office wanted to do this "at scale" and "automate", and just assumed blindly their own records were accurate, because well... They must be!
Had they actually tried to investigate these as one by one offences, you'd gather evidence of individuals concerned making huge cash transactions to buy expensive cars and holidays. And when you didn't find any evidence of this unexplained enrichment (as there wasn't any), your investigator would point this out, and you'd realise you didn't have a case.
Similarly a photograph of the subpostmaster getting into their outright-owned Lamborghini would have been useful evidence there. The absence of any of the evidence of this enrichment seems absent throughout. Let alone the detailed forensic accounting to determine what was actually taken. I suspect the issue was they simply didn't have any way to tell what should have been there, other than what the defective horizon system said... They were trying to run at national scale, without enough ground truth information to validate their assumptions and detect the issue.
I agree. My first thought on hearing this was that they'd look at the priors and realize there had to be a mistake.
My second thought was that most accounting departments I've worked with actually wouldn't do that, would blame fraud, and then would congratulate themselves at how much better they've gotten at detecting it!
This reminds me of what happened after 9/11, the fear of dirty bomb was all the rage so the US government deployed a network of Geiger counters. They arrested a number of dangerous dirty bombers, all of whom were cancer patients spotted by the detector at the subway station nearest Johns Hopkins radiation treatment facility.
At least when my wife hit that in the Shanghai/Pudong airport (residue from a heart scan, not cancer) they resolved it in a few minutes of talking.
On the other hand, I think Shanghai didn't check well enough--there was one simple test they could have done but didn't: Hand held geiger counter, see what's hot. Body equally hot, baggage not hot, it's medical.
They implemented the system without even thinking of the false positives. Eventually they added that to the procedures, but they harassed quite a few people before that happened. Cancer patients on top of that, many of whom were probably half dead already.
It seems to me that's an awful lot of stupid on their part.
Patient claims medical--call the facility and ask if they should be hot.
However, having read about their stupidity I would be inclined to get a card from the facility even if I didn't expect to be going anywhere with radiation scanners. (My wife had a card--which was sitting at home in the pocket of the jacket she had planned to wear. She changed her mind on flight day and didn't think about the card until she tripped the scanner. Note that she probably had an easier time of it than a typical tourist would have as she speaks Mandarin at native level.)
And according to the article, the full number may actually be something like 900 people.
>Campaigners believe that as many as 900 operators, often known as subpostmasters, may have been prosecuted and convicted between 2000 and 2014.
How do you make this mistake almost 1000 times over 14 years before someone suspects the system data may not be quite right? Also, even if you do completely believe the data, how can you convict them all without additional supporting evidence, like new purchases that don't seem to fit their salary, suspicious bank transactions or balances, records of unusual system access or them actually manipulating data, etc.