I went on a deep dive on this scandal about a year or so ago. One thing that struck me is the class element.
Basically, the Post Office leadership could not understand why someone would buy a PO franchise. It's a substantial amount of money up front, and people aren't allowed to buy multiple franchises, so every PO was an owner/operator position. Essentially people were "buying a job".
The people in leadership couldn't understand why someone would buy the opportunity to work long hours at a retail position and end up hopefully clearing a middle class salary at the end of the year. They assumed that there must be a real reason why people were signing up and the real reason was to put their hands in the till.
So they ended up assuming the postmasters were stealing, and the purpose of the accounting software was to detect the fraud so it could be prosecuted. When the accounting software started finding vast amounts of missing funds, they ignored questions about the software because it was working as intended. I bet if the opposite had happened, and it found very little fraud, they would have become suspicious of the software because their priors were that the postmasters were a bunch of thieves.
Someone brought this up in a previous HN comment section as an example of trust in software ruining peoples lives. But your explanation is far more human and recontextualizes it a bit for me - it just happened to be that this was done with software, but the real motivation was contempt for the lower classes and could have easily have happened 100 years ago with an internal investigation task force.
Growing up half in England and US I feel British culture is more attuned to the class aspects to this kind of event. Traditionally America likes to pretend this kind of class contempt doesn't exist (think of, people on welfare angry at welfare queens, unaware they will be affected by legislation they support).
> Growing up half in England and US I feel British culture is more attuned to the class aspects to this kind of event. Traditionally America likes to pretend this kind of class contempt doesn't exist (think of, people on welfare angry at welfare queens, unaware they will be affected by legislation they support).
As an immigrant to the US from latin america that has spent significant time in britain, this statement is the complete opposite of my experience to the point of ridiculousness.
Britain is the most openly classist western country I have ever been in.
So the PO creates a franchise program that they later decide isn't suitable for any sane, good-faith actor, and instead of revising the terms of the franchise program to make it so, they assume that the participants are criminals and prosecute them?
I think this is the parent’s point: this is the POV of the rich and powerful who lead the organization. They can’t imagine someone in a different position seeing these franchises as a way to secure good (or at least decent), long-term, stable employment.
Interesting how supposed fraud from lower class people is a high priority that must be punished, but fraud from upper class people is almost always protected by the corporate veil.
I came to realize spending few minutes every so many years to cast a vote in between the purchase of that great massage gun and groceries shopping, for party members who have been extensively vetted and not by you, doesn’t entitle to any control. Democracy is simply the most successful strategy to make believe into fairness and reduce costs of exercising power. With the capability to excise taxes and leverage them into debt that will always be repaid, one way or another, until the last citizen breathes government is, and always was, the greatest business of all times. Corporations who invest at every level, all the time, to make a buck do buy control. Mostly proportional to their investments into the wheels of government.
This is a salient observation that I don’t think has been presented bluntly enough by the media or popular culture (such as Mr Bates Vs The Post Office).
The UK is class-obsessed, which is not as immediately clear to the rest of the world (especially US). Lends a lot of credence to your theory.
As a cultural mutt between US and UK, I think UK is "class-aware" and US is more obsessed with the idea that if we all wear jeans then class isn't a thing. I see the same class contempt in US as the UK, and not recognizing it for what it is keeps people divided.
I found this comment insightful but I feel I must itirate ( maybe its not needed), that it is not "clear" if leadership were ignorant, as you said, ( though Im sure you are part right ), I have read that it was malicious leadership trying to protect their own asses as per another comment.
I don't mean to let the leadership off the hook. What they did was profoundly wrong and they have blood on their hands.
There were two phases though: the initial rollout, and sometime later the coverup.
If they had asked very reasonable questions about the software during the rollout there would have been no need for a coverup. No software rolls out without any bugs and it's really reasonable to ask why so many post offices had missing funds and if they were sure if it was real or not. The PO leadership basically ignored all evidence that there were bugs from the very beginning, and that makes no sense until you realize that they were starting from the premise that the postmasters are thieves and this software is going to catch them.
What I've seen so far suggest they were just ignorant and victims of confirmational bias etc. You can see that when they won some cases they wrote internally something to the effect of "Final we can put to rest all those concerns about these cases blablabla". So it became self-validating. Also the courts and defense lawyers didn't manage to the see the pattern and in the huge numbers of such cases. Each defendant was fighting their own battle. Also, a mathematician from Fujitsu gave "convincing" testimony they didn't have any errors. A lot was down to lack of understanding of how technology works. The fact that xx millions of transactions were processed without errors doesn't preclude that there could be errors in a small number, as was the case. In this case sometimes coming down to random effects like if race conditions were triggered.
I'd wager there was a solid amount of general incompetence involved at the PO "corporate" - management politically couldn't admit that their consultingware could be anything other than perfect, because they signed off on the decision to buy it, and probably on all the work orders that got them to that point.
If anyone from PO management or that of the consulting firm (Fujitsu, I believe?) ever get any work again, it will be a travesty of justice.
Yes at some point it turned into CYA. When the leadership started realizing that there were problems with the software they started doubling down, getting even more aggressive with prosecutions, because they were trying to hide their own fuckups.
But when the ball started rolling, as the software rolled out and was finding missing funds everywhere, you'd think a normal person would have asked "are we sure there are no bugs here?" That was never done, I believe, because the software was matching the leadership's priors.
These kinds of assumptions about fraud always make me wonder about the folks in charge.
I was at a company acquired by silicon valley company. Our tech support department was folded into another tech support department. Immediately the folks in the valley were upset that we closed more cases / had far higher customer satisfaction scores ... by far. They made no secret that they assumed that us mid-westerners doing the same job had to be inferior at the same job.
Eventually a pool of managers in the valley developed a full blown conspiracy theory that we were cooking the books by making fake cases and so on. It just had to be that right? No other explanation.
They finally got someone in an outside department to look into it. They found folks closing cases prematurely and even duplicating cases. The people doing it all worked for the managers pointing fingers at everyone else ...
Sometimes the folks who talk about fraud think those things because that's how they work.
I've been following this since the guardian wrote about it, maybe 2011 or 2013 (private eye was earlier) It was insane. I couldn't understand the lack of fuss. Maybe it is because as a programmer I guess that 95 percent of all software is complete shit and most of the developers don't know or don't care.
You've hit the nail on the head "why would anyone want a middle class life" yeah they have never known anything less than that.
The other factor to me is the careerism, all that matters is the project success, who cares if the riff raff end up committing suicide. Honestly listening to some of the tapes of those meetings makes me feel sick. Thing is, I think so many career orientated people I know wouldn't even consider that what went on in the meetings was beyond the pale. It's black mirror level.
I'm from Ireland, but I live on "mainland Britain" the UK class system is mind boggling. I think the establishment here despises the "great unwashed". God help any working class person who ends up in the courts system.
One final thing, Paula Vennells was an ordained church minister. She was preaching while she was overseeing the destruction of so many innocent hardworking people. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paula_Vennells
I don't know why that makes this all worse but some how it does. Somehow it speaks to what the UK is or has become.
I doubt she'll get the prison time she deserves. Actually I doubt she'll serve any time at all.
>One final thing, Paula Vennells was an ordained church minister. She was preaching while she was overseeing the destruction of so many innocent hardworking people. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paula_Vennells
She was very nearly parachuted in a Bishop of London, off the 'success' of her term in the post office:
> One final thing, Paula Vennells was an ordained church minister. She was preaching while she was overseeing the destruction of so many innocent hardworking people. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paula_Vennells
>
> I don't know why that makes this all worse but some how it does. Somehow it speaks to what the UK is or has become.
It makes it worse because most people are familiar with the tenets of christianity and know that this behavior is counter to that value system.
I think it's one of the most redeeming points of christianity/religion in general -- there is a standard to which people can be judged and agree to be judged. That's why it makes it worse, this person is not only doing terrible things, but doing terrible things while professing to believe a value system that would not condone it.
My entry-point was listening to this podcast, it's pretty long but it goes into the fact that the purpose of horizon was to detect fraud and reduce shrinkage, that the leadership and their consultants were coming up with outsized estimates for the amount of fraud and using that as financial justification for the project.
They also talk about postmaster's motivations for buying a franchise and how sitting behind a retail desk in a small town with a modest but steady income is actually one of the best outcomes available to the type of working-class Briton who was buying the franchise.
1) The franchise actually does represent a decent amount of stability and financial security for the franchisee. Well-run locations typically could clear a modest profit for the owner. These were not money losing franchises for the most part (until the prosecutions started of course).
2) The post offices were geographically distributed pretty evenly throughout the UK so there were positions in far-flung locations well outside London. In many of these communities it was a good and stable job compared to what else was available.
3) Many of the postmasters reported liking working retail positions where they get a lot of face time with customers. In many small towns the post office was a central part of the community.
Nevermind sibling comment about money-losing businesses, there are many small business operations like this where a substantial amount of capital buys a relatively moderate paying retail job. Think things like Subway franchises, or gas stations.
Historically it wasnt a bad thing since it was an add on to an existing shop.
The general idea being that I would come in to pick up my pension/tv licence or various other things the PO used to be the source for and then spend it in the other part of the shop.
> a retail position and end up hopefully clearing a middle class salary
Normal retail work is below the poverty line.
Beyond that i think it might be the social/community aspect. I simply can't use the post office in my town as its used as a social club for everyone over 70. Some people are just in to that kinda thing i suppose.
This is utterly illogical. Who in their right mind would commit a crime with a 100% probability of getting caught?
This isn't a classic embezzlement of public funds, where the people receiving the money are also the people deciding whether it was well spent or not and hence could easily divert some of the money through behind the scenes deals with contractors without getting caught.
The "embezzlement" here is on the level of getting an invoice and not paying it.
This was depressing to read. Failures at so many levels.
1. Immediately after Horizon was rolled out, issues were reported. But ignored
2. Prosecutors didn't bother to verify if there is another explanation before accusing thousands of people of stealing? Isn't it common sense to pause for a second and think, "could we please double check the evidence? how can thousands of postal workers suddenly turn into thieves?"
3. local newspaper had published a photo of her and labeled her the “pregnant thief.” - of course, UK tabloids. Click baits and write whatever the fuck they want, no matter whose lives are destroyed
4. post office has said that it does not have the means to provide redress for that many people - so they have the means to falsely prosecute and destroy the lives of thousands of people, but they don't have the means to correct their blunders?
This happened more than a decade ago. Citizens are expected to do everything on time (pay taxes, renew drivers license...) or get fined/jailed, but the government can sit on their butt for 10 YEARS and do nothing about a blunder they caused?
What about Fujitsu? Why can't the government make Fujitsu pay for the destruction caused by their shitty software?
Read about this [1, 2]. This is not yet a well-known scandal, but I expect (and hope) it will surface in the coming years or decade. It is on an even bigger scale, not limited to a single country, and it has been going on not just for 10 years but for many decades.
Reminds me somewhat of the child sex abuse hysteria in the 80s/90s involving daycare centers and the many horrific accusations that people took at face value and without question, being (rightfully) concerned for the wellbeing of the children. It was finally understood that it was relatively easy to plant false memories in young children through suggestive questioning. People went to jail for years before their convictions were overturned, and the impact on society lives on.
> What about Fujitsu? Why can't the government make Fujitsu pay for the destruction caused by their shitty software?
Because the software didn't cause it.
Look, by all accounts the software was/is a piece of piss, but what made it such an egregious scandal is how the Post Office leadership dealt with things. There was really no good reason for that to happen. They just ignored reports of problems (proper reports written by auditors, not vague rumours). They lied to postmasters by saying that no one has problems (when, in fact, there were hundreds of people). Lots has been written about all of this and I won't repeat it all here.
So I must object to the phrasing of "caused by their shitty software". Of course lots can be said about the failings of the software itself and Fujitsu also lied and covered their tracks so they are not entirely blameless. But they emphatically did not "cause" any of this: it was the Post Office leadership who primarily caused this mess.
Lots of things go wrong in the world, lots of things are defective. What often matters the most is not so much the mistake or defect itself, but what the response to that is.
I'm going to have to pull you up on this detail, as you seem to care about the details.
Fujitsu/ICL won the contract to develop and run Horizon. They got a commission on every EFTPOS sale. They paid for all the computers, all the network setup, all the staff training. They literally ran the helpline. If you were a sub-postmaster and had a problem with Horizon, you called Fujitsu.
It was Fujitsu that then told you that the bug you found in Horizon wasn't a bug and nobody else was experiencing it, at exactly the same time their internal IT tickets had fully documented the bug and their staff were trying to patch up that bug before it happened to anyone else.
Fujitsu also claimed, in many court cases, that they had no remote access to Horizon. But they did. They also let engineers use it, and push one-off code fixes, to "fix-up" known errors that had been made in ledgers on the computer in your Post Office, so there was no source of truth anywhere in the system. If courts had known this, almost every Post Office private prosecution would have been thrown in the bin for unreliable evidence. Instead, courts ran on the belief that computers were like calculators, and can be assumed to be reliable unless proven faulty.
It was Fujitsu not volunteering this fact, and indeed barristers coaching Fujitsu expert witnesses on what to say and what not to reveal, ignoring procedural rules that the barristers knew had to be followed that say you have to reveal pertinent facts to the defence.
Fujitsu were in it up to their necks along with the Post Office. They made material gains by denying bugs existed, denying they had remote access, falsely claiming their system was reliable, and having their staff perjure themselves in prosecutions brought by the Post Office.
Without Fujitsu's complicity and mendacity, the Post Office might not have succeeded in prosecuting anyone - and of course, without the phantom losses caused by their broken software, they'd have no cases to prosecute.
I was a lead Technical Architect and authority on behalf of HM Treasury for a while, and I will tell you this: this is just the tip of the iceberg in government procurement.
I've witnessed faulty systems in DVLA, DEFRA, DWP, Home Office, MOJ and Scottish Government. Systems that have directly resulted in suicide, false convictions, corruption and loss of money to the public purse.
The problem with Horizon and Fujitsu is that in the end the government has to sign it off, and there will be someone who is the Accountable Officer (AO). More often than not, all parties (customer and supplier) become incredibly motivated to protect the AO because it protects profits, protects reputational damage and essentially builds a good news story around the whole thing.
It's just elitism, wrapped up in cronyism, veiled in lies so that AOs can fail upwards into positions with suppliers. I've seen it too many times and I'm fed-up with it. Government is completely and utterly corrupt.
I suggest you keep an eye on what's being published in Private Eye and Computer Weekly if you have access to those where you are. They're holding feet to the fire on all these points.
One thing I would say is that if somebody is convicted in the UK, it's acceptable legally and culturally to call them by the crime they committed.
The problem is that in this case the Post Office had unique legal powers, and was being run by people who did not want to "harm the brand" by admitting they had made mistakes, so kept digging.
There is also a fundamental flaw in how the courts - and the Post Office prosecutors - were instructed to think about the evidence in common law.
Bizarrely, it was not (and may still not), be an acceptable defense to say that computer records are wrong. They are assumed correct in UK courts. IT systems were legally considered infallible, and if your evidence contradicts an IT systems evidence, you were considered a liar by the court, and a jury might be instructed accordingly.
Yes, that's awful. Yes, it's ruined lives.
But also, I think all involved have realised pointing fingers at one or two individuals to blame hasn't really helped fix things. Like an air accident, you have to have several things go wrong and compound errors to get into this amount of trouble, normally. There were systemic failing across procurement, implementation, governance, investigations, prosecutions, within the justice system and beyond.
I already know people who have worked for Fujitsu in the UK are not exactly shouting about it. And yet, they're still getting awarded contracts before the compensation has been paid out...
>And was being run by people who did not want to "harm the brand"
We've seen this time and again. Organizations would rather throw people under the bus than damage the organizations reputation/brand. For example, the Church of England has tried to cover up numerous sexual abuse scandals. This is a recent and particularly nasty case:
Lets ignore everything else for a second. Isn't it common sense, common decency to ask how can thousands of postal workers become thieves overnight? We're talking about postal workers for fuck's sake, not a bunch of mafia dudes. Is there some kind of perverse incentive for the prosecutors to send as many people to jail as possible, guilty or not?
run by people who did not want to "harm the brand"
Oh well, now their precious brand has been harmed, how exactly do they expect to gain the trust, respect of the people back? Maybe they think the public will forget and move on? These people suck...
> They are assumed correct in UK courts. IT systems were legally considered infallible
This will change when elected officials start getting hoisted by their own electronic petards.
The Venn diagram of midwit enterprise developers who build systems with audit trails yet could not swear under penalty of perjury that the audit trail is absolutely correct in every case is almost a circle.
I don't like the tabloids either but what exactly do you propose we do? Are you sure it's a good idea to undermine the freedom of the press?
A government with the power to censor the tabloids is also a government with the power to censor the news outlets that you do like. I'd be careful about opening that can of worms.
I think the Internet is gradually destroying them economically. Google stole their lunch money. Unfortunately it is also destroying the broadsheet papers. I'm not sure any of them profitable now. And that means much less investigative journalism.
>2. Prosecutors didn't bother to verify if there is another explanation before accusing thousands of people of stealing? Isn't it common sense to pause for a second and think, "could we please double check the evidence? how can thousands of postal workers suddenly turn into thieves?"
They genuinely thought that the new software was uncovering a lot of theft that previously went undetected. This actually spurred them on even further thinking that the software was a godsend.
The sickening part is the people responsible won't ever see the inside of a prison cell despite sending many to prison for their failures.
Rationalization is a powerful force. People rarely come to objective beliefs based on evidence. They come to beliefs and then search for evidence. In law enforcement, people tend to decide on a suspect and then look for proof. Hence why you so often see prosecutors and police fighting to punish innocent people, sometimes even after they've been proven to be innocent.
Describes pretty much the vast majority of people. All groups/institutions/enterprises made of such people will follow a similar path. Point being - there is no hope.
One of the things that frustrates me with how ethics is taught in computer science is that we use examples like Therac 25, and people listen in horror, then their takeaway is frequently "well thank god I don't work on medical equipment".
The fact that it's medical equipment is a distraction. All software can cause harm to others. All of it. You need to care about all of it.
Therac 25 is exactly what I thought of when reading this story. The software didn't have direct hardware control to kill patients with radiation, but it still resulted in thousands of victims.
I work on satellites that are intended for use in missile tracking. If I fail in the software, it might not "kill people", but people will die due to the failures.
Though, I used to work on fighter jets and SAMs. People do die due to my work.
Ethic classes are pointless without ethical liability and accountability of people causing suffering. Yes, even the Jira javascript ticket punchers hould be accountable for what they do.
The four-part mini-series Mr Bates vs The Post Office is worth checking out:
> A faulty IT system called Horizon, developed by Fujitsu, creates apparent cash shortfalls that cause Post Office Limited to pursue prosecutions for fraud, theft and false accounting against a number of subpostmasters across the UK. In 2009, a group of these, led by Alan Bates, forms the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance. The prosecutions and convictions are later ruled a miscarriage of justice at the conclusion of the Bates & Others v Post Office Ltd judicial case in 2019.[4][5]
What is particularly striking about the scandal is the impact of the mini-series. From what I understand (as a foreigner to the UK) is that it was the mini-series that sparked national interest in the case. Without it, those involved would still be in a bureaucratic and legal nightmare, in which all institutions rejected their innocence claims, and hardly anyone would have been held accountable. See also the "Impact" section on the linked wiki page.
It leaves me wondering how the situation would have been if it would have been a (dramaturgically) 'bad' series. It might have left those involved even worse of.
It's worth pointing out that Mr Bates vs The Post Office screened in early 2024. The Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry was set up in 2020/2021 and the public hearings started in 2023.
So it may have looked like "it was TV what done it" but the wheels of justice were turning long before the show came out.
We were in the middle of an election cycle. If you were paying attention you were aware of the scandal slowly grinding its way through legal slop, but most people probably weren't that clued in (as per normal).
But that mini-series threw it into the current public consciousness, and so suddenly it wasn't just the judicial system working through it but the Tories now gave a shit (briefly), because they thought showing that they care might save them (it didn't).
> It leaves me wondering how the situation would have been if it would have been a (dramaturgically) 'bad' series. It might have left those involved even worse of.
Holy shit. You might see big corps like the post office fund big dramas as a way to sway public opinion. A tool in the pr playbook.
There are other scandals in the UK, like IR35 that basically prevents worker owned businesses from making profit, then resulting cottage industry of parasitic "umbrella companies" and tumbling economy. But directly affected people are easily generalised as those with broader shoulders so the public couldn't care less if they cannot run their little businesses. Meanwhile big consultancies that lobbied for it are getting minted on public sector contracts, they have very much a monopoly now. Things are more expensive and shittier. Oh and then Boriswave - as if captive services market wasn't enough for big corporations - they also got to import the cheapest available workers instead of hiring locals.
The failing is as much with the court as it is with Fujitsu. Why did they blindly accept Horizon’s data as evidence? What if the computer said the Queen stole all the money and ran off to Barbados, would they have thrown her in jail? Why was the output of a black box, which may as well have been a notebook Fujitsu could have written anything they wanted into, treated as gospel?
The actual answer to this is terrible. Courts had to trust the computer was correct. There was a common law presumption that a computer was operating correctly unless there is evidence to the contrary (and getting that evidence is basically impossible for the individuals being charged who were post office workers, not computer experts, and the source code was a trade secret).
Governments should have access to all the source of code they buy licenses to (and provided at sale), as a precondition of selling to a government.
When these sorts of things happen, the source can be subpoena'd with the relevant legal tool, and reviewed appropriately.
Why governments don't do this is beyond me. It greatly limits liability of gov procurement, and puts the liability on the companies selling such goods.
> The actual answer to this is terrible. Courts had to trust the computer was correct. There was a common law presumption that a computer was operating correctly unless there is evidence to the contrary
That is just mind bogglingly stupid - who the hell are the idiots who wrote a law like that? Any of them wrote a line of code in their life?
The emperor has no clothes. Oxford is the worlds AI Safety research hub and yet they didn't think about campaigning to overturn a law which negates their entire reason for existing?
Part of the answer is that the Post Office had (has?) special legal status in that it can prosecute cases by itself - no need to present a convincing case to the CPS like the police do.
Many people were scared into pleading guilty just to avoid the upfront legal costs and the ruinous fines if contesting and found guilty (“the computer is always right”).
Often the PO knew that they didn’t have much of a case but just used their special status to bully them into submission.
This is a myth as far as I’ve been able to determine. The prosecutions were ordinary private prosecutions. The Post Office didn’t need any kind of special legal status in order to prosecute.
I have followed this scandal quite closely over the years, and these two quotations sum it up. Pretty sad:
"The report alleges that even before the program was rolled out in 1999, some Fujitsu employees knew that Horizon could produce false data."
"As the years went by the complaints grew louder and more persistent [...] Still the Post Office trenchantly resisted the contention that on occasions Horizon produced false data."
It would not surprise me if some developers at that time reported to journalists that they had a bug in their code, they'd go to jail for fabricating evidence, cybercrime, stealing of trade secrets, breaking an NDA, or something like that.
What can you do when you know you are innocent but the court trusts the software more than it trusts people? And you are asked to repay something you never stole which off course leads to your financial ruin/divorce/... your kids bullied because you as a parent were deemed a thief... Imagine your spouse leaving you because of something you didn't even do...
Someone absolutely needs to go to jail over this. This kind of software is supposed to go through a lengthy compliance and certification process, so clearly whatever person put their signature on that "certified" document is responsible for these death.
To the NY Times: please don't say they died by suicide. The passive voice makes it sound like some act of God, something regrettable but unavoidable that just somehow happened. It's important not to sugarcoat what happened: the postmasters killed themselves because the British state was imprisoning them for crimes they didn't commit, based on evidence from a buggy financial accounting system. Don't blur the details of what happened by making it sound like a natural disaster.
Horizon is the case that should replace Therac-25 as a study in what can go wrong if software developers screw up. Therac-25 injured/killed six people, Horizon has ruined hundreds of lives and ended dozens. And the horrifying thing is, Horizon wasn't something anyone would have previously identified as safety-critical software. It was just an ordinary point-of-sale and accounting system. The suicides weren't directly caused by the software, but from an out of control justice and social system in which people blindly believed in public institutions that were actually engaged in a massive deep state cover-up.
It is reasonable to blame the suicides on the legal and political system that allowed the Post Office to act in that way, and which put such low quality people in charge. Perhaps also on the software engineer who testified repeatedly under oath that the system worked fine, even as the bug tracker filled up with cases where it didn't. But this is HN, so from a software engineering perspective what can be learned?
Some glitches were of their time and wouldn't occur these days, e.g. malfunctions in resistive touch screens that caused random clicks on POS screens to occur overnight. But most were bugs due to loss of transactionality or lack of proper auditing controls. Think message replays lacking proper idempotency, things like that. Transactions were logged that never really occurred, and when the cash was counted some appeared to be missing, so the Post Office accused the postmasters of stealing from the business. They hadn't done so, but this took place over decades, and decades ago people had more faith in institutions than they do now. And these post offices were often in small villages where the post office was the center of the community, so the false allegations against postmasters were devastating to their social and business lives.
Put simply - check your transactions! And make sure developers can't rewrite databases in prod.
There is no "deep state", just the state. Calling things "the deep state" tries to partition the state in two parts, a good one and a bad one.
There is also no "deep Amazon" or "deep Meta". Amazon is Amazon, Meta is Meta and the state is the state. People working for or representing the state have their own agenda, have their cliques, have their CYA like people everywhere else. And the state as an organization prioritizes survival and self defense above all other goals it might have.
Indeed. "Deep" is a weasel word. "State" is all the operations of governance which don't change when the government changes.
However, the state is not a monolith. It's an organization of all sorts of sub-organizations run by individuals with their own agendas. They have names, faces, and honors: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-67925304
(The honors systems is deeply problematic because about half of them are handed out to insiders for complicity in god knows what and the other half are handed out to celebrities as cover for the first half)
I'm not sure that's really fair. Within any organization there are subgroups. For instance there was an entire branch of AT&T that was dedicated to illegally spying on Americans for the NSA.
Most employees of AT&T had no idea it was even going on, so to lump every AT&T employee into the same batch of "you're bad because th company you work for was doing X" when they had no idea the company was doing X isn't really fair.
By the same vein, Stephen Miller trying to round up and cage innocent civilians just trying to live their life is a very different part of the government than Suzanne at NASA who's trying to better the future of mankind. To act as if there's no distinguishing between the two is just silly.
Whether you have an issue with the specific term "deep state" I'll leave be. But please don't try to oversimplify large organizations. The higher up the chain the more responsibility you can place for what the organization as a whole does, but the reverse isn't true when speaking outside of their specific area of ownership.
When people say "deep state" they mean "invisible state". Not "bad state". If you realize this, suddenly you'll understand what people are talking about a lot more.
Deep State makes kind of sense here, because the U.K. Post Office, had there own Law Enforcement. They can act like the state in several ways. I think the correct term is "Private prosecution". And as fare as I understand it, the U.K. Post Office was able to have there own judge.
It refers to people in the government with a lot of power and little public exposure, and perhaps some indication of using their power against the will of the general public, and yes there’s tons of these people, and it’s quite good to have the public generally worried about them.
American political history is littered with deep state plots that turned out to be true - Iraq war being a big recent one, the insurance policy FBI agents another.
Fair. I use the term to refer to the parts of the state that are somehow buried deep, beyond most people's awareness. In this case the problems started with a government contractor, and were then covered up by people inside the post office. It wasn't a top-down conspiracy of politicians, or of civil servants following their orders.
While there is no real doubt that most, if not all, of these suicides were a direct consequence of the appalling way this monumental failure and its investigation was handled, reporting the news responsibly has become a minefield in which any deviation from what is strictly known is liable to be exploited by those who do not want their role in events to become public.
As you want to call a spade a spade, can we agree that the software engineer who testified repeatedly under oath that the system worked fine, even as the bug tracker filled up with cases where it didn't, is undoubtedly among those who are morally (if not legally) culpable to a considerable extent?
No question, they should be tried for corporate manslaughter and criminal enterprise for the cover up along with all their management. They should all be serving very long sentences, they killed many people with their lies.
> Perhaps also on the software engineer who testified repeatedly under oath that the system worked fine, even as the bug tracker filled up with cases where it didn't
It's quite possible he will end up going to prison, and absolutely, that would be the right outcome. It's hard to know what was going through his mind as he made that decision.
The horizon post office scandal is the first thing I taught in my "database design" course, to show that we're not creating self-serving academic exercises. We are creating systems that affect people's lives.
I try to give the legal and ethical perspectives. These systems should be auditable and help and not hurt people.
Indeed. This is not about Horizon's bugs. It is about management that was incurious and perhaps politically and financially motivated to ignore Horizon's shortcomings, enough so to knowingly destroy lives. Charges of murder should be laid.
But we hold engineers to much higher ethical standards than management. One does not expect management to blow the whistle - or even understand whats what when dealing with complex issues in distributed systems. If the engineers start lying - its game over.
I cried when I was reading the book. So much suffering. Bought a copy for all the it architects in my company and asked all of them to read it. Should be part of curriculum for aspiring software engineers.
Well said. I really wish we had a better word for someone who is bullied into suicide. It’s tantamount to manslaughter imho.
Recently, a snark/bullying community on Reddit resulted in the suicide of their target (a woman responsible for rescuing foxes).
That kind of targeting and bullying is horrific for any individual to process, let alone people who don’t have the press teams and training that celebrities do.
> Some glitches were of their time and wouldn't occur these days, e.g. malfunctions in resistive touch screens that caused random clicks on POS screens to occur overnight.
These still occur on modern touchscreen laptops (work-provided Dell Latitude 7450 and mandated to use Windows with a lot of restrictions). It's not an everyday issue, but a once a month one.
Other than that, completely agree with your assessment: the ruining of those lives was a completely avoidable tragedy that was grossly mishandled.
Arguably, it happens today on a modern iPhone capacitive screen. I've had issues where the UI performs a "bait and switch" and swaps a target that I inadvertently press. ios26 is worse because of some lag at certain times.
> Some glitches were of their time and wouldn't occur these days, e.g. malfunctions in resistive touch screens that caused random clicks on POS screens to occur overnight
I think there’s still a lesson to be learned here about computers needing to be locked when not in use. I find it utterly bizarre how many experienced technical employees will leave their computer unlocked when they step away from it for extended periods of time.
It's a surprising take to blame developers and software development for what is a prime example of corruption within the UK establishment, an uncaring and incompetent court system, and the lying senior managers of the UK Post Office. The faults were known and this is a case of cover-up.
Software development was merely an accessory to the crime in this case.
Read the book, if you havent already. The senior technical staff was actively obfuscating and lying. Developers knew the system had synchronization issues, operations knew as well, as they were apparently routinely doing manual data fixes in production. Senior engineering staff are the most to blame. They messed up and then covered up. The fact that their management covered up some more can be partially excused by technical illiteracy.
> please don't say they died by suicide. The passive voice makes it sound like some act of God, something regrettable but unavoidable that just somehow happened.
I mean, common. Everyone knows what suicide is or means. No, it does not make it sound like an act of God for anyone who is above A1 level of English.
Most people who commit suicide were not hounded to the end of their rope, these people were murdered by torture via the legal system. The proximal cause of their death was their own hand, sure, but their deaths should properly be seen as some form of murder or at least manslaughter.
These deaths had an unambiguous causal actor other than/in addition to themselves.
It's an exceptional condition particularly since if you are harassed by any ordinary person you have a multitude of recourse-- up to fleeing or going into hiding and so we should be very very hesitant to attribute suicide to the actions of a third party in general. But in the case of harassment perpetrated by or via state power the victims are far closer to an inescapable situation and because of the vastly greater power the state must carry vastly greater responsibility for the total consequences of their malicious and improper actions.
"died by suicide" is just a modern replacement for "committed suicide", because that phrase dates back to when it was a crime, so it's regarded as making the victim look bad.
I say this as someone whose father killed himself when I was in 5th grade:
The "victims" who suffer after a suicide are the living, not the dead. These kinds of "modernizations" are transparent PC nonsense made up by well-intentioned do-gooders who have no idea how to represent the interests of other people who have a lived experience that they don't understand.
The person is dead either way. There's literally no way to sugarcoat this fact. We'd rather you just speak in plain, honest language than trying to make it sound less bad somehow.
> Horizon is the case that should replace Therac-25 as a study in what can go wrong if software developers screw up.
Hum, no. Horizon had nothing to do with problems of software development.
It's a case of unaccountable judges, lying attorneys, and the entire police system acting in a conspiracy to hide information and gaslight the society at large. The fact that there is a software error there somewhere isn't relevant at all.
MPs and ministers (part of the state) used their parliamentary privilege to expose it after the campaign by the postmasters brought the issue to light.
No ‘deep state’ conspiracy, it’s just an arse covering cover-up (pared with outright incompetence) which had particularly devastating consequences.
The post office is a quasi quango, they are technically private but they maintain state functions like the ability to prosecute their post masters. So despite its private ownership it is a partially a state body and in the way in which it caused these deaths its the state quasi quango function that did it.
I know the term "deep state" is now extremely political and you've only heard it in the context of conspiracy theorists but it's a real term that is completely appropriate here.
It’s still suicide. The wrongfully imprisoned can be acquitted. That’s part of the argument against the death penalty: if justice is imperfect then don’t take actions that are permanent. You can’t classify every instance of miscarriage of justice as state murder. I really don’t see the issue you’re trying to raise. It’s more problematic to invent new language because it feels yucky than to be precise and accurate in our reporting.
I don't think they're arguing that the headline should be "13 UK postmasters murdered by the state", just that the extremely passive "died by suicide" lacks context and largely leaves out the UK Post Office's role in their death. I think they would prefer some thing along the lines of "At Least 13 People Killed Themselves After False Accusations From U.K. Post Office, Report Says".
> You can’t classify every instance of miscarriage of justice as state murder.
It's literally what we call it in Norway. In English it's compared to miscarriage (i.e. spontaneous abortion), "miscarriage of justice". Here we call it murder of justice (justismord), whether anyone actually died or not.
I do think it gets the seriousness across, and the focus on it as a deliberate act, rather than an accident as in English. Some people actually made a deliberate act to let innocent people take the blame.
For what it's worth, I agree. It never crossed my mind that the phrasing could lead anyone to believe the suicides were "unavoidable" or an "act of God", especially when the title clearly ties the suicides to a causation.
The phrasing could be made more accusatory, but I don't think that's inherently better.
I encourage you to read the current thinking on this evolving language, which offers some explanation as to why we're moving away from damaging language like "committing" suicide.
I think they are saying that the current title ("people died ... amid scandal") muddies the water when it comes to the causal relation, arguably "people were led to suicide by baseless accusations" _might_ be a more faithful descriptor of who's at fault here, but I understand journalists don't want to risk being sued (and neither do I, hence my use of _might_)
edit: lol wut? The more I think about this the less it makes sense. The stigma of suicide is from the societal attitude that it's wrong and you should never do it. Using a verb isn't the bit that tells everyone it is wrong. If you want to remove the stigma take away all the signs for 998 and perfunctory statements that help is available, and replace them all with "do it. no balls, do it."
Isn't the stigma desired anyway? It keeps people from going through with it. That's why society deliberately creates and actively cultivates the stigma.
I doubt removing "committed" removes any stigma to seek help. What sucks about suicidality is that everyone is so sterile about it. Removing the word is more of that. IMO the sterility discourages the not-yet-at-rock-bottom suicidal from reaching out.
For an excellent in-depth look at the scandal, I recommend Nick Wallis's book The Great Post Office Scandal. I read this soon after it came out and was wondering why it hadn't caused a national uproar. It was only the miniseries that prompted the required outrage.
Yes, many scandals stay under the radar until a good book, film or series reaches millions at once. I hope the same happens with another subject close to my heart [1, 2]. A Netflix film on a related topic a few years ago already had a huge impact [3]. It focused on one case, but by the end of the movie it is clear that many others are similarly affected.
The thing here is that the Post Office as the "victim" could also act as its own investigator and prosecutor, due to historical reasons going back to the 17th century when it effectively functioned as part of the state and as such, had the authority to investigate and prosecute crimes related to its operations (like mail theft or fraud).
I mean, it's no Norway, but to remind you the United States, which has continued just straight up executing people who may not have committed any crime, is currently trying to make some of its own citizens stateless, then ship them to a foreign oubliette. Russia doesn't bother with courts and people who are out of favour just have deadly "accidents" there.
The bug is hardly the problem here, it is necessary but far from sufficient for something like this to happen.
The UK legal system's ability to prosecute and penalize people without anything more than circumstantial evidence makes it unfit for purpose. It should be an embarrassment to a country that considers itself a member of the developed Western world.
>The UK legal system's ability to prosecute and penalize people without anything more than circumstantial evidence makes it unfit for purpose.
This defect is present in all justice systems to some degree or another. For that matter, most crimes (serious or otherwise) rarely have the sort of smoking gun evidence that would satisfy us all that it wasn't circumstantial. Worse still, when the evidence isn't circumstantial, it's still usually testimonial in nature... some witness is on the stand at trial, describing what they saw. Or, perhaps more accurately, misinterpreting what they saw/remember.
The only difference this time around is that they were misinterpreting what their software logic meant.
I recommend you read the report. The charges were brought solely on the claimed accounting shortfalls with no further evidence that the postmasters and sub-postmasters did anything wrong, not even an attempt to discover where the money had gone or anything resembling forensic accounting that would be required in similar US cases.
In the most shocking case, with Martin Griffiths, there were attempts to hold him responsible for robbery loses he had absolutely nothing to do with:
> On 2 May 2013 a robbery occurred at the Post Office which resulted in a net loss to the Post Office of £38,504.96, which was reduced to £15,845 after some of the money was
recovered. Mr Griffiths was injured during the robbery; he was present in the branch when it occurred. The Post Office Investigator advised the Post Office that Mr Griffiths
was partly to blame for the loss sustained by the Post Office and that he should be held responsible for part of the loss. [1]
Such a claim wouldn't even be colorable in most jurisdictions.
I disagree that anything similar could happen at this scale in the US or France. Individual cases might not be handled perfectly, but this is a systemic miscarriage of justice where at every turn individuals were prosecuted without any evidence of individual wrongdoing. It was believed money was missing, no attempt was made to discover how it went missing, and the post-masters were held responsible without further inquiry. The legal system upheld these non-findings as facts and convicted people based upon them.
I'd love to see a technical analysis of what went wrong with the software and what to do about it. Similar to when airplanes crash etc... This is another case like Therac-25 that should be tought in every IT master class.
I did read a very technical report about this which obviously now I can't find :-( My takeaways were: (1) They didn't bother with double-entry bookkeeping. (2) It was a distributed system which no one fully understood and was not based on any normal distributed system principles. (3) Developers made ad hoc changes to the code and even database to temporarily patch things up, even going so far as to hard-code database ids into special cases throughout the code.
It was an internal developer bearing witness that made a material difference here. If you're the developer logging in to fix errors and the postmaster scandal is in full swing, then it's time to look at being a whistleblower. If you're the developer writing code to hack emissions tests in cars, again, look at your ethics.
I worked as a software test analysist (technical tester) for 20 years for a company that processed large amounts of money ( millions of gambling transactions) Our testing had to produce documented repeatable test cases and test evidence of correct software system operation.
My company had to pay third party independent software auditors who would examine the software in the test results in ay way they wanted. This involved re running some of our tests and specific tests requested by the auditor. These audits could range from a few hours to several days depending on the software change.
Auditors would prepare a report for the government department. If there was no repeatable test case and test evidence recorded than the software was regarded as not tested, Making the tests repeatable would sometimes involve in considerable test data setup.
My point is the defense should have kept digging and ask for test evidence that software had been such tested.
( On busy days, the companies software could process $100m or more transactions with transaction speeds of 1000 or more a second, so such testing was important)
This whole scandal has been exposed partly due to the dogged work of journalists at Private Eye over many years. Private Eye is also very funny, with some very good cartoons. Please consider taking out a subscription to Private Eye, to support investigative journalism - even if you only read the cartoons.
This is a disgraceful story from start to finish. Many of the postmasters have still not been compensated and no-one in the post office or Fujitsu has been properly held to account yet, all these years later. In fact most of them have retired on big pensions. Paula Vennels was nearly parachuted in as a Bishop. The UK tax payer is footing the compensation bill. And Fujitsu continue to get fat contracts from the British Government. Kudos to Alan Bates, Private Eye, Computer Weekly and a few others who fought many years to get this far. But justice has still not been done.
A big issue is that the British post office could itself act as the prosecutor. Other entities reporting a crime need to convince the public prosecutor before there even is a case, but due to hundred years old traditions the Post Office had the right act as its own prosecutor. Effectively the same problem as in the LLoyd's scandal where LLoyd's effectively was its own regulator.
We've chased all of the smart people out of government. You're more likely to find a smart person working as a cook the local fried chicken restaurant than you are to find one in government. It has to be said. And you'll all find that it's true if you pay attention. Those of you who have been paying attention already noticed this.
I became aware of this fraud involving Fujitsu/Horizon and the UK Post Office at the beginning of this year because I watched the movie 'Mr. Bates vs The Post Office.' I can recommend it.
It's sad to see all these people losing their livelihoods and beliefs. And it gives me hope to see how they fought back and started to help each other over the decades.
I was curious so I looked into it: It looks like about 10x the average UK suicide rate (assuming "the worst case": all male, 40+ over about a decade. In reality some percentage of the about 1000 wrongfully accused will be female, of course).
From the wording of the description of the programmer who failed to debug and labeled it user error it appears that it is fairly typical Accenture-grade software where there is no single bug so much as the program itself approximates the correct result.
Their data model appears to have been akin to having a single accumulator sum up things rather than to use something like double-entry bookkeeping or an account graph so that the source of errors could be traced.
It’s less “a bug” and more a coincidence that the application worked when it did.
The judge’s report[1] lists twenty-eight different classes of failure, including:
- Confusing and buggy UI causing clerks to duplicate or mis-enter transactions
- Inventory getting “stuck” in branches after the product was discontinued; the attempt to remove it hid the inventory but caused its value to reappear on the books again each accounting period
- Byzantine failures during hardware replacement causing multiple transactions to be assigned the same ID and overwrite each other
- Fujitsu employees with unaudited write access to the production database making one-off modifications
- The point of sale system simply telling the clerk to give too much change back to the customer
There’s no “one bug” here; the main failure was that those responsible continued to dismiss any problems as users being either in error or outright malicious, despite massive amounts of evidence that the system had technical flaws. Better quality software would have reduced the problems, but no system is bug-free and in many cases very little effort was made to identify the root causes of problems, much less to prevent similar ones from happening again.
What is amazing is the engineers the Fujitsu employed would testify in court against some of the subpostmasters saying "there were no faults" where in unearthed evidence of their support logs they could be clearly acknowledging bugs that could create false accounts, manually updating records and audit logs to balance it out (and also sometimes screwing that up).
> [Anne] Chambers closed the ticket with a definitive: “No fault in product”.
> The cause of the defect was assigned to “User” – that is, the Subpostmaster.
> When Beer asked why, Chambers replied: “Because I was rather frustrated by not – by feeling that I couldn’t fully get to the bottom of it. But there was no evidence for it being a system error.”
...
> Chambers conceded: “something was obviously wrong, in that the branch obviously were getting these discrepancies that they weren’t expecting, but all I could see on my side was that they were apparently declaring these differing amounts, and I certainly didn’t know of any system errors that would cause that to happen, or that would take what they were declaring and not record it correctly…. so I felt, on balance, there was just no evidence of a system error.”
> No evidence. [Sir Wyn] Williams pointed out that it surely was unlikely to be a user error if both trainers and auditors had recorded the Subpostmaster as inputting information correctly. Chambers replied:
> “Well, yeah, I… yes, I don’t know why… I’m not happy with this one. But I still stand by there being no indication of a system error and the numbers that they were recording just didn’t make a lot of sense.”
I’m really surprised the post office didn’t do more of a job to frame it as the “Fujitsu Scandal”. They could have made the public think it was a foreign Japanese issue
As someone who attempted suicide almost ten years ago, I'm disheartened by how cold-hearted the comments on this article are. Accusations of certain wording being "woke" or "PC" and completely ignoring the substance of the article itself, as if the wording were the tragedy here. If we must have this discussion, I stopped using the phrase "committed suicide" when I found out it was a relic of when it was illegal and stigmatized by the justice system. I prefer "died by suicide", and I appreciate when others use it too. Not in the sense that I will correct people when they say committed (because most people, the ones in this comment section excepted, don't know the origins), but rather "oh hey, that person knows about this, and they care too."
I think the discussion is that “driven to suicide” would be a more appropriate term. Their deaths were not coincidental or incidental. It is an attempt to acknowledge that their act was the result of the actions of the post office and others.
Me: "Hey, I survived a suicide attempt several years ago, and I appreciate it when people who know the negative history behind 'committing suicide' say something else, because it shows that they care."
You (pre-edit): "The problem many of us see with saying 'unalived by suicide' rather than 'committed suicide' is the artificiality of the sentence and the implication that the language we speak has to keep up with the correct newspeak due to the latest euphemistic moral cleansing lest we appear uncouth and uncultured."
Anyone who has worked on a large migration eventually lands on a pattern that goes something like this:
1. Double-write to the old system and the new system. Nothing uses the new system;
2. Verify the output in the new system vs the old system with appropriate scripts. If there are issues, which there will be for awhile, go back to (1);
3. Start reading from the new system with a small group of users and then an increasingly large group. Still use the old system as the source of truth. Log whenever the output differs. Keep making changes until it always matches;
4. Once you're at 100% rollout you can start decomissioning the old system.
This approach is incremental, verifiable and reversible. You need all of these things. If you engage in a massive rewrite in a silo for a year or two you're going to have a bad time. If you have no way of verifying your new system's output, you're going to have a bad time. In fact, people are going to die, as is the case here.
If you're going to accuse someone of a criminal act, a system just saying it happened should NEVER be sufficient. It should be able to show its work. The person or people who are ultimately responsible for turning a fraud detection into a criminal complaint should themselves be criminally liable if they make a false complaint.
We had a famous example of this with Hertz mistakenly reporting cars stolen, something they ultimately had to pay for in a lawsuit [1] but that's woefully insufficient. It is expensive, stressful and time-consuming to have to criminally defend yourself against a felony charge. People will often be forced to take a plea because absolutely everything is stacked in the prosecution's favor despite the theoretical presumption of innocence.
As such, an erroneous or false criminal complaint by a company should itself be a criminal charge.
In Hertz's case, a human should eyeball the alleged theft and look for records like "do we have the car?", "do we know where it is?" and "is there a record of them checking it in?"
In the UK post office scandal, a detection of fraud from accounting records should be verified by comparison to the existing system in a transition period AND, moreso in the beginning, double checking results with forensic accountants (actual humans) before any criminal complaint is filed.
I know this is only tangentially relevant, but as someone who lives in the UK the inhuman and process driven nature of the way the state operates today is terrifying to me.
Several times in recent years I've had people significantly financially and emotionally affected by what amounts to just fairly minor errors of judgement that the state treats as deliberate criminal acts and will follow up on with absolutely no human judgement or compassion.
An obvious example of this is tax law which despite being extremely complicated is followed by the state with no human consideration for individual circumstances. I guess upper-middle-class people must just know from osmosis every letter of UK tax code, but I've had so many people in my family not realise that they need to fill tax returns for certain things like Bitcoin disposals, OnlyFans earnings, eBay gains, income from helping neighbours with building/gardening work, etc... And the state can be absolutely fucking brutal when you make a mishap like this. They do not give a crap about intention or whether you've otherwise been a law abiding citizen. Case in point is HMRCs name and shame list which I believe was intended to name and shame high-profile tax evaders, but has basically just become a list of working class dudes who (perhaps stupidly in our eyes) didn't realise they had to manually file tax returns on their income.
Even extremely mediocre things are treated with brutal enforcement... For example, a street by mine recently changed from 30mph to 20mph overnight and this resulted in literally thousands of people being caught exceeding the speed limit by 10mph. There was no understanding that these people obviously didn't expect the speed limit to randomly change over night, instead they were all sent a letter from the government stating the government's intent to prosecute them for their offence... Any human would have thought, hm, yeah the fact thousands of people were caught when we made this change might imply that people didn't deliberately exceed the speed limit but we didn't make it clear enough that it had changed.
Obviously this is a totally different magnitude to what these people went through, but again I think it's all a result of overly systematic rule following that makes people feel completely powerless when the state decides they've done something wrong. There's absolutely nothing you can do to say, "hey, you know me... I wouldn't do this. You've made a mistake." Nope, sorry computer says no, and that's the end of it.
I get what I'm suggesting here isn't practical and this is just a side-effect of a large state which must depersonalise and systematise everything, but when you're a person caught on the wrong side of that system it's fucking scary because no one will listen to you or relate to you as a human being. And everyone you talk to can ruin your life at the click of a button and you know it's their job to do it when the system tells them that's what they must do.
Obviously these people had some legal assumption of innocence, but on a human level the assumption was always that they couldn't be trusted and were criminals. If you've ever experienced this before, where it's just assumed that you are guilty because of some faulty or misleading information it's psychologically brutal. You feel helpless, powerless and you're treated as if you lack humanity. It's horrible feeling and completely unsurprising to me these people decided to do the only thing they could reasonably do to take back control of their lives.
I don't think there's any real danger of confusion. So I don't buy your objection on that basis.
I do think that both the suffix "-cide" and the transitive verb "committed" insinuate wrongdoing and I in fact appreciate avoiding that phrasing out of respect for the deceased and their families.
On the other hand my younger sister took her own life in 2014 and my uncle took his own life in 2017, and that's the phrasing I've used, whenever I've felt the need to share these biographical details. Doesn't discard their agency, but also doesn't stigmatize. I can't help but think that the style guide would be better served by this established vernacular. It's both clear and respectful, and I wouldn't even really call it a euphemism.
I agree with your final paragraph, disagree in part with your second, and disagree with your first.
To the second: I don't doubt there's an implication of wrongdoing baked into the etymology of "committed suicide" - after all, suicide is a sin in Christianity and was historically a crime in England, and I imagine when the term first arose there was an intent for it to be condemnatory. But I think modern usage of the term is generally not understood to inherently carry that implication. IMO sometimes, as here, terms become established as first-class citizens in the language, speakers and listeners consequently don't even think about their etymology any more, and consequently the connotations logically implied by their etymology just cease to be salient to the vast majority of people.
(I also don't think the -cide suffix implies wrongdoing. Homicide is not necessarily illegal or wrong, and then of course there are words like "fungicide".)
But in any case if the term is to be eschewed, there are alternatives that avoid the implication of wrongdoing in the word "commit", are already well-established in the language (thus avoiding confusion about meaning) and avoid the new set of distasteful/offensive connotations that "died by suicide has". "Took his/her own life" is one; simply "killed himself/herself" is another. That is - we agree on your third paragraph, even if we disagree on details along the way.
To your first paragraph - I am perplexed. Did you (or anyone else) really just read this term for the first time (whenever you first came across it) and intuitively understand it was simply a new term for "killed themselves"? I struggle to imagine anyone grasping what the term was meant to mean without going to Google to figure out how it was meant to differ from the usual "committed suicide" (or either of the other less common but still well-established terms above); certainly I did not.
But suicide is an act (even if often either an irrational one committed by people in a disordered state of mind, or perhaps a desperate one by people with no path to happiness), and understanding any particular suicide is going to require understanding the thoughts and motivations of the person who killed themselves.
In this case, several people independently committed suicide due to largely identical circumstances. Sure, not everyone falsely implicated took the same action, but I don't think we need to look at their individual circumstances to understand the root cause.
framing suicide more like a disease that acted upon them
These people started off with agency, sure, but being falsely accused by the government, and having government employees and contractors giving false testimony, took away much of that agency.
Could you or I be 100% certain we wouldn't react the same way?
> Could you or I be 100% certain we wouldn't react the same way?
Probably not - but when I say that we should not deemphasise their agency, I don't think I imply otherwise. The opposite, in fact: to even ask or try to answer the question you ask here - to consider how I would act if put in the circumstances of another person - is to view their suicide as agentic.
(Observe that you could not meaningfully ask, of someone who got lung cancer and died due to asbestos exposure, whether I could be certain I would not "react the same way" to asbestos exposure! That is the difference between the "disease" framing and the "act by an agent" framing.)
to commit an act usually means that its intentional and illegal.
suicide is often neither.
hence the passive tone.
compare and contrast:
- he committed suicide
- he was a victim of suicide
- he died by suicide
each implies different levels of legality and passivity, and therefore control, and responsibility.
in this particular case the passive voice is extra important because to any reasonable person the post office management / fujitsu / uk gov are the responsible parties.
I don' much like this euphemism either, but there is at least one favorable aspect in my view: "Died by suicide" reads less accusatory to me, and I believe that is actually a good thing here.
Too much focus is put on retroactively heaping blame on involved persons whenever things go wrong, but that is a really bad approach in my view; enforcement/punishment for things like this should be as light (and consistent) as possible.
But instead we get insane inconsistency (depending on exact outcome) thanks to media amplification and selective outrage.
All that achieves in the end is that people become better at shirking responsibility and playing the blame game, and it hinders not only investigations of past incidents but even increases future risk by incentivizing everyone to cover their ass first and actually fix things second.
It's the euphemism treadmill in action. It's like how "undocumented residents", which replaced "illegal aliens" in the media, now has a negative connotation anyway, so mainstream media are now trying to find a new word that doesn't sound "offensive"... but the very concept is loaded by definition, so no amount of euphemism is going to change that.
My take: as long as the thing being described connotes some lower status, change the term all you want and it will still be "uncomfortable"
Negro, black, African American, person of color... it's not the term, it's the implication. Solve the fact that the treatment is that of second-class citizens and there won't be a need to create new terms.
("But that's hard and as an individual I feel powerless so instead I will use a different term I guess." Probably the same phenomenon causing people to direct energy against vaccines more than pollutants and chemicals)
"Disabled", "handicapped", "differently-abled" -- we've never needed to rename "tall", have we?
This trend for commenting on news articles with nothing to say but a complaint about the wording of the headline is tedious. The right to free speech does not impose a responsibility to say something about everything you see.
I think you're missing the point by a mile. The point isn't some tedious debate over grammar; it's about the choice of language that perpetuates the idea that suicide is a tragedy that happens passively 'to people' in some kind of tragic, medicalised, incomprehensible way which is severed from any socio-political context.
In this case, these people were driven to suicide. I would argue that those responsible for the Horizon scandal are guilty of at minimum manslaughter of these poor people.
Another post office operator, Seema Misra, was pregnant when she was sent to prison. She said in testimony that the local newspaper had published a photo of her and labeled her the "pregnant thief." While she was in prison, her husband was beaten up and subjected to racist insults, she testified.
The tidal wave of fascist & far-right grievances are so hard to contain and fight against in the moment. Multi-cultural societies everywhere are never getting rid of it, are they?
Blaming the grievances on multiculturalism is yet another lie on the never-ending pile of lies that is fascism. If everyone was a literal clone from the same insular culture, fascism will invent new distinctions to create outgroups to oppress.
After race it's religion, when it's not religion it's politics, when it's not politics it's social class... It's stuff like this that makes me wonder if we will ever achieve anything like the Star Trek future where we just get past racism and bigotry. I have a feeling bigotry will be our great filter as a species.
What boggles my mind is that so many of us still thing more government is the way to address problems. The fact is, humans are human, and work in both government and in business. But a business cannot put you in jail or unilaterally freeze all your money.
A business can accuse you of a crime, but they will be very careful before they do as the consequences of bring wrong are very severe - for a business. Corporations can fire you or sell your data or send you targeted adds. But the risks associated with government are far worse.
https://archive.md/oldest/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/10...
I went on a deep dive on this scandal about a year or so ago. One thing that struck me is the class element.
Basically, the Post Office leadership could not understand why someone would buy a PO franchise. It's a substantial amount of money up front, and people aren't allowed to buy multiple franchises, so every PO was an owner/operator position. Essentially people were "buying a job".
The people in leadership couldn't understand why someone would buy the opportunity to work long hours at a retail position and end up hopefully clearing a middle class salary at the end of the year. They assumed that there must be a real reason why people were signing up and the real reason was to put their hands in the till.
So they ended up assuming the postmasters were stealing, and the purpose of the accounting software was to detect the fraud so it could be prosecuted. When the accounting software started finding vast amounts of missing funds, they ignored questions about the software because it was working as intended. I bet if the opposite had happened, and it found very little fraud, they would have become suspicious of the software because their priors were that the postmasters were a bunch of thieves.
Someone brought this up in a previous HN comment section as an example of trust in software ruining peoples lives. But your explanation is far more human and recontextualizes it a bit for me - it just happened to be that this was done with software, but the real motivation was contempt for the lower classes and could have easily have happened 100 years ago with an internal investigation task force.
Growing up half in England and US I feel British culture is more attuned to the class aspects to this kind of event. Traditionally America likes to pretend this kind of class contempt doesn't exist (think of, people on welfare angry at welfare queens, unaware they will be affected by legislation they support).
> Growing up half in England and US I feel British culture is more attuned to the class aspects to this kind of event. Traditionally America likes to pretend this kind of class contempt doesn't exist (think of, people on welfare angry at welfare queens, unaware they will be affected by legislation they support).
As an immigrant to the US from latin america that has spent significant time in britain, this statement is the complete opposite of my experience to the point of ridiculousness.
Britain is the most openly classist western country I have ever been in.
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> Traditionally America likes to pretend this kind of class contempt doesn't exist
It just manifests as racism.
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So the PO creates a franchise program that they later decide isn't suitable for any sane, good-faith actor, and instead of revising the terms of the franchise program to make it so, they assume that the participants are criminals and prosecute them?
The same way many think about welfare/unemployment/disability schemes.
Constant hoops to jump through to prove they're looking for work or still incapable.
Or in the case of illness to prove they're still sick. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-59067101
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> isn't suitable for any sane, good-faith actor
I think this is the parent’s point: this is the POV of the rich and powerful who lead the organization. They can’t imagine someone in a different position seeing these franchises as a way to secure good (or at least decent), long-term, stable employment.
I see you've worked with a moribund bureaucracy before.
sociopathic lack of empathy basically
Interesting how supposed fraud from lower class people is a high priority that must be punished, but fraud from upper class people is almost always protected by the corporate veil.
I came to realize spending few minutes every so many years to cast a vote in between the purchase of that great massage gun and groceries shopping, for party members who have been extensively vetted and not by you, doesn’t entitle to any control. Democracy is simply the most successful strategy to make believe into fairness and reduce costs of exercising power. With the capability to excise taxes and leverage them into debt that will always be repaid, one way or another, until the last citizen breathes government is, and always was, the greatest business of all times. Corporations who invest at every level, all the time, to make a buck do buy control. Mostly proportional to their investments into the wheels of government.
Let's not even talk about the financial crisis
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This is a salient observation that I don’t think has been presented bluntly enough by the media or popular culture (such as Mr Bates Vs The Post Office).
The UK is class-obsessed, which is not as immediately clear to the rest of the world (especially US). Lends a lot of credence to your theory.
As a cultural mutt between US and UK, I think UK is "class-aware" and US is more obsessed with the idea that if we all wear jeans then class isn't a thing. I see the same class contempt in US as the UK, and not recognizing it for what it is keeps people divided.
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In the UK class is about your education, how you speak and who your parents are and, to a lesser extent, money.
In the US I get the impression that it is much more about money. And therefore less static.
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I found this comment insightful but I feel I must itirate ( maybe its not needed), that it is not "clear" if leadership were ignorant, as you said, ( though Im sure you are part right ), I have read that it was malicious leadership trying to protect their own asses as per another comment.
I don't mean to let the leadership off the hook. What they did was profoundly wrong and they have blood on their hands.
There were two phases though: the initial rollout, and sometime later the coverup.
If they had asked very reasonable questions about the software during the rollout there would have been no need for a coverup. No software rolls out without any bugs and it's really reasonable to ask why so many post offices had missing funds and if they were sure if it was real or not. The PO leadership basically ignored all evidence that there were bugs from the very beginning, and that makes no sense until you realize that they were starting from the premise that the postmasters are thieves and this software is going to catch them.
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What I've seen so far suggest they were just ignorant and victims of confirmational bias etc. You can see that when they won some cases they wrote internally something to the effect of "Final we can put to rest all those concerns about these cases blablabla". So it became self-validating. Also the courts and defense lawyers didn't manage to the see the pattern and in the huge numbers of such cases. Each defendant was fighting their own battle. Also, a mathematician from Fujitsu gave "convincing" testimony they didn't have any errors. A lot was down to lack of understanding of how technology works. The fact that xx millions of transactions were processed without errors doesn't preclude that there could be errors in a small number, as was the case. In this case sometimes coming down to random effects like if race conditions were triggered.
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I suspect there's more to it in than that.
I'd wager there was a solid amount of general incompetence involved at the PO "corporate" - management politically couldn't admit that their consultingware could be anything other than perfect, because they signed off on the decision to buy it, and probably on all the work orders that got them to that point.
If anyone from PO management or that of the consulting firm (Fujitsu, I believe?) ever get any work again, it will be a travesty of justice.
I regret to inform you that not only is Fujitsu not banned from UK government work, they're not even banned from continuing the same project https://www.publictechnology.net/2025/03/17/business-and-ind...
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Yes at some point it turned into CYA. When the leadership started realizing that there were problems with the software they started doubling down, getting even more aggressive with prosecutions, because they were trying to hide their own fuckups.
But when the ball started rolling, as the software rolled out and was finding missing funds everywhere, you'd think a normal person would have asked "are we sure there are no bugs here?" That was never done, I believe, because the software was matching the leadership's priors.
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what's the mistake of fujitsu here ? we all know how software is made and that bugs happen and if nobody reports them they never get fixed
These kinds of assumptions about fraud always make me wonder about the folks in charge.
I was at a company acquired by silicon valley company. Our tech support department was folded into another tech support department. Immediately the folks in the valley were upset that we closed more cases / had far higher customer satisfaction scores ... by far. They made no secret that they assumed that us mid-westerners doing the same job had to be inferior at the same job.
Eventually a pool of managers in the valley developed a full blown conspiracy theory that we were cooking the books by making fake cases and so on. It just had to be that right? No other explanation.
They finally got someone in an outside department to look into it. They found folks closing cases prematurely and even duplicating cases. The people doing it all worked for the managers pointing fingers at everyone else ...
Sometimes the folks who talk about fraud think those things because that's how they work.
Accusations are often confessions.
I've been following this since the guardian wrote about it, maybe 2011 or 2013 (private eye was earlier) It was insane. I couldn't understand the lack of fuss. Maybe it is because as a programmer I guess that 95 percent of all software is complete shit and most of the developers don't know or don't care.
You've hit the nail on the head "why would anyone want a middle class life" yeah they have never known anything less than that.
The other factor to me is the careerism, all that matters is the project success, who cares if the riff raff end up committing suicide. Honestly listening to some of the tapes of those meetings makes me feel sick. Thing is, I think so many career orientated people I know wouldn't even consider that what went on in the meetings was beyond the pale. It's black mirror level.
I'm from Ireland, but I live on "mainland Britain" the UK class system is mind boggling. I think the establishment here despises the "great unwashed". God help any working class person who ends up in the courts system.
One final thing, Paula Vennells was an ordained church minister. She was preaching while she was overseeing the destruction of so many innocent hardworking people. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paula_Vennells
I don't know why that makes this all worse but some how it does. Somehow it speaks to what the UK is or has become.
I doubt she'll get the prison time she deserves. Actually I doubt she'll serve any time at all.
>One final thing, Paula Vennells was an ordained church minister. She was preaching while she was overseeing the destruction of so many innocent hardworking people. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paula_Vennells
She was very nearly parachuted in a Bishop of London, off the 'success' of her term in the post office:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-67923190
> One final thing, Paula Vennells was an ordained church minister. She was preaching while she was overseeing the destruction of so many innocent hardworking people. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paula_Vennells > > I don't know why that makes this all worse but some how it does. Somehow it speaks to what the UK is or has become.
It makes it worse because most people are familiar with the tenets of christianity and know that this behavior is counter to that value system.
I think it's one of the most redeeming points of christianity/religion in general -- there is a standard to which people can be judged and agree to be judged. That's why it makes it worse, this person is not only doing terrible things, but doing terrible things while professing to believe a value system that would not condone it.
Where can I listen to these tapes, particularly the ones you describe as black-mirror level?
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Fascinating. Do you have references for the motives/biases of the PO leadership?
My entry-point was listening to this podcast, it's pretty long but it goes into the fact that the purpose of horizon was to detect fraud and reduce shrinkage, that the leadership and their consultants were coming up with outsized estimates for the amount of fraud and using that as financial justification for the project.
They also talk about postmaster's motivations for buying a franchise and how sitting behind a retail desk in a small town with a modest but steady income is actually one of the best outcomes available to the type of working-class Briton who was buying the franchise.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000jf7j
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Forgive my indelicate question, but why would someone buy a PO franchise?
1) The franchise actually does represent a decent amount of stability and financial security for the franchisee. Well-run locations typically could clear a modest profit for the owner. These were not money losing franchises for the most part (until the prosecutions started of course).
2) The post offices were geographically distributed pretty evenly throughout the UK so there were positions in far-flung locations well outside London. In many of these communities it was a good and stable job compared to what else was available.
3) Many of the postmasters reported liking working retail positions where they get a lot of face time with customers. In many small towns the post office was a central part of the community.
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Nevermind sibling comment about money-losing businesses, there are many small business operations like this where a substantial amount of capital buys a relatively moderate paying retail job. Think things like Subway franchises, or gas stations.
Some folks like running a small shop, being their own boss, and serving their neighborhood community.
People buy into all kinds of money-losing businesses... Edible Arrangements, Nothing Bundt Cakes, various multi-level marketing type of schemes.
And yes, a lot of people are willing to go into debt to effectively pay to have a job.
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Historically it wasnt a bad thing since it was an add on to an existing shop. The general idea being that I would come in to pick up my pension/tv licence or various other things the PO used to be the source for and then spend it in the other part of the shop.
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Its in OPs comment
> a retail position and end up hopefully clearing a middle class salary
Normal retail work is below the poverty line.
Beyond that i think it might be the social/community aspect. I simply can't use the post office in my town as its used as a social club for everyone over 70. Some people are just in to that kinda thing i suppose.
Why would someone buy a Subway franchise?
Demand for postal services is, on a long horizon, generally more consistent than demand for any particular junk food.
The better question is: why the hell would the government sell a PO franchise?
This is utterly illogical. Who in their right mind would commit a crime with a 100% probability of getting caught?
This isn't a classic embezzlement of public funds, where the people receiving the money are also the people deciding whether it was well spent or not and hence could easily divert some of the money through behind the scenes deals with contractors without getting caught.
The "embezzlement" here is on the level of getting an invoice and not paying it.
That's interesting. I read a lot about this case, but I don't recall anything along these lines.
This does explain why the leadership was so stubborn.
How good or bad of a decision was it in reality? E.g. what was the real salary on top of what one would earn from investing in index?
The purpose of a system is what it does.
Conversely, https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpo...
There once was grafitti in my city which read something like:
"Every system creates,
the bullshit it deserves"
Interesting insight. Thanks.
This was depressing to read. Failures at so many levels.
1. Immediately after Horizon was rolled out, issues were reported. But ignored
2. Prosecutors didn't bother to verify if there is another explanation before accusing thousands of people of stealing? Isn't it common sense to pause for a second and think, "could we please double check the evidence? how can thousands of postal workers suddenly turn into thieves?"
3. local newspaper had published a photo of her and labeled her the “pregnant thief.” - of course, UK tabloids. Click baits and write whatever the fuck they want, no matter whose lives are destroyed
4. post office has said that it does not have the means to provide redress for that many people - so they have the means to falsely prosecute and destroy the lives of thousands of people, but they don't have the means to correct their blunders?
This happened more than a decade ago. Citizens are expected to do everything on time (pay taxes, renew drivers license...) or get fined/jailed, but the government can sit on their butt for 10 YEARS and do nothing about a blunder they caused?
What about Fujitsu? Why can't the government make Fujitsu pay for the destruction caused by their shitty software?
Jeez. This is just fucking nuts
Read about this [1, 2]. This is not yet a well-known scandal, but I expect (and hope) it will surface in the coming years or decade. It is on an even bigger scale, not limited to a single country, and it has been going on not just for 10 years but for many decades.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37650402
Reminds me somewhat of the child sex abuse hysteria in the 80s/90s involving daycare centers and the many horrific accusations that people took at face value and without question, being (rightfully) concerned for the wellbeing of the children. It was finally understood that it was relatively easy to plant false memories in young children through suggestive questioning. People went to jail for years before their convictions were overturned, and the impact on society lives on.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day-care_sex-abuse_hysteria
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/10/us/the-trial-that-unleash...
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Incredible. Reading HN pays off again. Thank you for sharing.
The link is to a book by a PhD neuroscientist investigation the scientific basis for shaken baby syndrome.
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Wow that's crazy. Good work! I guess this is a less "compelling" scandal than Horizon because there isn't one or two entities that are responsible.
> What about Fujitsu? Why can't the government make Fujitsu pay for the destruction caused by their shitty software?
Because the software didn't cause it.
Look, by all accounts the software was/is a piece of piss, but what made it such an egregious scandal is how the Post Office leadership dealt with things. There was really no good reason for that to happen. They just ignored reports of problems (proper reports written by auditors, not vague rumours). They lied to postmasters by saying that no one has problems (when, in fact, there were hundreds of people). Lots has been written about all of this and I won't repeat it all here.
So I must object to the phrasing of "caused by their shitty software". Of course lots can be said about the failings of the software itself and Fujitsu also lied and covered their tracks so they are not entirely blameless. But they emphatically did not "cause" any of this: it was the Post Office leadership who primarily caused this mess.
Lots of things go wrong in the world, lots of things are defective. What often matters the most is not so much the mistake or defect itself, but what the response to that is.
I'm going to have to pull you up on this detail, as you seem to care about the details.
Fujitsu/ICL won the contract to develop and run Horizon. They got a commission on every EFTPOS sale. They paid for all the computers, all the network setup, all the staff training. They literally ran the helpline. If you were a sub-postmaster and had a problem with Horizon, you called Fujitsu.
It was Fujitsu that then told you that the bug you found in Horizon wasn't a bug and nobody else was experiencing it, at exactly the same time their internal IT tickets had fully documented the bug and their staff were trying to patch up that bug before it happened to anyone else.
Fujitsu also claimed, in many court cases, that they had no remote access to Horizon. But they did. They also let engineers use it, and push one-off code fixes, to "fix-up" known errors that had been made in ledgers on the computer in your Post Office, so there was no source of truth anywhere in the system. If courts had known this, almost every Post Office private prosecution would have been thrown in the bin for unreliable evidence. Instead, courts ran on the belief that computers were like calculators, and can be assumed to be reliable unless proven faulty.
It was Fujitsu not volunteering this fact, and indeed barristers coaching Fujitsu expert witnesses on what to say and what not to reveal, ignoring procedural rules that the barristers knew had to be followed that say you have to reveal pertinent facts to the defence.
Fujitsu were in it up to their necks along with the Post Office. They made material gains by denying bugs existed, denying they had remote access, falsely claiming their system was reliable, and having their staff perjure themselves in prosecutions brought by the Post Office.
Without Fujitsu's complicity and mendacity, the Post Office might not have succeeded in prosecuting anyone - and of course, without the phantom losses caused by their broken software, they'd have no cases to prosecute.
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It's not a crime when the government does it :-(
I really do agree.
I was a lead Technical Architect and authority on behalf of HM Treasury for a while, and I will tell you this: this is just the tip of the iceberg in government procurement.
I've witnessed faulty systems in DVLA, DEFRA, DWP, Home Office, MOJ and Scottish Government. Systems that have directly resulted in suicide, false convictions, corruption and loss of money to the public purse.
The problem with Horizon and Fujitsu is that in the end the government has to sign it off, and there will be someone who is the Accountable Officer (AO). More often than not, all parties (customer and supplier) become incredibly motivated to protect the AO because it protects profits, protects reputational damage and essentially builds a good news story around the whole thing.
It's just elitism, wrapped up in cronyism, veiled in lies so that AOs can fail upwards into positions with suppliers. I've seen it too many times and I'm fed-up with it. Government is completely and utterly corrupt.
Wow, have you considered leaking these stories somewhere?
It's fucking nuts because it's worse than that too.
Fujitsu falsely claimed that they couldn't remotely modify data.
They used technical info to obfuscate things for the accused and the judges.
I haven’t followed this issue closely but would lying in court about their ability to remotely modify data not be perjury?
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I suggest you keep an eye on what's being published in Private Eye and Computer Weekly if you have access to those where you are. They're holding feet to the fire on all these points.
One thing I would say is that if somebody is convicted in the UK, it's acceptable legally and culturally to call them by the crime they committed.
The problem is that in this case the Post Office had unique legal powers, and was being run by people who did not want to "harm the brand" by admitting they had made mistakes, so kept digging.
There is also a fundamental flaw in how the courts - and the Post Office prosecutors - were instructed to think about the evidence in common law.
Bizarrely, it was not (and may still not), be an acceptable defense to say that computer records are wrong. They are assumed correct in UK courts. IT systems were legally considered infallible, and if your evidence contradicts an IT systems evidence, you were considered a liar by the court, and a jury might be instructed accordingly.
Yes, that's awful. Yes, it's ruined lives.
But also, I think all involved have realised pointing fingers at one or two individuals to blame hasn't really helped fix things. Like an air accident, you have to have several things go wrong and compound errors to get into this amount of trouble, normally. There were systemic failing across procurement, implementation, governance, investigations, prosecutions, within the justice system and beyond.
I already know people who have worked for Fujitsu in the UK are not exactly shouting about it. And yet, they're still getting awarded contracts before the compensation has been paid out...
>And was being run by people who did not want to "harm the brand"
We've seen this time and again. Organizations would rather throw people under the bus than damage the organizations reputation/brand. For example, the Church of England has tried to cover up numerous sexual abuse scandals. This is a recent and particularly nasty case:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cje0y3gqw1po
The irony is that the coverups generally don't work for long, and the reputational damage is all the worse for the coverup.
Lets ignore everything else for a second. Isn't it common sense, common decency to ask how can thousands of postal workers become thieves overnight? We're talking about postal workers for fuck's sake, not a bunch of mafia dudes. Is there some kind of perverse incentive for the prosecutors to send as many people to jail as possible, guilty or not?
run by people who did not want to "harm the brand"
Oh well, now their precious brand has been harmed, how exactly do they expect to gain the trust, respect of the people back? Maybe they think the public will forget and move on? These people suck...
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> They are assumed correct in UK courts. IT systems were legally considered infallible
This will change when elected officials start getting hoisted by their own electronic petards.
The Venn diagram of midwit enterprise developers who build systems with audit trails yet could not swear under penalty of perjury that the audit trail is absolutely correct in every case is almost a circle.
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> One thing I would say is that if somebody is convicted in the UK, it's acceptable legally and culturally to call them by the crime they committed.
Which certainly contributed to the suicides.
> if somebody is convicted in the UK, it's acceptable legally and culturally to call them by the crime they committed.
Is this not the case in other countries?
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I really wish someone had the political capital to do something about the tabloids. They’re really a detriment to society.
Politicians love the tabloids. They distract from the real goings-on.
Think that would be solving the last century's problem. I think you'd get more bang for your buck by reining in social media.
I don't like the tabloids either but what exactly do you propose we do? Are you sure it's a good idea to undermine the freedom of the press?
A government with the power to censor the tabloids is also a government with the power to censor the news outlets that you do like. I'd be careful about opening that can of worms.
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I think the Internet is gradually destroying them economically. Google stole their lunch money. Unfortunately it is also destroying the broadsheet papers. I'm not sure any of them profitable now. And that means much less investigative journalism.
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>2. Prosecutors didn't bother to verify if there is another explanation before accusing thousands of people of stealing? Isn't it common sense to pause for a second and think, "could we please double check the evidence? how can thousands of postal workers suddenly turn into thieves?"
They genuinely thought that the new software was uncovering a lot of theft that previously went undetected. This actually spurred them on even further thinking that the software was a godsend.
The sickening part is the people responsible won't ever see the inside of a prison cell despite sending many to prison for their failures.
Rationalization is a powerful force. People rarely come to objective beliefs based on evidence. They come to beliefs and then search for evidence. In law enforcement, people tend to decide on a suspect and then look for proof. Hence why you so often see prosecutors and police fighting to punish innocent people, sometimes even after they've been proven to be innocent.
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>Failures at so many levels.
Describes pretty much the vast majority of people. All groups/institutions/enterprises made of such people will follow a similar path. Point being - there is no hope.
fortunately, (most) governments will let you leave.
Effectively tortured to death.
One of the things that frustrates me with how ethics is taught in computer science is that we use examples like Therac 25, and people listen in horror, then their takeaway is frequently "well thank god I don't work on medical equipment".
The fact that it's medical equipment is a distraction. All software can cause harm to others. All of it. You need to care about all of it.
That’s why the “died by suicide” language can be problematic. These people were driven by several factors and they were left with no choice.
"Driven to suicide" may be more accurate. And damning.
Therac 25 is exactly what I thought of when reading this story. The software didn't have direct hardware control to kill patients with radiation, but it still resulted in thousands of victims.
I work on satellites that are intended for use in missile tracking. If I fail in the software, it might not "kill people", but people will die due to the failures.
Though, I used to work on fighter jets and SAMs. People do die due to my work.
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Jesus I desperately wish real ethics classes were required for computer science degrees
Ethic classes are pointless without ethical liability and accountability of people causing suffering. Yes, even the Jira javascript ticket punchers hould be accountable for what they do.
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The best available evidence is that ethics classes reduce ethical behaviour.
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In the UK they are I think? Well if they want to be BCS accredited.
The four-part mini-series Mr Bates vs The Post Office is worth checking out:
> A faulty IT system called Horizon, developed by Fujitsu, creates apparent cash shortfalls that cause Post Office Limited to pursue prosecutions for fraud, theft and false accounting against a number of subpostmasters across the UK. In 2009, a group of these, led by Alan Bates, forms the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance. The prosecutions and convictions are later ruled a miscarriage of justice at the conclusion of the Bates & Others v Post Office Ltd judicial case in 2019.[4][5]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr_Bates_vs_The_Post_Office
What is particularly striking about the scandal is the impact of the mini-series. From what I understand (as a foreigner to the UK) is that it was the mini-series that sparked national interest in the case. Without it, those involved would still be in a bureaucratic and legal nightmare, in which all institutions rejected their innocence claims, and hardly anyone would have been held accountable. See also the "Impact" section on the linked wiki page.
It leaves me wondering how the situation would have been if it would have been a (dramaturgically) 'bad' series. It might have left those involved even worse of.
It's worth pointing out that Mr Bates vs The Post Office screened in early 2024. The Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry was set up in 2020/2021 and the public hearings started in 2023.
So it may have looked like "it was TV what done it" but the wheels of justice were turning long before the show came out.
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The people are still waiting for their money back and their names to be cleared. The scandal continues.
I first saw news about this scandal and the early evidence of wrong doing by the Post Office in 2008.
> From what I understand (as a foreigner to the UK) is that it was the mini-series that sparked national interest in the case.
The case was done with by 2019:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bates_%26_Others_v_Post_Office...
The mini-series aired in 2024. Perhaps it was a bit more obscure pre-airing, but things were sorted out already.
Sort of.
We were in the middle of an election cycle. If you were paying attention you were aware of the scandal slowly grinding its way through legal slop, but most people probably weren't that clued in (as per normal).
But that mini-series threw it into the current public consciousness, and so suddenly it wasn't just the judicial system working through it but the Tories now gave a shit (briefly), because they thought showing that they care might save them (it didn't).
> It leaves me wondering how the situation would have been if it would have been a (dramaturgically) 'bad' series. It might have left those involved even worse of.
Holy shit. You might see big corps like the post office fund big dramas as a way to sway public opinion. A tool in the pr playbook.
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There are other scandals in the UK, like IR35 that basically prevents worker owned businesses from making profit, then resulting cottage industry of parasitic "umbrella companies" and tumbling economy. But directly affected people are easily generalised as those with broader shoulders so the public couldn't care less if they cannot run their little businesses. Meanwhile big consultancies that lobbied for it are getting minted on public sector contracts, they have very much a monopoly now. Things are more expensive and shittier. Oh and then Boriswave - as if captive services market wasn't enough for big corporations - they also got to import the cheapest available workers instead of hiring locals.
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I learned a lot from The Great Post Office Trial podcast by BBC Radio 4
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-great-post-office-...
The failing is as much with the court as it is with Fujitsu. Why did they blindly accept Horizon’s data as evidence? What if the computer said the Queen stole all the money and ran off to Barbados, would they have thrown her in jail? Why was the output of a black box, which may as well have been a notebook Fujitsu could have written anything they wanted into, treated as gospel?
The actual answer to this is terrible. Courts had to trust the computer was correct. There was a common law presumption that a computer was operating correctly unless there is evidence to the contrary (and getting that evidence is basically impossible for the individuals being charged who were post office workers, not computer experts, and the source code was a trade secret).
This might change, partly in response to this case: https://www.gov.uk/government/calls-for-evidence/use-of-evid...
Quite interesting article about this: https://www.counselmagazine.co.uk/articles/the-presumption-t...
Governments should have access to all the source of code they buy licenses to (and provided at sale), as a precondition of selling to a government.
When these sorts of things happen, the source can be subpoena'd with the relevant legal tool, and reviewed appropriately.
Why governments don't do this is beyond me. It greatly limits liability of gov procurement, and puts the liability on the companies selling such goods.
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> The actual answer to this is terrible. Courts had to trust the computer was correct. There was a common law presumption that a computer was operating correctly unless there is evidence to the contrary
That is just mind bogglingly stupid - who the hell are the idiots who wrote a law like that? Any of them wrote a line of code in their life?
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> There was a common law presumption that a computer was operating correctly unless there is evidence to the contrary
This is horrifying. I presume software is working incorrectly until proven otherwise.
Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/2030/
I was not aware of this. Wow.
I hope they're taking a hard look at past cases where they've done this.
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The emperor has no clothes. Oxford is the worlds AI Safety research hub and yet they didn't think about campaigning to overturn a law which negates their entire reason for existing?
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Part of the answer is that the Post Office had (has?) special legal status in that it can prosecute cases by itself - no need to present a convincing case to the CPS like the police do.
Many people were scared into pleading guilty just to avoid the upfront legal costs and the ruinous fines if contesting and found guilty (“the computer is always right”).
Often the PO knew that they didn’t have much of a case but just used their special status to bully them into submission.
This is a myth as far as I’ve been able to determine. The prosecutions were ordinary private prosecutions. The Post Office didn’t need any kind of special legal status in order to prosecute.
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I have followed this scandal quite closely over the years, and these two quotations sum it up. Pretty sad:
"The report alleges that even before the program was rolled out in 1999, some Fujitsu employees knew that Horizon could produce false data."
"As the years went by the complaints grew louder and more persistent [...] Still the Post Office trenchantly resisted the contention that on occasions Horizon produced false data."
It would not surprise me if some developers at that time reported to journalists that they had a bug in their code, they'd go to jail for fabricating evidence, cybercrime, stealing of trade secrets, breaking an NDA, or something like that.
Why not all of the above?
the employee knew something going to fuck up but higher up maybe don't want to deal with clean up and proceed to release it asap
hmm sounds like silicon valley work ethics
What a horrible story.
What can you do when you know you are innocent but the court trusts the software more than it trusts people? And you are asked to repay something you never stole which off course leads to your financial ruin/divorce/... your kids bullied because you as a parent were deemed a thief... Imagine your spouse leaving you because of something you didn't even do...
Someone absolutely needs to go to jail over this. This kind of software is supposed to go through a lengthy compliance and certification process, so clearly whatever person put their signature on that "certified" document is responsible for these death.
To the NY Times: please don't say they died by suicide. The passive voice makes it sound like some act of God, something regrettable but unavoidable that just somehow happened. It's important not to sugarcoat what happened: the postmasters killed themselves because the British state was imprisoning them for crimes they didn't commit, based on evidence from a buggy financial accounting system. Don't blur the details of what happened by making it sound like a natural disaster.
Horizon is the case that should replace Therac-25 as a study in what can go wrong if software developers screw up. Therac-25 injured/killed six people, Horizon has ruined hundreds of lives and ended dozens. And the horrifying thing is, Horizon wasn't something anyone would have previously identified as safety-critical software. It was just an ordinary point-of-sale and accounting system. The suicides weren't directly caused by the software, but from an out of control justice and social system in which people blindly believed in public institutions that were actually engaged in a massive deep state cover-up.
It is reasonable to blame the suicides on the legal and political system that allowed the Post Office to act in that way, and which put such low quality people in charge. Perhaps also on the software engineer who testified repeatedly under oath that the system worked fine, even as the bug tracker filled up with cases where it didn't. But this is HN, so from a software engineering perspective what can be learned?
Some glitches were of their time and wouldn't occur these days, e.g. malfunctions in resistive touch screens that caused random clicks on POS screens to occur overnight. But most were bugs due to loss of transactionality or lack of proper auditing controls. Think message replays lacking proper idempotency, things like that. Transactions were logged that never really occurred, and when the cash was counted some appeared to be missing, so the Post Office accused the postmasters of stealing from the business. They hadn't done so, but this took place over decades, and decades ago people had more faith in institutions than they do now. And these post offices were often in small villages where the post office was the center of the community, so the false allegations against postmasters were devastating to their social and business lives.
Put simply - check your transactions! And make sure developers can't rewrite databases in prod.
There is no "deep state", just the state. Calling things "the deep state" tries to partition the state in two parts, a good one and a bad one.
There is also no "deep Amazon" or "deep Meta". Amazon is Amazon, Meta is Meta and the state is the state. People working for or representing the state have their own agenda, have their cliques, have their CYA like people everywhere else. And the state as an organization prioritizes survival and self defense above all other goals it might have.
Indeed. "Deep" is a weasel word. "State" is all the operations of governance which don't change when the government changes.
However, the state is not a monolith. It's an organization of all sorts of sub-organizations run by individuals with their own agendas. They have names, faces, and honors: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-67925304
(The honors systems is deeply problematic because about half of them are handed out to insiders for complicity in god knows what and the other half are handed out to celebrities as cover for the first half)
I'm not sure that's really fair. Within any organization there are subgroups. For instance there was an entire branch of AT&T that was dedicated to illegally spying on Americans for the NSA.
Most employees of AT&T had no idea it was even going on, so to lump every AT&T employee into the same batch of "you're bad because th company you work for was doing X" when they had no idea the company was doing X isn't really fair.
By the same vein, Stephen Miller trying to round up and cage innocent civilians just trying to live their life is a very different part of the government than Suzanne at NASA who's trying to better the future of mankind. To act as if there's no distinguishing between the two is just silly.
Whether you have an issue with the specific term "deep state" I'll leave be. But please don't try to oversimplify large organizations. The higher up the chain the more responsibility you can place for what the organization as a whole does, but the reverse isn't true when speaking outside of their specific area of ownership.
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When people say "deep state" they mean "invisible state". Not "bad state". If you realize this, suddenly you'll understand what people are talking about a lot more.
Deep State makes kind of sense here, because the U.K. Post Office, had there own Law Enforcement. They can act like the state in several ways. I think the correct term is "Private prosecution". And as fare as I understand it, the U.K. Post Office was able to have there own judge.
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There’s incredible utility to the term.
It refers to people in the government with a lot of power and little public exposure, and perhaps some indication of using their power against the will of the general public, and yes there’s tons of these people, and it’s quite good to have the public generally worried about them.
American political history is littered with deep state plots that turned out to be true - Iraq war being a big recent one, the insurance policy FBI agents another.
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Fair. I use the term to refer to the parts of the state that are somehow buried deep, beyond most people's awareness. In this case the problems started with a government contractor, and were then covered up by people inside the post office. It wasn't a top-down conspiracy of politicians, or of civil servants following their orders.
While there is no real doubt that most, if not all, of these suicides were a direct consequence of the appalling way this monumental failure and its investigation was handled, reporting the news responsibly has become a minefield in which any deviation from what is strictly known is liable to be exploited by those who do not want their role in events to become public.
As you want to call a spade a spade, can we agree that the software engineer who testified repeatedly under oath that the system worked fine, even as the bug tracker filled up with cases where it didn't, is undoubtedly among those who are morally (if not legally) culpable to a considerable extent?
No question, they should be tried for corporate manslaughter and criminal enterprise for the cover up along with all their management. They should all be serving very long sentences, they killed many people with their lies.
> Perhaps also on the software engineer who testified repeatedly under oath that the system worked fine, even as the bug tracker filled up with cases where it didn't
I don't think you needed to ask for agreement.
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He should be charged with perjury and sued by the families.
It's quite possible he will end up going to prison, and absolutely, that would be the right outcome. It's hard to know what was going through his mind as he made that decision.
The horizon post office scandal is the first thing I taught in my "database design" course, to show that we're not creating self-serving academic exercises. We are creating systems that affect people's lives.
I try to give the legal and ethical perspectives. These systems should be auditable and help and not hurt people.
Or, if you are designing software to kill people, that you actually do a good job.
https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/cia-allegedly-bought-flawe...
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That's good to hear. I'm sure the story makes an impact!
>if software developers screw up
Well, yes, they did screw up, but the fallout was amplified 100x by bad management.
"The Horizon IT system contained "hundreds" of bugs[0]."
If your accounting software has hundreds of bugs then you are really in the deep shit.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal#:~...
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Indeed. This is not about Horizon's bugs. It is about management that was incurious and perhaps politically and financially motivated to ignore Horizon's shortcomings, enough so to knowingly destroy lives. Charges of murder should be laid.
But we hold engineers to much higher ethical standards than management. One does not expect management to blow the whistle - or even understand whats what when dealing with complex issues in distributed systems. If the engineers start lying - its game over.
I cried when I was reading the book. So much suffering. Bought a copy for all the it architects in my company and asked all of them to read it. Should be part of curriculum for aspiring software engineers.
Well said. I really wish we had a better word for someone who is bullied into suicide. It’s tantamount to manslaughter imho.
Recently, a snark/bullying community on Reddit resulted in the suicide of their target (a woman responsible for rescuing foxes).
That kind of targeting and bullying is horrific for any individual to process, let alone people who don’t have the press teams and training that celebrities do.
This sets a bad precedent. There is a wide gamut of emotional resilience in people. What is a funny insult to one person, can be rope-fuel to another.
Would you want to be called that if you make a light jab at a middle aged bald guy?
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> Some glitches were of their time and wouldn't occur these days, e.g. malfunctions in resistive touch screens that caused random clicks on POS screens to occur overnight.
These still occur on modern touchscreen laptops (work-provided Dell Latitude 7450 and mandated to use Windows with a lot of restrictions). It's not an everyday issue, but a once a month one.
Other than that, completely agree with your assessment: the ruining of those lives was a completely avoidable tragedy that was grossly mishandled.
Arguably, it happens today on a modern iPhone capacitive screen. I've had issues where the UI performs a "bait and switch" and swaps a target that I inadvertently press. ios26 is worse because of some lag at certain times.
> Some glitches were of their time and wouldn't occur these days, e.g. malfunctions in resistive touch screens that caused random clicks on POS screens to occur overnight
I think there’s still a lesson to be learned here about computers needing to be locked when not in use. I find it utterly bizarre how many experienced technical employees will leave their computer unlocked when they step away from it for extended periods of time.
This is the same organization that talks about Palestinians dying, while Hamas slaughters Jews by the millions. Don't expect unbiased voice.
It's a surprising take to blame developers and software development for what is a prime example of corruption within the UK establishment, an uncaring and incompetent court system, and the lying senior managers of the UK Post Office. The faults were known and this is a case of cover-up.
Software development was merely an accessory to the crime in this case.
Read the book, if you havent already. The senior technical staff was actively obfuscating and lying. Developers knew the system had synchronization issues, operations knew as well, as they were apparently routinely doing manual data fixes in production. Senior engineering staff are the most to blame. They messed up and then covered up. The fact that their management covered up some more can be partially excused by technical illiteracy.
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Surely the engineer wasn't acting alone, lying in court without some inside pressure?
> please don't say they died by suicide. The passive voice makes it sound like some act of God, something regrettable but unavoidable that just somehow happened.
I mean, common. Everyone knows what suicide is or means. No, it does not make it sound like an act of God for anyone who is above A1 level of English.
Most people who commit suicide were not hounded to the end of their rope, these people were murdered by torture via the legal system. The proximal cause of their death was their own hand, sure, but their deaths should properly be seen as some form of murder or at least manslaughter.
These deaths had an unambiguous causal actor other than/in addition to themselves.
It's an exceptional condition particularly since if you are harassed by any ordinary person you have a multitude of recourse-- up to fleeing or going into hiding and so we should be very very hesitant to attribute suicide to the actions of a third party in general. But in the case of harassment perpetrated by or via state power the victims are far closer to an inescapable situation and because of the vastly greater power the state must carry vastly greater responsibility for the total consequences of their malicious and improper actions.
"died by suicide" is just a modern replacement for "committed suicide", because that phrase dates back to when it was a crime, so it's regarded as making the victim look bad.
I say this as someone whose father killed himself when I was in 5th grade:
The "victims" who suffer after a suicide are the living, not the dead. These kinds of "modernizations" are transparent PC nonsense made up by well-intentioned do-gooders who have no idea how to represent the interests of other people who have a lived experience that they don't understand.
The person is dead either way. There's literally no way to sugarcoat this fact. We'd rather you just speak in plain, honest language than trying to make it sound less bad somehow.
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For context: Suicide was a crime in the United Kingdom until 1961.
* https://legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Eliz2/9-10/60/contents
* https://bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14374296
Except colloquially no one today thinks the word has any bearing on whether the victim looks bad. It just means they're responsible for the act.
I guess some people take comfort in the idea that suicide is thrust on people and they take no responsibility for their actions.
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> Horizon is the case that should replace Therac-25 as a study in what can go wrong if software developers screw up.
Hum, no. Horizon had nothing to do with problems of software development.
It's a case of unaccountable judges, lying attorneys, and the entire police system acting in a conspiracy to hide information and gaslight the society at large. The fact that there is a software error there somewhere isn't relevant at all.
> massive deep state cover-up
Let’s not use conspiracy-theory language.
It was a coverup by Fujitsu and The Post Office.
MPs and ministers (part of the state) used their parliamentary privilege to expose it after the campaign by the postmasters brought the issue to light.
No ‘deep state’ conspiracy, it’s just an arse covering cover-up (pared with outright incompetence) which had particularly devastating consequences.
The post office is a quasi quango, they are technically private but they maintain state functions like the ability to prosecute their post masters. So despite its private ownership it is a partially a state body and in the way in which it caused these deaths its the state quasi quango function that did it.
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"Deep state" is, or at least to be, a perfectly respectable political term for bodies that retain power across changing governments.
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I know the term "deep state" is now extremely political and you've only heard it in the context of conspiracy theorists but it's a real term that is completely appropriate here.
I don't think the NY Times reads HN comments.
> To the NY Times: please don't say they died by suicide. The passive voice
“X died by suicide” is a sentence in the active voice. “Die” is an intransitive verb and cannot be passivized in English.
Please don't do this kind of tangential grammar nitpicking here. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less.
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It’s still suicide. The wrongfully imprisoned can be acquitted. That’s part of the argument against the death penalty: if justice is imperfect then don’t take actions that are permanent. You can’t classify every instance of miscarriage of justice as state murder. I really don’t see the issue you’re trying to raise. It’s more problematic to invent new language because it feels yucky than to be precise and accurate in our reporting.
I don't think they're arguing that the headline should be "13 UK postmasters murdered by the state", just that the extremely passive "died by suicide" lacks context and largely leaves out the UK Post Office's role in their death. I think they would prefer some thing along the lines of "At Least 13 People Killed Themselves After False Accusations From U.K. Post Office, Report Says".
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> You can’t classify every instance of miscarriage of justice as state murder.
It's literally what we call it in Norway. In English it's compared to miscarriage (i.e. spontaneous abortion), "miscarriage of justice". Here we call it murder of justice (justismord), whether anyone actually died or not.
I do think it gets the seriousness across, and the focus on it as a deliberate act, rather than an accident as in English. Some people actually made a deliberate act to let innocent people take the blame.
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We are incapable of returning life-time taken. False imprisonment is still racking up centimorts instead of delivering 1 mort.
"The passive voice makes it sound like some act of God, something regrettable but unavoidable that just somehow happened. "
That's a really odd take.
> odd take
It's not odd when the sentiment is widespread, for example, look at the other comments in this thread that talk about it.
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It's not that odd - it's simply pointing out that phrasing can and does play a rather large role in how we internalize and react to news.
It was an extremely common criticism of the passive voice. Yours is the weird take.
For what it's worth, I agree. It never crossed my mind that the phrasing could lead anyone to believe the suicides were "unavoidable" or an "act of God", especially when the title clearly ties the suicides to a causation.
The phrasing could be made more accusatory, but I don't think that's inherently better.
> please don't say they died by suicide
I encourage you to read the current thinking on this evolving language, which offers some explanation as to why we're moving away from damaging language like "committing" suicide.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_terminology#%22Committ... https://www.iasp.info/languageguidelines/
I suspect the point was that they were driven to suicide. As in pushed into a corner by external, human forces.
I think they are saying that the current title ("people died ... amid scandal") muddies the water when it comes to the causal relation, arguably "people were led to suicide by baseless accusations" _might_ be a more faithful descriptor of who's at fault here, but I understand journalists don't want to risk being sued (and neither do I, hence my use of _might_)
"damaging", in no quantifiable way whatsoever. It's just the euphemism treadmill at work, nothing more.
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edit: lol wut? The more I think about this the less it makes sense. The stigma of suicide is from the societal attitude that it's wrong and you should never do it. Using a verb isn't the bit that tells everyone it is wrong. If you want to remove the stigma take away all the signs for 998 and perfunctory statements that help is available, and replace them all with "do it. no balls, do it."
Isn't the stigma desired anyway? It keeps people from going through with it. That's why society deliberately creates and actively cultivates the stigma.
I doubt removing "committed" removes any stigma to seek help. What sucks about suicidality is that everyone is so sterile about it. Removing the word is more of that. IMO the sterility discourages the not-yet-at-rock-bottom suicidal from reaching out.
My pre-edit comment was that just about sterility and linking to: "Envying the dead: SkyKing in memoriam" https://eggreport.substack.com/p/rehosting-envying-the-dead-...
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For an excellent in-depth look at the scandal, I recommend Nick Wallis's book The Great Post Office Scandal. I read this soon after it came out and was wondering why it hadn't caused a national uproar. It was only the miniseries that prompted the required outrage.
Yes, many scandals stay under the radar until a good book, film or series reaches millions at once. I hope the same happens with another subject close to my heart [1, 2]. A Netflix film on a related topic a few years ago already had a huge impact [3]. It focused on one case, but by the end of the movie it is clear that many others are similarly affected.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Take_Care_of_Maya
I thought British legal system and computer forensics were serious but this case is just a travesty of justice.
The thing here is that the Post Office as the "victim" could also act as its own investigator and prosecutor, due to historical reasons going back to the 17th century when it effectively functioned as part of the state and as such, had the authority to investigate and prosecute crimes related to its operations (like mail theft or fraud).
The British legal system is and always has been a litany of injustices dressed up in formal attire. To be avoided at all costs.
Indeed. The goal of the British legal system is to appear serious. Justice is an occasional byproduct.
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The stuffy 17th c clothes and powdered wigs were a warning that you are entering the Clown Zone (not the Twilight Zone).
Compared to?
I mean, it's no Norway, but to remind you the United States, which has continued just straight up executing people who may not have committed any crime, is currently trying to make some of its own citizens stateless, then ship them to a foreign oubliette. Russia doesn't bother with courts and people who are out of favour just have deadly "accidents" there.
That mess inspired the American legal system though, which is probably one of if not the best in the world.
IMO common law is still better than case law at least.
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A good summary from the UK IT trade publication that broke the story:
https://www.computerweekly.com/feature/Post-Office-Horizon-s...
Not sure if this requires sign-in/subscription, so apologies in advance. I did neither and have access to the full article.
Paywall removed: https://archive.ph/OZeED
The bug is hardly the problem here, it is necessary but far from sufficient for something like this to happen.
The UK legal system's ability to prosecute and penalize people without anything more than circumstantial evidence makes it unfit for purpose. It should be an embarrassment to a country that considers itself a member of the developed Western world.
>The UK legal system's ability to prosecute and penalize people without anything more than circumstantial evidence makes it unfit for purpose.
This defect is present in all justice systems to some degree or another. For that matter, most crimes (serious or otherwise) rarely have the sort of smoking gun evidence that would satisfy us all that it wasn't circumstantial. Worse still, when the evidence isn't circumstantial, it's still usually testimonial in nature... some witness is on the stand at trial, describing what they saw. Or, perhaps more accurately, misinterpreting what they saw/remember.
The only difference this time around is that they were misinterpreting what their software logic meant.
I recommend you read the report. The charges were brought solely on the claimed accounting shortfalls with no further evidence that the postmasters and sub-postmasters did anything wrong, not even an attempt to discover where the money had gone or anything resembling forensic accounting that would be required in similar US cases.
In the most shocking case, with Martin Griffiths, there were attempts to hold him responsible for robbery loses he had absolutely nothing to do with:
> On 2 May 2013 a robbery occurred at the Post Office which resulted in a net loss to the Post Office of £38,504.96, which was reduced to £15,845 after some of the money was recovered. Mr Griffiths was injured during the robbery; he was present in the branch when it occurred. The Post Office Investigator advised the Post Office that Mr Griffiths was partly to blame for the loss sustained by the Post Office and that he should be held responsible for part of the loss. [1]
Such a claim wouldn't even be colorable in most jurisdictions.
I disagree that anything similar could happen at this scale in the US or France. Individual cases might not be handled perfectly, but this is a systemic miscarriage of justice where at every turn individuals were prosecuted without any evidence of individual wrongdoing. It was believed money was missing, no attempt was made to discover how it went missing, and the post-masters were held responsible without further inquiry. The legal system upheld these non-findings as facts and convicted people based upon them.
[1]: Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry, 3.49
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The inquiry into this scandal was live streamed on Youtube.
You had lawyers quizzing people from all ranks of the Post Office and Fujistu; very interesting.
Ever since, I’ve worded my work related electronic communications with the supposition that a lawyer may read them at some point in the future.
If I’m ever asked to do something seemingly unusual or ‘out of the box’, it must be put to me in writing.
Here is the original source for this article. Warning: it is a tough read, particularly section 3.c "Case Illustrations": https://www.postofficehorizoninquiry.org.uk/sites/default/fi...
I'd love to see a technical analysis of what went wrong with the software and what to do about it. Similar to when airplanes crash etc... This is another case like Therac-25 that should be tought in every IT master class.
I did read a very technical report about this which obviously now I can't find :-( My takeaways were: (1) They didn't bother with double-entry bookkeeping. (2) It was a distributed system which no one fully understood and was not based on any normal distributed system principles. (3) Developers made ad hoc changes to the code and even database to temporarily patch things up, even going so far as to hard-code database ids into special cases throughout the code.
Edit: I think this one: https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/bates-v-... Also related article: https://www.benthamsgaze.org/2021/07/15/what-went-wrong-with...
Some context:
"How a software glitch at the UK Post Office ruined lives" - 2024 | 331 comments - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
I think that "Mr Bates vs the post office" (https://m.imdb.com/title/tt27867155/) should be required watching for software developers.
It was an internal developer bearing witness that made a material difference here. If you're the developer logging in to fix errors and the postmaster scandal is in full swing, then it's time to look at being a whistleblower. If you're the developer writing code to hack emissions tests in cars, again, look at your ethics.
I worked as a software test analysist (technical tester) for 20 years for a company that processed large amounts of money ( millions of gambling transactions) Our testing had to produce documented repeatable test cases and test evidence of correct software system operation.
My company had to pay third party independent software auditors who would examine the software in the test results in ay way they wanted. This involved re running some of our tests and specific tests requested by the auditor. These audits could range from a few hours to several days depending on the software change.
Auditors would prepare a report for the government department. If there was no repeatable test case and test evidence recorded than the software was regarded as not tested, Making the tests repeatable would sometimes involve in considerable test data setup.
My point is the defense should have kept digging and ask for test evidence that software had been such tested.
( On busy days, the companies software could process $100m or more transactions with transaction speeds of 1000 or more a second, so such testing was important)
This whole scandal has been exposed partly due to the dogged work of journalists at Private Eye over many years. Private Eye is also very funny, with some very good cartoons. Please consider taking out a subscription to Private Eye, to support investigative journalism - even if you only read the cartoons.
Private Eye might be humorous but they're also very respected for their journalistic integrity.
They will expose scandals and wrongdoing which many publications would buckle under pressure to stop digging.
No person or business wants be in the crosshairs of Ian Hislop! [0]
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Hislop
This is a disgraceful story from start to finish. Many of the postmasters have still not been compensated and no-one in the post office or Fujitsu has been properly held to account yet, all these years later. In fact most of them have retired on big pensions. Paula Vennels was nearly parachuted in as a Bishop. The UK tax payer is footing the compensation bill. And Fujitsu continue to get fat contracts from the British Government. Kudos to Alan Bates, Private Eye, Computer Weekly and a few others who fought many years to get this far. But justice has still not been done.
A big issue is that the British post office could itself act as the prosecutor. Other entities reporting a crime need to convince the public prosecutor before there even is a case, but due to hundred years old traditions the Post Office had the right act as its own prosecutor. Effectively the same problem as in the LLoyd's scandal where LLoyd's effectively was its own regulator.
We've chased all of the smart people out of government. You're more likely to find a smart person working as a cook the local fried chicken restaurant than you are to find one in government. It has to be said. And you'll all find that it's true if you pay attention. Those of you who have been paying attention already noticed this.
I became aware of this fraud involving Fujitsu/Horizon and the UK Post Office at the beginning of this year because I watched the movie 'Mr. Bates vs The Post Office.' I can recommend it.
It's sad to see all these people losing their livelihoods and beliefs. And it gives me hope to see how they fought back and started to help each other over the decades.
I was curious so I looked into it: It looks like about 10x the average UK suicide rate (assuming "the worst case": all male, 40+ over about a decade. In reality some percentage of the about 1000 wrongfully accused will be female, of course).
I don't understand why people kill the victim rather than the person who made them a victim, especially when they are the victim.
These people know that are being wronged. These people know the wrongdoing is life-destroying...
What was the actual bug in the software that caused the accounting errors?
From the wording of the description of the programmer who failed to debug and labeled it user error it appears that it is fairly typical Accenture-grade software where there is no single bug so much as the program itself approximates the correct result.
Their data model appears to have been akin to having a single accumulator sum up things rather than to use something like double-entry bookkeeping or an account graph so that the source of errors could be traced.
It’s less “a bug” and more a coincidence that the application worked when it did.
So the errors could be down to using floats instead of decimal types?
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The judge’s report[1] lists twenty-eight different classes of failure, including:
- Confusing and buggy UI causing clerks to duplicate or mis-enter transactions
- Inventory getting “stuck” in branches after the product was discontinued; the attempt to remove it hid the inventory but caused its value to reappear on the books again each accounting period
- Failing touch screens entering spurious purchases overnight
- Incomplete rollback of distributed transactions
- Byzantine failures during hardware replacement causing multiple transactions to be assigned the same ID and overwrite each other
- Fujitsu employees with unaudited write access to the production database making one-off modifications
- The point of sale system simply telling the clerk to give too much change back to the customer
There’s no “one bug” here; the main failure was that those responsible continued to dismiss any problems as users being either in error or outright malicious, despite massive amounts of evidence that the system had technical flaws. Better quality software would have reduced the problems, but no system is bug-free and in many cases very little effort was made to identify the root causes of problems, much less to prevent similar ones from happening again.
[1] https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/bates-v-...
Thanks
U.K gov try not to be hilariously evil challenge:impossible.
But honestly I'm not even slightly surprised as this is coming from the same "people" who invented the window tax.
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44499498
What is amazing is the engineers the Fujitsu employed would testify in court against some of the subpostmasters saying "there were no faults" where in unearthed evidence of their support logs they could be clearly acknowledging bugs that could create false accounts, manually updating records and audit logs to balance it out (and also sometimes screwing that up).
See Nick Wallis' coverage: * https://www.postofficetrial.com/2019/03/the-smoking-gun.html * https://www.postofficescandal.uk/post/ecce-chambers/
> [Anne] Chambers closed the ticket with a definitive: “No fault in product”.
> The cause of the defect was assigned to “User” – that is, the Subpostmaster.
> When Beer asked why, Chambers replied: “Because I was rather frustrated by not – by feeling that I couldn’t fully get to the bottom of it. But there was no evidence for it being a system error.”
...
> Chambers conceded: “something was obviously wrong, in that the branch obviously were getting these discrepancies that they weren’t expecting, but all I could see on my side was that they were apparently declaring these differing amounts, and I certainly didn’t know of any system errors that would cause that to happen, or that would take what they were declaring and not record it correctly…. so I felt, on balance, there was just no evidence of a system error.”
> No evidence. [Sir Wyn] Williams pointed out that it surely was unlikely to be a user error if both trainers and auditors had recorded the Subpostmaster as inputting information correctly. Chambers replied:
> “Well, yeah, I… yes, I don’t know why… I’m not happy with this one. But I still stand by there being no indication of a system error and the numbers that they were recording just didn’t make a lot of sense.”
I’m really surprised the post office didn’t do more of a job to frame it as the “Fujitsu Scandal”. They could have made the public think it was a foreign Japanese issue
Pretty sure I can guess the answer, but: does the UK have professional licensure for "software engineers?"
Yes, software engineers can become Chartered Engineers via the BCS:
https://www.bcs.org/membership-and-registrations/get-registe...
Has anyone, ever? I've met precisely one.
Absolutely scandalous. What kind of engineer is she?
Hopefully an unemployed one. She deserves to be thrown into jail.
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This is why there should be tort law in England and other common law locales.
As someone who attempted suicide almost ten years ago, I'm disheartened by how cold-hearted the comments on this article are. Accusations of certain wording being "woke" or "PC" and completely ignoring the substance of the article itself, as if the wording were the tragedy here. If we must have this discussion, I stopped using the phrase "committed suicide" when I found out it was a relic of when it was illegal and stigmatized by the justice system. I prefer "died by suicide", and I appreciate when others use it too. Not in the sense that I will correct people when they say committed (because most people, the ones in this comment section excepted, don't know the origins), but rather "oh hey, that person knows about this, and they care too."
I think the discussion is that “driven to suicide” would be a more appropriate term. Their deaths were not coincidental or incidental. It is an attempt to acknowledge that their act was the result of the actions of the post office and others.
A few comments are like that, yes, and I have no objections to that description. Most of the discussion though seems to be more like this:
> I guess some people take comfort in the idea that suicide is thrust on people and they take no responsibility for their actions.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44531844
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Me: "Hey, I survived a suicide attempt several years ago, and I appreciate it when people who know the negative history behind 'committing suicide' say something else, because it shows that they care."
You (pre-edit): "The problem many of us see with saying 'unalived by suicide' rather than 'committed suicide' is the artificiality of the sentence and the implication that the language we speak has to keep up with the correct newspeak due to the latest euphemistic moral cleansing lest we appear uncouth and uncultured."
My point stands.
There is something very rotten about this country. It’s like the heart of it has rotted out totally.
People should go to jail for this.
Anyone who has worked on a large migration eventually lands on a pattern that goes something like this:
1. Double-write to the old system and the new system. Nothing uses the new system;
2. Verify the output in the new system vs the old system with appropriate scripts. If there are issues, which there will be for awhile, go back to (1);
3. Start reading from the new system with a small group of users and then an increasingly large group. Still use the old system as the source of truth. Log whenever the output differs. Keep making changes until it always matches;
4. Once you're at 100% rollout you can start decomissioning the old system.
This approach is incremental, verifiable and reversible. You need all of these things. If you engage in a massive rewrite in a silo for a year or two you're going to have a bad time. If you have no way of verifying your new system's output, you're going to have a bad time. In fact, people are going to die, as is the case here.
If you're going to accuse someone of a criminal act, a system just saying it happened should NEVER be sufficient. It should be able to show its work. The person or people who are ultimately responsible for turning a fraud detection into a criminal complaint should themselves be criminally liable if they make a false complaint.
We had a famous example of this with Hertz mistakenly reporting cars stolen, something they ultimately had to pay for in a lawsuit [1] but that's woefully insufficient. It is expensive, stressful and time-consuming to have to criminally defend yourself against a felony charge. People will often be forced to take a plea because absolutely everything is stacked in the prosecution's favor despite the theoretical presumption of innocence.
As such, an erroneous or false criminal complaint by a company should itself be a criminal charge.
In Hertz's case, a human should eyeball the alleged theft and look for records like "do we have the car?", "do we know where it is?" and "is there a record of them checking it in?"
In the UK post office scandal, a detection of fraud from accounting records should be verified by comparison to the existing system in a transition period AND, moreso in the beginning, double checking results with forensic accountants (actual humans) before any criminal complaint is filed.
[1]: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/06/1140998674/hertz-false-accusa...
This is horrifying.
I know this is only tangentially relevant, but as someone who lives in the UK the inhuman and process driven nature of the way the state operates today is terrifying to me.
Several times in recent years I've had people significantly financially and emotionally affected by what amounts to just fairly minor errors of judgement that the state treats as deliberate criminal acts and will follow up on with absolutely no human judgement or compassion.
An obvious example of this is tax law which despite being extremely complicated is followed by the state with no human consideration for individual circumstances. I guess upper-middle-class people must just know from osmosis every letter of UK tax code, but I've had so many people in my family not realise that they need to fill tax returns for certain things like Bitcoin disposals, OnlyFans earnings, eBay gains, income from helping neighbours with building/gardening work, etc... And the state can be absolutely fucking brutal when you make a mishap like this. They do not give a crap about intention or whether you've otherwise been a law abiding citizen. Case in point is HMRCs name and shame list which I believe was intended to name and shame high-profile tax evaders, but has basically just become a list of working class dudes who (perhaps stupidly in our eyes) didn't realise they had to manually file tax returns on their income.
Even extremely mediocre things are treated with brutal enforcement... For example, a street by mine recently changed from 30mph to 20mph overnight and this resulted in literally thousands of people being caught exceeding the speed limit by 10mph. There was no understanding that these people obviously didn't expect the speed limit to randomly change over night, instead they were all sent a letter from the government stating the government's intent to prosecute them for their offence... Any human would have thought, hm, yeah the fact thousands of people were caught when we made this change might imply that people didn't deliberately exceed the speed limit but we didn't make it clear enough that it had changed.
Obviously this is a totally different magnitude to what these people went through, but again I think it's all a result of overly systematic rule following that makes people feel completely powerless when the state decides they've done something wrong. There's absolutely nothing you can do to say, "hey, you know me... I wouldn't do this. You've made a mistake." Nope, sorry computer says no, and that's the end of it.
I get what I'm suggesting here isn't practical and this is just a side-effect of a large state which must depersonalise and systematise everything, but when you're a person caught on the wrong side of that system it's fucking scary because no one will listen to you or relate to you as a human being. And everyone you talk to can ruin your life at the click of a button and you know it's their job to do it when the system tells them that's what they must do.
Obviously these people had some legal assumption of innocence, but on a human level the assumption was always that they couldn't be trusted and were criminals. If you've ever experienced this before, where it's just assumed that you are guilty because of some faulty or misleading information it's psychologically brutal. You feel helpless, powerless and you're treated as if you lack humanity. It's horrible feeling and completely unsurprising to me these people decided to do the only thing they could reasonably do to take back control of their lives.
Sadly we'll learn nothing from this.
>Sadly we'll learn nothing from this.
True. There is no hope.
Don't forget her name: Paula Vennells (Royal Mail CEO). She went on record to state there was no issue despite reports.
I'm sure we're see justice for her actions. /s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paula_Vennells
Remember her: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPYo_gq329w
Lying should be punishable according to max(expected harm, indended harm, actual harm).
Making factual statements from a position of power without making sure they are correct is lying.
Wow, that video was hard to watch.
She needs to go to jail yesterday.
She alone is not to blame, she's doing what a psychopath is expected to do.
Blame people who gave her that power and did not monitor her abuse of the power she had.
I haven't. She's yet to face any real consequences too. Thoroughly despicable.
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I don't think there's any real danger of confusion. So I don't buy your objection on that basis.
I do think that both the suffix "-cide" and the transitive verb "committed" insinuate wrongdoing and I in fact appreciate avoiding that phrasing out of respect for the deceased and their families.
On the other hand my younger sister took her own life in 2014 and my uncle took his own life in 2017, and that's the phrasing I've used, whenever I've felt the need to share these biographical details. Doesn't discard their agency, but also doesn't stigmatize. I can't help but think that the style guide would be better served by this established vernacular. It's both clear and respectful, and I wouldn't even really call it a euphemism.
Sorry for your loss.
I agree with your final paragraph, disagree in part with your second, and disagree with your first.
To the second: I don't doubt there's an implication of wrongdoing baked into the etymology of "committed suicide" - after all, suicide is a sin in Christianity and was historically a crime in England, and I imagine when the term first arose there was an intent for it to be condemnatory. But I think modern usage of the term is generally not understood to inherently carry that implication. IMO sometimes, as here, terms become established as first-class citizens in the language, speakers and listeners consequently don't even think about their etymology any more, and consequently the connotations logically implied by their etymology just cease to be salient to the vast majority of people.
(I also don't think the -cide suffix implies wrongdoing. Homicide is not necessarily illegal or wrong, and then of course there are words like "fungicide".)
But in any case if the term is to be eschewed, there are alternatives that avoid the implication of wrongdoing in the word "commit", are already well-established in the language (thus avoiding confusion about meaning) and avoid the new set of distasteful/offensive connotations that "died by suicide has". "Took his/her own life" is one; simply "killed himself/herself" is another. That is - we agree on your third paragraph, even if we disagree on details along the way.
To your first paragraph - I am perplexed. Did you (or anyone else) really just read this term for the first time (whenever you first came across it) and intuitively understand it was simply a new term for "killed themselves"? I struggle to imagine anyone grasping what the term was meant to mean without going to Google to figure out how it was meant to differ from the usual "committed suicide" (or either of the other less common but still well-established terms above); certainly I did not.
In this case, several people independently committed suicide due to largely identical circumstances. Sure, not everyone falsely implicated took the same action, but I don't think we need to look at their individual circumstances to understand the root cause.
These people started off with agency, sure, but being falsely accused by the government, and having government employees and contractors giving false testimony, took away much of that agency.
Could you or I be 100% certain we wouldn't react the same way?
> Could you or I be 100% certain we wouldn't react the same way?
Probably not - but when I say that we should not deemphasise their agency, I don't think I imply otherwise. The opposite, in fact: to even ask or try to answer the question you ask here - to consider how I would act if put in the circumstances of another person - is to view their suicide as agentic.
(Observe that you could not meaningfully ask, of someone who got lung cancer and died due to asbestos exposure, whether I could be certain I would not "react the same way" to asbestos exposure! That is the difference between the "disease" framing and the "act by an agent" framing.)
“Died by suicide” is not new. I heard it 30 years ago as a kid.
Many, many professional organizations use clinical language around suicide because it’s always been a sensitive topic.
You also see this everywhere in when people use euphemism instead of saying it directly.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Died+by+suicid...
Bloody woke libtards in Victorian era!
Journalists are taught that suicide is contagious. Using euphemisms may help reduce the number of suicides that their reporting directly causes.
That’s because suicide is contagious. Once one person does it, other people around them feel more justified doing it themselves.
to commit an act usually means that its intentional and illegal. suicide is often neither. hence the passive tone.
compare and contrast: - he committed suicide - he was a victim of suicide - he died by suicide
each implies different levels of legality and passivity, and therefore control, and responsibility.
in this particular case the passive voice is extra important because to any reasonable person the post office management / fujitsu / uk gov are the responsible parties.
I don' much like this euphemism either, but there is at least one favorable aspect in my view: "Died by suicide" reads less accusatory to me, and I believe that is actually a good thing here.
Too much focus is put on retroactively heaping blame on involved persons whenever things go wrong, but that is a really bad approach in my view; enforcement/punishment for things like this should be as light (and consistent) as possible.
But instead we get insane inconsistency (depending on exact outcome) thanks to media amplification and selective outrage.
All that achieves in the end is that people become better at shirking responsibility and playing the blame game, and it hinders not only investigations of past incidents but even increases future risk by incentivizing everyone to cover their ass first and actually fix things second.
That vaguely reminds me of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_JCBmY9NGM&t=290s only that it's called "woke" now instead of "political correctness".
It's the euphemism treadmill in action. It's like how "undocumented residents", which replaced "illegal aliens" in the media, now has a negative connotation anyway, so mainstream media are now trying to find a new word that doesn't sound "offensive"... but the very concept is loaded by definition, so no amount of euphemism is going to change that.
My take: as long as the thing being described connotes some lower status, change the term all you want and it will still be "uncomfortable"
Negro, black, African American, person of color... it's not the term, it's the implication. Solve the fact that the treatment is that of second-class citizens and there won't be a need to create new terms.
("But that's hard and as an individual I feel powerless so instead I will use a different term I guess." Probably the same phenomenon causing people to direct energy against vaccines more than pollutants and chemicals)
"Disabled", "handicapped", "differently-abled" -- we've never needed to rename "tall", have we?
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Suicide is a verb and result by itself. Would the author also say “he died by murder”?
They are simplify avoiding using the word "committed" using a well accepted alternative because of the connotation with criminal behavior.
But no they would say "died by homicide" not "died by murder".
Would they not say "was killed" and so allow "killed himself/herself"?
Maybe "were driven to suicide by..." to properly describe the situation?
> Suicide is a verb
Not in English. Although it's a verb in many languages, which is why "he suicided" is a common ESL mistake.
This trend for commenting on news articles with nothing to say but a complaint about the wording of the headline is tedious. The right to free speech does not impose a responsibility to say something about everything you see.
Your argument is that the wording of headlines is so meaningless as to always be beneath comment? Seems silly.
I think you're missing the point by a mile. The point isn't some tedious debate over grammar; it's about the choice of language that perpetuates the idea that suicide is a tragedy that happens passively 'to people' in some kind of tragic, medicalised, incomprehensible way which is severed from any socio-political context.
In this case, these people were driven to suicide. I would argue that those responsible for the Horizon scandal are guilty of at minimum manslaughter of these poor people.
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Language evolves, like it or not.
In 2025 English, suicide is most commonly a noun.
Suicide has never been a verb in English in my 40 years on this earth. The OP claiming it is a verb is... really odd.
There’s probably a near future where “unalived” becomes an unironic and accepted descriptor.
> Suicide is a verb
No it isn’t. You can’t say “He suicided.”
They have unalived themselves.
The tidal wave of fascist & far-right grievances are so hard to contain and fight against in the moment. Multi-cultural societies everywhere are never getting rid of it, are they?
Blaming the grievances on multiculturalism is yet another lie on the never-ending pile of lies that is fascism. If everyone was a literal clone from the same insular culture, fascism will invent new distinctions to create outgroups to oppress.
After race it's religion, when it's not religion it's politics, when it's not politics it's social class... It's stuff like this that makes me wonder if we will ever achieve anything like the Star Trek future where we just get past racism and bigotry. I have a feeling bigotry will be our great filter as a species.
At the moment yes but always has been in the UK.
What boggles my mind is that so many of us still thing more government is the way to address problems. The fact is, humans are human, and work in both government and in business. But a business cannot put you in jail or unilaterally freeze all your money.
A business can accuse you of a crime, but they will be very careful before they do as the consequences of bring wrong are very severe - for a business. Corporations can fire you or sell your data or send you targeted adds. But the risks associated with government are far worse.