Comment by PaulRobinson
6 days ago
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...
Related case in the Netherlands: if you just think all dual citizens are up for no good as the pretext a lot of law abiding people's lifes will just get upended.
If legislation, jurisdiction and law enforcement forget about basic principles and human rights in favour of looking productive, collateral damage is pretty much more or less expected.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_childcare_benefits_scand...
Means tested benefits, all sorts of problems
There are incentives to cheat
There is moral panic about "undeserving poor"
Increase taxes and make services and benefits free, including a UBI.
Increase and collect taxes.
afaict, the assumption was they already were, and were just uncovered.
> Isn't it common sense, common decency to ask how can thousands of postal workers become thieves overnight
The whole privatized postoffice setup was a profoundly unattractive investment-- at least to those who thought of it on investment grounds (e.g. return on investment+costs)-- and so there was a presumption before the computer system went in that many must have been in it to steal.
> Is there some kind of perverse incentive for the prosecutors
One of the broken things here is that the postoffice themselves were able to criminally prosecute-- so the criminal cases lacked "have to deserve the state prosecutors time" protection.
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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.
Show me a system for which you believe the audit trail is absolutely correct in every case and I’ll show you a midwit…
It is straightfoward to build systems which derive their state from the audit trail instead of building the audit trail in parallel. That is what event sourcing is.
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I may be dumb but isn't this what a merkle tree does? Or the blockchain sort of does (with 51% confidence?)
> 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?
In Germany, calling someone by a crime they have been sentenced of, constitutes defamation.
What? That makes no sense whatsoever.
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