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).
Most claims of racism in America are in fact classism. Very, very few people have actual dislike of others based on race. But a whole lot of people dislike people due to culture or class signals.
there's still regular ol classism, too, racism is just part of the calculus. Poor white folks don't have it good, they just have it less bad than poor not-white folks
In America maybe, in south africa it's quite the opposite considering the government provides a lot more support for poor non-white folks than for white folks (specifically based om race)
Some bits here and there. That faded as the US became a super power, and came back a bit as the 80's started stripping down the middle class thst was growing.
Of course, but the 2010's it was decided by the powers that he to re-introduce identity politics as the new form of class warfare. Which was 80% sexism/racism and 20% classisn.
Wealth is not the same as class, either. Even in America. A teacher with an annual salary of $60k is higher class than a plumber making $100k annually. Unless the teacher is black, of course, then racial elements of class come into play.
I agree that wealth is not the same as class, but just as a counter anecdote, my dad is a (small business) plumber and I never felt like we were treated less than any other middle class family. If anything, it seemed like people were often really grateful and giving random gifts like food from gardens or tickets to local events.
There isn't as much contempt for the rich as there should be. The poor despise themselves for being poor, instead of the rich for making them that way.
> 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.
I think you misunderstood the parent post. It states people in the UK are more aware/recognizant of "class" - not that they are less classist (i.e. prejudiced)
The example of lower class people not recognizing so in the US is meant to be an example of lack of class awareness/recognition; not of less (or more) classism (prejudice based on class)
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?
There is a rather famous book written on this subject.
Catch-22.
In order to be given disability you must jump through so many hoops that no one whom is actually sick could complete them. Or how in unemployment you must prove you must spend your time proving you are looking for a job so you cannot spend you time actually looking for a job. My personal fav because its almost universal is sick-day policies that codify 100% abuse of sick days because people are punished for not using them because some people were "abusing" their sick days.
In the case of the book to be discharged from military service they must prove they are insane which no insane person could complete.
Minor correction, but in the book the act of asking to be discharged on account of insanity is taken as proof that one is sane, because no sane person would want to keep flying bombing missions day after day with low odds of survival.
The general logic is that money is going to be taken from people no matter what (crime, expensive late interventions, etc.) and that relatively preventative measures are preferable because they cost less while preserving the social contract.
Sorry, but citation needed. Means testing might seem “obvious” from first principles, but from a policy point of view, it makes little to no sense.
The macroeconomic effects of welfare programs create a society that is better for everyone to live in. Reducing the issue to a matter of personal responsibility is a reframing that allows you to completely lose sight of the big picture, and create programs that are destined to fail by not reaching many of the people they need to.
Citation needed for the right to other people's money.
Government running charity interferes with the normal feedback in society. And the need to ask politely, justify one's apparently bad decisions and change failing behavior.
People become "entitled" to regular cash so a lot of the fear that ordinarily motivates the rest of us goes away.
Any system that asks nothing of people is a bad system.
I grew up on welfare. I've also seen how a lot of people on welfare actually live and how they spend their time. They don't spend it cleaning, I can tell you that.
> Administration of means testing is often more expensive than doing away with the means testing. How about UBI coupled with repealing the minimum wage?
Er... why wouldn't UBI be more expensive?
I'm not even arguing against UBI here, I'm just trying to make sense of your claim, which seems quite dubious.
That’s my soapbox — I think that’s the only feasible hope for the future, taking into account increased efficiency, fewer jobs, and higher corporate profits. UBI funded by higher corporate taxes.
I just don’t see any realistic way to make it actually happen.
I would rather we have a system that is too generous and gets taken advantage of than one that is too parsimonious where people die for want of food and shelter that we could provide for them.
We exist in a world where people can be unable to work or even advocate for themselves through no fault of their own. As we raise the bar for how people have to prove that they "need" help, there will be people who die because they don't have the capacity to prove that. In theory we have social workers (as a societal role) but in reality they're underfunded/don't have capacity for the same reasons.
This feels like the same moral argument behind the presumption of innocence in the American legal system: far better to let criminals walk free than to falsely imprison an innocent person. Why do we not apply the same logic to welfare?
I mean, I know why: we're worried the system would get taken advantage of and not serve the people it's "meant" to help.... but then, who does it help? How much effort is it worth making people spend to prove they need help when that effort comes with a blood cost?
I agree with GP that welfare systems make for better societies--see also, public healthcare. I have several friends who are alive because of welfare systems. I grew up with people whose family squandered the welfare they got, but I don't view that as sufficient reason to withhold welfare from anyone else; I just accept that's the cost of a system that helps people.
Yeah but in the UK there actually are lots of people claiming benefits that probably shouldn't be. Especially Personal Independent Payments.
It's enough of an issue that even Labour (left wing) is having to deal with it. Though as usual Starmer has chickened out (I think this is like the third thing that was obviously a good move that he's backed down on after dumb backlash).
If you're looking for hard numbers on how many people shouldn't be getting them then you won't find it. Only the government has access to the details of individual claims.
However you can infer a lot from a) the insane rise in claims, especially mental health related:
£400/month help with her bills because she struggles with time management? I'm sympathetic to her problems but that is a shit ton of money!
Even some of the people receiving it agree:
> "I was shocked by the ease with which it was granted. I was expecting to be interviewed, rightly so, but it was awarded without interview and he received backdated pay for the maximum amount."
>
> She was also surprised that her husband got mobility allowance for not having a car, even though she had a car and could drive him around.
(This reminds me of WFA where plenty of people receiving that also thought it was ridiculous.)
> Paul Harris, from Barnard Castle, gets £72.65 a week in PIP payments to help with extra costs associated with his anxiety and depression - such as for specialist therapy apps and counselling.
> Nick Howard, 51, from Cambridge, is neurodivergent and has been claiming Pip for five years.
>
> "Without Pip I would not be able to work as it pays for my transport to and from my workplace.
>
> "I'm currently buying an electric bike on credit, others I have had have been stolen or vandalised," he added.
Great... but I don't think paying PIP for 5 years is a good way to buy someone a bike.
Obviously not all cases are like this, but clearly something has gone wrong. And this isn't a partisan issue. Both parties agree that it has to change. The Tories just ignored the problem and Labour gave up after predictable "N people will die!" press.
And to be clear I'm not anti-poor or anything like that. I also thing WFA is ridiculous and that mostly goes to the rich. Child benefit also goes to lots of people (myself included) who totally don't need it. They all need reform, but look what happens when the government tries...
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.
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 agree that contempt arises in both cultures. My point about the UK was more around the phenomenon that the class "obsession" stems from the notion that somebody's class in the UK is ostensibly immutable from birth. (It is my impression that class in the US is much more about money; your status and class can be correlated / increased by your level of wealth).
In the UK it doesn't really matter if you become a millionaire or billionaire, you still won't be able to perforate the perception of "where you came from". This leads to all kinds of baseless biases such as OP's observation / point.
Yes, this is mostly true - class is thought of as upbringing in UK and it's malleable in US. But you can still be rich and low class in the US, there are a ton of class signifiers in US but it's more like a club that you get inducted into, money just gets you the chance to try to enter that world. Increasingly though it's something you're born into.
From my experience living most of my life in the UK from birth there is an element of truth to class being immutable - being directly linked to money and the status of property ownership - for now anyway.
The Thatcher years created an opportunity for working class (who traditionally lived in rent controlled properties due to low income) to purchase their houses for pennies on the dollar.
Suddenly, millions of families felt they had moved up a class. They were no longer at the mercy of landlords and had moved up in society from a tenant to an owner.
The traditional three tiers of lower, middle and upper class changed to lower, lower-middle, upper-middle and upper.
From my observations the lower-middle class are still adjusting not to having money but rather _access_ to money previously denied. Having equity in a property as a guarantee of a loan opens up a world previously off limits by the banks.
A bit like when someone turns 18 and they have access to credit cards - lots of cash easily available!
I come from a family where (with the exception of a mortgage), if you can't pay for something in cash (and still have plenty in reserve), you can't afford it. My folks were very proud of raising a family with zero debts (minus the mortgage), and I'm forever thankful.
The families I knew (and by extension others living on the typical "cookie cutter" UK housing estate) were swimming in debt. What surprised me the most was how "normal" it was - 3yr (or less) car on the drive; massive flatscreen TVs (in 2007); multiple cruise holidays per year; flying off to a warm destination mid-winter.
Many of them said when they were younger they never experienced such things and told stories of growing up in near poverty. Going into debt for holidays and having a new car on the drive was normalised.
These were nurses, postmen, truck drivers, retail staff, hospitality etc. all traditional working class jobs with low salary expectations.
They were trying desperately to _appear_ like they were middle class at whatever cost.
I'm of the belief it will still take a few generations before the wave of lower-middle class learn that it's not about having a new car on the drive but rather having that cash in the bank as savings - and a significantly cheaper (& older) car on the drive.
And yet the UK school system doesn't teach pupils about sensible financial matters - we all rely on our parents to guide us - so escaping the "buy it now on credit" mentality will be easier said that done!
To clarify: Right to Buy your rental home applied to homes rented from the local government, not ones rented from a private landlord.
These days you can get a big mortgage on a cheaply constructed apartment and still get hit for huge maintenance charges by a grasping building management firm.
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.
> 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.
It would be reasonable, but that also assumes the ass-covering started post rollout rather than pre rollout.
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.
Organisations can be fiendishly good at cultivating this kind of unaccountability. The software is managed by a contractor, maybe a project management company, a local PM team all of which focus on the performance of management and maybe budgets and timelines. Then you have some internal technical experts who just focus on the detail but have no influence on the whole. When things go wrong it is sent down a tech support ticketing system with multiple tiered defenses to deflect complaints. At some point it maybe gets to the point that an investigation is started. But obviously it needs to be done by someone neutral and independent who doesn't actually know the people involved or necessarily the technical details. And they are accountable not for outcomes but how closely they follow policy. A policy written by people outside the normal chain of command and no real skin in the game. At some point it reaches a legal team and then everyone else takes a step back. No one ever takes any responsibility beyond.an occasional case review conducted in a collegial atmosphere in a stuffy conference room by bored people. All the structures are put in place with good intentions but just protect people from actually having to make a decision and accept consequences. Except for the poor soul on the front line who only ever has consequences.
You're probably right—I just wanted to share a few thoughts and would welcome any corrections or clarification.
If I were in leadership, I'd assume there are edge cases I'm missing and take responsibility accordingly. Id just assume that is my job, as the leader, that is why I am paid, to make important decisions and stop the company from making big mistakes.
This isn’t a critique of your view—just an observation: there's a recurring theme on HN that leadership shouldn't be held responsible when things break down, as if being a CEO is just another job, not a position of accountability.
Where does this come from? Is it a uniquely American or capitalist norm?
I recall ( i dont think incorrectly) 1980s Japanese leadership—tech/auto who took failures so seriously they’d resign or even mention/think of sudoku.
CEO really is just another job, though. Perhaps you meant to say director? That is where the accountability lies, both practically and legally.
CEO is the top of middle management, but still middle management all the same. The board and owners sit above that position, if you want to picture it as some kind of hierarchy, and are the driving leadership. They call the shots. The CEO has to answer to them.
Perhaps what you are trying to say is that middle management should carry more accountability? But if we were to go down that road, why stop at CEO?
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.
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.
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.
I haven't listened to the podcast, but I think you may be oversimplifying.
The origin of Horizon is that ICL won the tender for a project to computerise the UK's benefits payment system -- replacing giro books (like cheque books) with smart cards (like bank cards):
Sure, it was also expected to detect fraud, but overall it was a "modernising" project. The project failed disastrously because ICL were completely incompetent at building an accounting system, the system regularly made huge mistakes, and the incoming government scrapped it.
ICL was nonetheless still very chummy with government, as it was concieved of by 1960s British politicians who basically wanted a UK version of IBM because they didn't want Americans being in control of all the UK's computer systems. ICL used to operate mainframes and supply "computer terminals" to government and such, which is why they needed a lot of equipment from Fujitsu, which is why Fujitsu decided to buy them.
ICL/Fujitsu still kept the contract to computerize Post Office accounting more generally -- Horizon. Post Offices could literally have pen-and-paper accounting until this! Yes, the project was also meant to look for fraud and shrinkage, but at its heart it was there to modernise, centralise and reduce costs. If only it wasn't written by incompetent morons who keep winning contracts because they're sweet with government.
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.
I bet number 3 on your list there is super-appealing to many people. It sounds lovely to be the kind of person in a smaller community that everyone knows and says hi to, that helps you out with paying your bills or whatever it is. I’m guessing you’re also often the closest contact to the state in a smaller village, so there’s probably all sorts of applications and permits you’re asked to help out with.
Especially if you’re on the older side, it sounds like an absolutely wonderful way to spend your time. Assuming the post office doesn’t try to ruin your life afterwards.
It might not be fully clear to the reader, but many of these Post Office franchises are co-located with a Spar, or other shop. People have to go to the Post Office (IME to a greater extent than here in the US where I now live) and they then shop for other items. Obviously, other businesses tend to cluster around as well.
There are situations where franchisees don't offer other services. These folks tend to be older and for most of the life of the franchise haven't had the need for additional income earlier in the life of the franchise. They don't have the energy and don't want to take on the risk of expanding now. When they retire, they'll probably close up shop as their children have other jobs.
The rural Post Office where I grew up in the 80s and 90s was accessible to a wide area just off the main road. It served a wider area than the current one. The Postmistress' family also farmed. When that closed the natural place to setup was in the closes village because that was projected to grow in population. That development would result in the old Post Office building being knocked down to make way for a dual carriageway. Eventually a few more Post Office franchises appeared with their shops in that part of the county.
My inlaws ran a rural UK post office for a time (70s, maybe early 80s?). I'm not sure how they got in to it, but seemed to enjoy it while they did it. Small village, low volume of foot traffic, etc. I got a sense it almost felt like a civic duty, but I may be reading too much in to the earlier conversations.
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.
> And yes, a lot of people are willing to go into debt to effectively pay to have a job.
That's the same _class_ element that OP was talking about, no?
I guess most of the people on HN don't see issue with people going into debt to get a degree, which is supposed to get them a job.
So how is it different to people going into debt to buy a franchise?
It's even a more straightforward way to actually get a job, while a degree, if it goes out of fashion on the job market, would have absolutely no use, and you'll have to flip the same burgers as the lad with no degree and no student debt.
Running a pub is a time-honoured way to lose money in the UK. They're essentially scams to steer the life savings of the working class into the accounts of large breweries.
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.
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.
What do you mean? The government very strongly responded to this scandal, including having the person directly responsible, who instructed the post office to hide proof of the postmaster's innocence, appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
She has since been thrown under the bus, though, of course, not prosecuted or imprisoned (despite ordering wrongful prosecutions of over 900 others)
The politician responsible for her was Vince Cable, who since became leader of the Liberal Democrats, and holds 10 positions, most of which are either funded by the government or related to it.
Indeed - the accepted mechanism to influence the range of issues MPs care about (outside of election times) is to bombard their office with communication until they have no choice but to care. That is what needs to happen here.
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.
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.
It is crazy to think that anyone believed these nursery workers were committing massive levels of abuse on children in broad daylight at the nursery. Somewhere that parents were coming and going all the time. I can't imagine what it was like for the people wrongly accused.
> 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.
Fujistu is a business - they're gonna lie and do all kinds of shady things to maximize profits, avoid litigation etc. Nobody expects a big business to be ethical or even do only legal things at this point.
It is the prosecutors conduct that is maddening here. They need to have higher standards - it is their job to prosecute actual criminal behavior, and not be lazy in fact checking
Firstly, no, people do expect big business to act legally. Businesses should not "lie and do all kinds of shady things", and it's up to regulators (and those they harm, using the courts) to hold them to account.
Secondly, I don't think you understand the situation if you talk about the "prosecutors conduct". The Post Office itself - a private company (owned by the government at arms length) - was the entity doing the prosecuting. These were private prosecutions.
You're hearing it right. The aggrieved party is also the prosecutor, in the criminal courts. They are not a claimant in the civil courts.
The Crown Prosecution Service (who work with the police, act for the government and prosecute most criminal cases in England and Wales) were not involved. In fact, much of the criticism of the CPS in the Post Office scandal is that they could have been involved; they had the statutory right to take over a prosecution, and if appropriate, discontinue it due to lack of evidence. But they did not intervene.
Many people committed perjury. Many barristers advised their clients to perjure themselves. Many executives within the post office and at Fujitsu conspired to deceive the courts. Many prosecutors submitted evidence to the courts they knew to be fraudulent.
The only people who received criminal charges were the sub postmasters.
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...
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.
> 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.
Why does it not make sense? If I was involved in a robbery at age 18, as a dumb kid, should I still be called "robber xyz" for the rest of my life? Especially if I turned my life around?
I agree that we should be forgiving, give people second chances etc, but that doesn't change the meaning of words. "Defamation" is when you damage someone's reputation by saying things about them that aren't true. If you were convicted of a crime long ago and someone draws attention to that fact, they're not defaming you. The truth isn't defamation, by definition.
Words can have multiple similar definitions with small variations. If I look up "defamation" I get:
> Defamation is a legal term that refers to any statement made by a person, whether verbal or printed, that causes harm to another person’s reputation or character. --- https://legaldictionary.net/defamation/
> Defamation is a communication that injures a third party's reputation and causes a legally redressable injury. The precise legal definition of defamation varies from country to country. It is not necessarily restricted to making assertions that are falsifiable, and can extend to concepts that are more abstract than reputation – like dignity and honour. --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defamation
Truth (in English law) is merely a defence to an accusation of libel or slander, and it is not an absolute defence. If you say or print true things about a person, that lowers their reputation in the eyes of an ordinary person, and you are motivated by malice, then you have still committed the crime of defamation.
English libel law is an evolution of the former English law known as scandalum magnatum -- "scandalizing the mighty". Basically, if you say bad things about powerful people, those powerful people will crush you with the law.
As an example, Robert Maxwell embezzled millions from his company's pension fund, and also used that money to sue anyone who slighted him - including anyone who said he was embezzling from his company's pension fund. He was never prosecuted for embezzling millions from his company's pension fund.
Calling someone a robber means they are currently a robber. It can be inaccurate and untrue in the same way that calling someone a bartender would be inaccurate and untrue if they are a lawyer who hasn't tended a bar in 20 years.
I don't like the idea of prosecuting people for this, but I don't think it's illogical.
Honestly I don't know, I think it would depend on how long ago the crime was and if there's a credible reason to believe they won't do it again. I do think there's a meaningful difference between "they murdered someone" and "they're a murderer", and in general I do prefer to describe people's actions as opposed to using "they're a ___" labels.
> 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.
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.
I was attempting to emphasize the absurdity of any software system being “absolutely correct at all times”. I don’t believe such a system can exist, at least not in such strong terms.
What's important is that the audit trail can be replayed to derive the state of the system - and preferably in such a way that investigators can determine what _would_ have been seen by someone using it on a specific day at a specific time. Whether the system is free from bugs is a different matter - no system is, which is why deriving state from the audit trail instead of a parallel process which is guaranteed to diverge is so important!
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.
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.
Civil defamation laws could equally be used to undermine freedom of the press. In any case, the 'can of worms' you are talking about was the state of affairs in the UK until 2009 and is currently the case in several US states and yet somehow we still have people in those states openly criticizing a sitting president.
Rather than throwing our hands in the air, maybe we could expect our governments to craft laws in such a way that we can punish people for willful lies resulting in death while still preserving our right to free speech and the press.
The UK already has extremely strong defamation laws, to the point where we attract "libel tourism" - foreigners find dubious excuses to bring their libel cases to the UK courts so that they have an easier chance of winning.
Lots of people in my replies are telling me that I'm wrong, but no-one has yet answered my question: what specifically should the government do?
Simple things like anti-harassment rules, paparazzi regulations and rules against publishing known fabrications would be a good start without impugning on the freedom of press.
The United States (famously) has stronger free speech protections and weaker libel/slander laws, yet seems to have less of an issue with tabloids. Is there maybe more of a divide between what's alloweable for "public figures" versus private citizens? Or maybe even our right-wing rags are more skeptical of the government? I don't know what the difference is, but you seem to see less of this sort of thing, gross as our tabloids still are. Maybe it really is just a cultural difference somehow.
The US tabloids are awful. Any checkout isle at a Walmart, Dollar General, etc is just littered with them, right next to the disposable lighter packs and chewing gum.
But nobody reads them in the US[1], and many are about celebrities or cryptids or what-have-you rather than current events or private citizens. There's definitely a cultural difference here.
[1] UK has 1/4th of the population of the US but The Sun has 4x the circulation of The New York Post. The Daily Mirror every day puts out 4x the number of papers that The National Enquirer puts out in a week.
Defamation is already illegal. People sue each other for defamation all the time - in fact UK libel law is notoriously weighted in favour of the plaintiff. If these men were defamed they can sue the tabloids and they'll probably win.
GP was saying the government should do something. What more can the government do?
No other country has as toxic a press culture as the UK. Addressing that doesn’t have to mean restricting press freedom. If something is a destructive cancer on society, you can’t just ignore it, or eventually it will destroy those freedoms for everyone else.
>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.
Maybe everyone does it at some level, but not everyone works in a job that has the potential to wreck other people's lives and freedoms. There should be a higher standard for doctors, prosecutors, cops, judges etc than someone writing a todo CRUD app or a cashier at a bodega.
It is not too much to ask for prosecutors to be a bit more careful, bit more factual, understand the powers that come with their position and use it wisely. If they are not able to do that, they should pick some other profession which has lesser potential to cause damage than law enforcement.
Also - now that the software has proven defective, are they doing to go after Fujitsu or those who tested/signed off on the software? Probably not, maybe they will find a scapegoat at best.
Law enforcement could definitely do better here. The nature of the job tends to attract people who like exerting power over others, and I imagine that correlates with deciding people are guilty first, and finding evidence later.
But everybody is like this to an extent, so you need to fix this in other ways too. This is why reasonable countries have a whole bunch of process around legal punishment, and don't just throw someone in prison after a police officer says so. All the restrictions on how evidence is gathered and what kind of proof needs to be provided are ways to work around this problem. The police and prosecutor might decide someone is guilty, but they still have to convince twelve ordinary people. (Or whatever the process is in your country of choice.)
It sounds like this is where things really fell apart with the postal scandal, and the courts were willing to convict with insufficient evidence.
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.
Look your question is not unreasonable and the s answer is interesting, but your tone implies loathing and belittling.
Which maybe we (I also work in "defense") deserve to burn in hell, but who are you to be self righteous? For example, if you ever put up a Ukraine flag sticker you'd be a hypocrite too.
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 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.
Governments don't do get source code for the same reason as every other customer doesn't get source code: software vendors are incentivized to refuse the request.
Why are the vendors so incentivized? Well, coming back to Fujitsu and the Post Office, the answer is that refusing to share the source was worth about a billion dollars: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cgm8lmz1xk1o
> 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?
It's incremental, and goes back to things like clocks.
Imagine a witness says "I saw him go into the bank at 11:20. I know the time because I looked up at the clock tower, and it said 11:20".
Defence argues "The clock must have been wrong. My client was at lunch with his wife by 11:15".
Clocks are simple enough that we can presume them to correct, unless you can present evidence that they are unreliable.
This presumption was extended to ever-more complicated machines over the years. And then (fatally) this presumption was extended to the rise of PROGRAMMABLE computers. It is the programmability of computers that makes them unreliable. The actual computer hardware rarely makes an error that isn't obvious as an error.
The distinction of software and hardware is a relatively recent concept for something as old as common law.
Isn’t it a similar case in the USA where intoxication breath test computers are similarly obscured from scrutiny? People have argued that they have a right to “face their accuser” and see the source code only to have that request denied. So, black box.
Breathalyzers aren't typically considered sufficient evidence in of themselves to convict (or exonerate), iirc many PDs have a policy of treating a breathalyzer hit as probable cause more than anything and then either they throw you in the drunk tank if you don't demand a blood test to verify, or, if they want to actually prosecute you, they get a warrant for a blood test.
AIUI breath test only establishes probable cause. If you fail a breath test you are taken for a blood draw.
Breath test results are routinely challenged (sometimes successfully) by demanding records showing that the device has been tested and calibrated according to the required schedule.
No chance. The article concludes with the depressing statement that the government has no plans to reform the law, so the injustices will continue. They certainly won't be spending money on digging up old injustices.
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?
Arguments made towards right-wing government (which the UK had for the past decade) from higher education are unlikely to be well received. Perhaps somewhat by Cameron, certainly not in the post-Brexit idiocracy of May, Johnson, Truss or Sunak.
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.
Well, hey, far be it for me to tell you that you’re wrong, but the BBC says that you’re wrong as do numerous other sources.
> The Post Office itself took many cases to court, prosecuting 700 people between 1999 and 2015. Another 283 cases were brought by other bodies, including the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS).
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.
It didn't work because it was a terrible movie and blatant propaganda, but I could see someone doing this successfully if they were more subtle about it.
I suspect it’s a deliberate strategy in other venues. I see a lot of comments on HN that seem like they’re rage/troll/flame bait to cause a line of inquiry they are advancing to be flagged/downvoted, but if done as intended, their reply will be divisive enough that the troll trigger man isn’t identified as a troll, but they induce trolling in others.
Anyone Can Become a Troll: Causes of Trolling Behavior in Online Discussions
Justin Cheng, Michael Bernstein, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Jure Leskovec
> In online communities, antisocial behavior such as trolling disrupts constructive discussion. While prior work suggests that trolling behavior is confined to a vocal and antisocial minority, we demonstrate that ordinary people can engage in such behavior as well. We propose two primary trigger mechanisms: the individual’s mood, and the surrounding context of a discussion (e.g., exposure to prior trolling behavior). Through an experiment simulating an online discussion, we find that both negative mood and seeing troll posts by others significantly increases the probability of a user trolling, and together double this probability. To support and extend these results, we study how these same mechanisms play out in the wild via a data-driven, longitudinal analysis of a large online news discussion community. This analysis reveals temporal mood effects, and explores long range patterns of repeated exposure to trolling. A predictive model of trolling behavior shows that mood and discussion context together can explain trolling behavior better than an individual’s history of trolling. These results combine to suggest that ordinary people can, under the right circumstances, behave like trolls.
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 propaganda that was manufactured by the government around this was particularly clever. Most people believe the captive labour market that has been created was for the benefit of the tax payer - see the downvotes and no comments - and reject the idea that it is actually the opposite and only benefactors are big corporations. The idea that subsequent governments could be so corrupt, doesn't compute.
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.
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.
>> 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]
This is hilarious... in the land of "you can't defend yourself or especially your property", he was partly to blame. That one is hilarious.
>I disagree that anything similar could happen at this scale in the US or France.
In the US, the US Mail is sacred, so I agree it could never be attacked like this. But other industries, other scenarios? That level of prosecutorial malfeasance isn't unusual at all. I will concede that the scale of it may differ, but only because I have no ready examples, not because I believe that there is some sort of safeguard that would prevent it.
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.
No, the Post Office doesn't have its own "law enforcement" (if you mean something like a police force) or its own judges.
Any company has the right to bring a private prosecution under UK law, and this was the basis for the prosecutions in question. It just means that the company pays for some of the costs involved.
Whether or not private prosecutions should be allowed is certainly a legitimate topic of discussion. Let's not muddy the waters with misinformation about the Post Office having some kind of parallel police and courts system. It just doesn't.
> Any company has the right to bring a private prosecution under UK law
That's a simplification. The Post Office has a more privileged position due to its history; it has both formal access (e.g. to police computers) and informal deference from CPS that regular companies do not enjoy.
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.
My argument is that these are not deep state plots, these are just plots. This are plots that states are doing. This is the state. This is an organization of millions of people. There is no deep state. The state is just like any other large organization.
Take for example the eBay stalking scandal.
"The eBay stalking scandal was a campaign conducted in 2019 by eBay and contractors. The scandal involved the aggressive stalking and harassment of two e-commerce bloggers, Ina and David Steiner, who wrote frequent commentary about eBay on their website EcommerceBytes"
There is no "deep eBay", there is just eBay. We don't use the phrase "deep eBay" for a reason. And in the same way "deep State" does not make any sense.
Iraq war was definitely not the work of any deep state, if you follow your definition. It was pushed by the president and his government, not faceless bureaucrats.
Certainly the pressure on them and the “intel” they saw on WMD was in part the work of the deep state, that the president was captured by them is sort of the point.
The CIA was very clear that there was nothing there, and the publicly appointed leadership (Rumsfeld, Feith, Cheney, etc) badgered them until they gave in and made some wishy-washy statement that Powell could pretend was real.
The war was led from the top - Sec Def and VP. That Bush was a moron and appointed liars to Sec Def and VP is on him. Cheney and Rumsfeld had a long history of making things up, going back to the 70s.
Source being that ridiculous fanfic Cheney movie? You’re even further off than me, even high level CIA was divided, along many other orgs that supported it. Where did Colin Powell get his evidence from? And the OSP?
Even if we agreed Iraq wasn’t a good example, it’s irrelevant to the point as I don’t think anyone actually thinks there aren’t powerful and largely behind the scenes figures - defense, lobbying, billionaires, and so on that aren’t actively steering the government away from the will of the people.
That shows some set of intelligence had some sources that told them they don’t, far from proof of anything let alone anything relevant here. And we know several high up yet largely unknown to the public defense ops claimed the opposite, ie, the deep state.
You've got it backwards, at least in your description.
They went after the intel they wanted to find to justify their position. It didn't matter if it was real or true, it just needed to come from the intelligence apparatus.
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
Partly on account of the "perhaps" in the original, and partly because I have seen (elsewhere) "just doing his job" defenses.
In corner cases, culpability for uncertain expertise can be a tricky issue - you may recall the case of the Italian geologists, a few years back, indicted for minimizing the risk of an earthquake shortly before one occurred - but the case here seems pretty clear-cut (again, I'm speaking morally, not legally.)
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.
OT but what a shit site that is. A third of the page is taken up by a “best prime day deals” countdown banner. What a consumerist piece of shit website.
Every system has bugs, even deployed, high visibility accounting systems. Debian stable, which I personally view as the gold standard for a robust general purpose OS, has hundreds of bugs.
That is not to say that bugs are good. They are bad and should be squashed. But the Horizon failure, IMO, is with the management, that pretended that the system was bug free and, faced with the evidence to the contrary, put the blame on postmasters. My 2c.
If any large system wasn’t constantly logging errors I’d immediately assume there was something wrong with the error logging system. Only trivial software is bug free.
So long as the jury understands this, it's all fine.
If you're on trial for doing X and your jury is told by a prosecution witness "mrkramer did X" and under cross they admit that's based on computer records which are often bogus, inconsistent, total nonsense, it doesn't take the world's best defence lawyer to secure an "innocent" verdict. That's not a fun experience, but it probably won't drive you to suicide.
One of the many interlocking failures here is that the Post Office, historically a government function, was allowed to prosecute people.
Suppose I work not for the Post Office (by this point a private company which is just owned in full by the government) but for say, an Asda, next door. I'm the most senior member of staff on weekends, so I have keys, I accept deliveries, all that stuff. Asda's crap computer system says I accepted £25000 of Amazon Gift Cards which it says came on a truck from the depot on Saturday. I never saw them, I deny it, there are no Gift Cards in stock at our store.
Asda can't prosecute me. They could try to sue, but more likely they'd call the police. If the police think I stole these Amazon cards, they give the file to a Crown Prosecutor, who works for the government to prosecute criminals. They don't work for Asda and they're looking at a bunch of "tests" which decide whether it makes sense to prosecute people.
But because the Sub-postmasters worked under contract to the Post Office, it could and did in many cases just prosecute them, it was empowered to do that. That's an obvious mistake, in many of these cases if you show a copper, let alone a CPS lawyer your laughable "case" that although this buggy garbage is often wrong you think there's signs of theft, they'll tell you that you can't imprison people on this basis, piss off.
A worse failure is that Post Office people were allowed to lie to a court about how reliable this information was, and indeed they repeatedly lied in later cases where it's directly about the earlier lying. That's the point where it undoubtedly goes from "Why were supposedly incompetent morons given this important job?" where maybe they're morons or maybe they're liars, to "Lying to a court is wrong, send them to jail".
It's worse than that - in UK law you cannot question the evidence produced by a computer unless you can prove the computer is not operating correctly - it's an inversion of the normal burden of proof.
A juror can, and should IMHO, however consider that evidence based entirely upon computer records may potentially be erroneous and therefore unable to secure proof 'beyond a reasonable doubt'. If I were a juror, I'd default to non-guilty if a case were based entirely upon the results of an algorithm or computerised records because they introduce doubt.
It’s only an inversion of the usual burden of proof if you assume that evidence from a computer can only ever be used to aid the prosecution. It can also be used to aid the defense, in which case this presumption makes it harder to convict someone, not easier.
They can, actually. Anyone in the UK can launch a private prosecution. It's rare because it's expensive and the CPS can (and often do) take over any private prosecution then drop it.
Nevertheless, the power exists and has been intentionally protected by parliament. I think most would agree it needs reform, however.
Unfortunately the "its rare" isnt true.
it is more common now than it was back in the horizon days.
It also isnt necessarily expensive since you can apply for costs with the default being for it to be paid (unless good reason not to). As such whilst its not an option for the average person who cant afford the upfront cost it is very practical for large businesses especially if they engage in it often and hence can stand up a department for it.
It is an actual example of a two tier justice system since those who can afford the private prosecution skip the queue for the public system but will still normally have the taxpayer pay for it.
There is currently a consultation underway as per below article which, incidentally, mentions a more recent dubious example of private prosecutions which got slapped down.
> If you're on trial for doing X and your jury is told by a prosecution witness "mrkramer did X" and under cross they admit that's based on computer records which are often bogus, inconsistent, total nonsense, it doesn't take the world's best defence lawyer to secure an "innocent" verdict. That's not a fun experience, but it probably won't drive you to suicide.
I imagine digital records are involved in nearly every trial at this point. Good luck getting this point admitted by the justice system.
There are plenty of examples, Light Blue Touchpaper talks about this a bunch. You do have a problem that courts will believe technicians very broadly unless somebody competent is cross-examining to highlight where the limits of their evidence are. So your defence will need to hire such an expert and your legal team need to get the judge to understand why everybody is going to listen to nerd stuff for however long when they thought this was a case about, say, theft.
Well not really, no one should be committing suicide due to a buggy system. If you know the details of the case it was widespread but the post office decided to gaslight everyone and put people in debt and prison. That’s what caused this, the bugs were just a catalyst for shitty humans to do shitty things
Yea management failed but wouldn't the most logical thing be to call in computer forensics experts and quality test the software, reverse engineering it and try to catch the bugs. This wasn't the classic case of financial fraud, this was all about faulty software.
The Post Office management knew about the bugs but didn't want to take the blame for the accounting issues they caused (since it was management that purchased and approved the software some blame would have fallen on them).
Fujitsu was all to blame, after all they created and maintained the software. It just blows my mind why would courts pursue the individuals and not the creator of the software, when they realized that this mess was widespread and not isolated.
UK law said that there was a presumption that computer systems were working correctly unless there was evidence to the contrary. That’s not inherently nuts. It makes roughly as much sense as assuming that, say, a dishwasher is in working order unless there’s evidence to the contrary. This presumption in and of itself could just as well aid a person’s defense as hinder it (e.g. if they have an alibi based on computer records).
In this case it should have been very easy to provide evidence to override the presumption that the Horizon system was working correctly. That this didn’t happen seems to have resulted from a combination of bad lawyering and shameless mendacity on the part of Fujitsu and the Post Office.
Don’t get me wrong — the whole thing is a giant scandal. I’m just not sure if this particular presumption of UK law is the appropriate scapegoat.
>UK law said that there was a presumption that computer systems were working correctly unless there was evidence to the contrary.
Defense had to prove that only one Horizon/Fujitsu accounting software was buggy and the whole prosecution falls apart e.g. If John's Horizon/Fujitsu accounting software has bugs then Peter's Horizon/Fujitsu accounting software most probably has bugs too.
IIRC one issue was that every time someone advanced the theory something was wrong with Horizon, the Post Office kept claiming that nobody else was experiencing any issues. They also lied under oath, claiming no bugs that could cause such situations were known. Given this most the of defence lawyers abandoned that line of inquiry (they were nothing special, seeing as village postmasters aren't rich).
Proving bugs can be pretty hard if you don't have access to software & source code. That is similar to the US, courts usually won't give you access to source code to verify if software is operating correctly, you generally only get cross examine the company representative & person who performed the test. DNA tests are one good example.
In principle, yes. It may be that the bar was set too high and that there needs to be some clarification of exactly what the presumption means.
I’d argue that some kind of weak presumption along these lines clearly makes sense and is probably universal across legal systems. For example, suppose the police find that X has an incriminating email from Y after searching X’s laptop. Are they required to prove that GMail doesn’t have a bug causing it to corrupt email contents or send emails to the wrong recipients? Presumably not.
I meant courts should've called in multiple expert witnesses and even computer forensics companies. This case looks like government or in this case courts colluded with British Post Office.
But it was the decision to gaslight and charge the postmasters with crimes that caused the suicides, not the bugs in the code. If they had just admitted that the accounting issues were due to bugs in the system then I really doubt anyone would have committed suicide.
I'd be shocked if any piece of software large enough to qualify as an "accounting system" didn't contain at least hundreds of bugs. We're just not that good at building software. Especially if you consider that the system encompasses all of the dependencies, so you should count bugs in the OS, CPU, any relevant firmware, etc.
I meant top management is in deep shit if their finical departments run low quality buggy accounting software not the staff. Or in this case post office branches run the buggy software. All in all, decentralized nature of post office system was the thing that drove everything to this madness.
Damn! That's dark. I should've read the article first, but I did not. Sorry.
I kinda understand the false guilt these postmasters must have felt when they were wrongfully accused. These people should not be dead like that, those who puts them into that living hell should.
Oddly though, the justice of this world usually don't work like that. Usually, it's the people at the lowest level who suffer the worst fate/abuse, simply because they are the most defenseless, while the people "on the top" pets themselves for "resolving" the problem they created.
It's a odd place to mention, but from one of Donald Trump's story (The Verrazano-Narrows Bridge one where he noticed the unnoticed engineer) I've learned it is important that one must actively take what they deserved (recognition in his story, justice in this case), and at least don't be silent when other people is stealing it away. This is "a nasty world", and if you want to make things right, you must "Fight! Fight! Fight!" and never give up.
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.
A 90 year old is much more physically fragile than a 20 year old. If you hit a 20 year old and they are bruised you get an assault charge, if you hit a 90 year old and they die you get a murder charge, despite using the same amount of force.
I do agree with the sibling post that suicide would be weaponized which is the real problem.
A single comment is not really bullying. Continued harassment is.
And much like assessing how physical violence might contribute to the end result, so could this be actually assessed. I don’t know why people reach for binary classifications strawmans like this.
> 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.
> 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.
"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.
I don't have a big issue with that particular phrase itself. Although the passive voice is designed to conceal or obscure the actor, which doesn't accomplish anything here. Attributing a suicide to anyone other than the actor starts to appear oxymoronic very quickly. Yes life is complex and whatnot -- that's a given, we don't need a reminder every time anything happens.
But really it's the transparent and ham-handed attempts by some others to smooth over the sharp edges of reality merely by re-phrasing how things are written.
People generally don't want pity, but these re-phrasings accomplish nothing other than to make clear that one person feels sorry for another.
> Attributing a suicide to anyone other than the actor starts to appear oxymoronic very quickly.
No one is an island. We’re all deeply intertwined/interconnected. We’re the sum total of our lived experiences and without a doubt some have lived far more challenging lives than others and are influenced by factors that would lead just about anyone down a dark path.
The grief felt by those left behind is the result of that aforementioned interconnectedness.
Getting back to the quoted bit, isn’t this a bit like saying “attributing grief to anyone other than the person experiencing it is oxymoronic”?
My point is not to diminish the impact on those left behind in any way. Clearly this is a traumatic event that causes excruciating grief.
But I think we also need to be honest about the environmental factors that lead to suicide. Hopelessness is one of the large causes. If there are systemic reasons causing people to feel hopeless, and if those systemic problems could theoretically be changed/improved, and such improvement lowered the suicide rate, there’s a strong case to be made that the systemic factors share the responsibility.
> Yes life is complex and whatnot -- that's a given, we don't need a reminder every time anything happens.
I don’t think it’s a given. Clearly some lives are far more complicated than others. There exists a subset of people for whom that complication will become an insurmountable problem. Often those people have been traumatized, or have never learned the tools necessary to work through their feelings.
Some people are bullied into killing themselves. Should that be attributed wholly to the person who was bullied?
Yes I already said that life is complicate because I KNEW that someone would write this very comment. But reminding people that life isn't simple isn't the PSA that you believe it to be.
Yes, everything causes everything, there is no one single thing to blame. Life is hard and complicated. Every rule has exceptions. Every truth has contradictions. Every one is a hypocrite. The world is big and complex.
We all know this already. We don't need this disclaimer to every statement that anyone makes. At a certain point, it just becomes noise.
> Although the passive voice is designed to conceal or obscure the actor, which doesn't accomplish anything here.
No, passive voice is not in general designed to conceal or obscure the actor. Especially not in the sentence here.
There were valid similar complains about crime reporting. But the language there was different. The sentence "The innocent McKay family was inadvertently affected by this enforcement operation" is trying to hide culpability. We can discuss that. These two are incomparable:
- A deputy-involved shooting occurred. (Ok, we are avoiding the actor. We do not know who was shooting.)
- A person died by Suicide. (Clear to anyone who done what.)
The latter implies that suicide just happened to the person, like they got hit by a bus.
The former correctly attributes the action to the person who killed themselves. Certainly the motivations and causes that drive people to suicide are complex, but ultimately it is a choice the person makes.
"Committed" is perhaps not the best word, since it's associated with crimes (and suicide is not a crime in many places anymore), but it's at least more active.
Because there often is an external attribute, especially if you consider illness to be “external” as is conventional for most deaths caused by illness.
Think about it this way: I have relative who is vegan, so she has been trying to convince me to kill myself for many years now.
I can still choose whether I do it though, and obviously I chose not to so far, although during COVID I didn’t have much other social interaction, so I nearly went through with it.
I had agency throughout though. I’m not dead because I chose not to go through with it.
Many vegans think everyone else is evil/demonic for eating meat. “Meat is murder” etc etc. So the natural conclusion to that is, according to several vegans I know, that everyone who eats meat should be forced to either stop being a mass murderer or kill themselves.
Keep in mind there was a point where I was vegan, I know several vegans, so I know what I’m talking about.
They’re not shy about it either—look up That Vegan Teacher on YouTube for relatively middle-of-the-road vegan behavior in action.
Comparing nagging from a relative to wrongful prosecution is asinine. You might as well say that you had heartburn and it didn't kill you, so what's with all these people dying from heart attacks?
Agency is the ability to act. If someone dies against their own will, they don’t have agency, which is why we don’t use language like “they committed their own death” to refer to such instances.
Healthy, sane people in good situations don't kill themselves.
It follows from that fact that if someone kills themselves, at least one of those things was not true. And those things can and often are thrust on people, or at least occur against the will of the person.
In this case, a bad situation was thrust on a whole bunch of people, and it ended up killing some of them.
> Healthy, sane people in good situations don't kill themselves.
Correct. This has no bearing.
> it ended up killing some of them.
No, and it's irresponsible and unhelpful to act like agency and choice is not part of the equation. As if to say that basically everyone chooses the same way (euthanasia) in the face of terminal illness, or depression.
Tautologically, if you want to convey that help is out there and that a better life is possible, then you're saying people have a choice to make.
There's a lot of agency in heart attacks too, but we still say that the heart attack killed them, not that they killed themselves with a heart attack.
There is agency, but it's equally irresponsible and unhelpful to act like outside factors are not part of the equation, and that someone who drives a person to suicide is blameless.
Let's say someone jumps out of a burning building and they're killed by the fall. Did they have agency? Responsibility? Should we describe that as "committed suicide"?
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.
That explanation based on lies by the tech staff, is another variation of the Volkswagen explanation that the emissions scandal, were just some low level engineers.
The essence of this story is how the UK establishment can lie, and be corrupt to levels that will shame big time criminals.
[1]
"...Vennells was the CEO of Post Office Ltd during the latter part of the Post Office scandal, which involved more than 900 subpostmasters being wrongly convicted of theft, false accounting and fraud between 1999 and 2015 because of shortfalls at their branches that were in fact errors of the Horizon accounting software used by the Post Office.Thousands of subpostmasters paid for shortfalls caused by Horizon and/or had their contracts terminated. The actions of the Post Office caused the loss of jobs, bankruptcy, family breakdown, criminal convictions, prison sentences and at least four suicides. In total, over 4,000 subpostmasters would eventually become eligible for compensation..."
"...In 2013, Post Office Limited hired forensic accounting firm Second Sight, headed by Ron Warmington, to investigate the Horizon software losses. Warmington discovered the system was flawed and faulty, but Vennells was unhappy with Warmington's report and terminated their contract. Prior to her role as CEO, Vennells was the Chief Operating Officer of Post Office Ltd, a position in which – according to the evidence of the then CEO, David Smith – she had responsibility for management of the "operational use" of the Horizon software...."
"...During the case, the Post Office's conduct under Vennells's leadership was described as an instance of "appalling and shameful behaviour..."
"...During her testimony, Vennells consistently stated she was unaware of the facts or, when confronted with documents that showed she had been made aware of them, said she had not understood them..."
> 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.
> 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.
I’m not nitpicking the poster’s grammar, I’m nitpicking the claim about the grammatical structure of a particular sentence that’s the factual basis of their criticism of the article.
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.
Not arguing against that at all. It is a function of the state. My issue was purely about the emotive language of “deep state”, which is used (in my experience) to delegitimise all aspects of the state.
The legacy of the Post Office having prosecution powers was clearly a big part of the problem.
Or in other words: the state. No ‘deep’ needed unless you’re trying to be emotive. Fujitsu is not part of the state and although the Post Office is owned by the state, it’s a stand-alone company.
> “Perfectly respectable”
Maybe in some fringe circles, but this term is certainly attached to a huge amount extreme propaganda and conspiracy that attempts to undermine western democracy and institutions.
The point, I think, is that that The Post Office acted like part of the state, notably in that they acted like an unconstrained branch of the CPS in bringing prosecutions against thousands of people.
> Maybe in some fringe circles
I would say the fringe circles co-opted it over the last couple of decades, and the term's obviously become heavily associated with them in some people's minds (eg. yours). But it's an older term than that.
Edit: Why would the loons have adopted it, if it was such a disreputable term?
> The point, I think, is that that The Post Office acted like part of the state
I agree. The are part of the state. They are a standalone company, but wholly owned by the state. But other aspects of the state (eventually) reacted to the injustice: MPs, select committees, ministers, the public inquiry, and hopefully next the legal system as some of these people should be in jail.
> But it's an older term than that.
Fine, I’m happy to accept that. Just like I’m happy to accept that R&B has nothing to do with BB King any more (well, actuality I still struggle with that).
Definitions and usage change. The current usage is the one that matters. Not the legacy definition.
When the original poster wrote “massive deep state cover-up” I think the implication is that shadowy figures throughout the state are pulling cover-up levers, when it was one privately owned company and one publicly owned company. The rest of the state moved (albeit slowly) to expose this and make it right.
I think your struggle with shifting meanings is a worthwhile one. At least, if you said BB King was an R&B artist, and somebody tried to correct you, you'd be within your rights to stand your ground.
But particularly with regard to politics, I don't think you should let go of useful ideas because arseholes pollute them. At least, it feels uncomfortably like letting the arseholes win, to me.
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".
I’m fine with that. And I agree with the sentiment, just not the conclusion that we should be reporting these as not-suicide. If the original comment was indeed that tempered then I have no issue.
It's the lack of clarity in what happened. I think the rephrasing mike suggested is much clearer:
> 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.
> 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.
You may disagree with my assertion, but there has been considerable research into the role of media and reporting in suicide, indicating that contagion is real and that words matter when reporting on these issues.
That words matter is why I'm in opposition, as this diminishes agency in people.
Today I would say that framing suicide as "immoral" in secular society is banal and has no traction, but most, excepting certain circumstances, would suggest it is a bad choice. That surely follows if you as well as I would try to talk an able person out of suicide.
I don't think it helps to diminish agency as though suicide is an inevitability following tough circumstances. That's the message I am getting from the euphemism treadmill game, and I reject it.
The message should be that you can go through hell and recover, and you still have a choice. And granted there's always nature vs nurture; just as we are not entirely the product of our environment, the environment does shape us. But it's not all-or-nothing.
The person you are replying to shared some research by experts on the topic giving recommendations. You can argue for or against anything, but it’s useful to at least engage with the evidence being presented.
I would say it's not the treadmill at work in this case. It's not simply a replacement.
The article linked by the parent comment explains it well and references plenty of considered material. But the tldr is that committing suicide aligns with an active criminal/immoral act, while dying by suicide is a factual cause of death with many possible causes.
Consider how people would like your death, or the death of a loved one, described by others. And if you can't, maybe consider how others might be affected.
> But the tldr is that committing suicide aligns with an active criminal/immoral act, while dying by suicide is a factual cause of death with many possible causes.
The projections are doing the work here. Colloquially today what's understood is that "commit" merely means they did the deed. People can judge that to be immoral or not regardless; most people don't, except through the lens of religion.
They might judge it to be the wrong choice, as I surely do, and I don't think it helps to diminish agency as though suicide is an inevitability following any given circumstance.
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.
> 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.
That’s a very optimistic take on how “rational” society tends to be. The thought that “if things are in a certain way in society, then it must make sense (from a moral or societal point of view) for them to be that way.”
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.
My favourite inspiration goes the opposite direction. The United States has this Supreme Court, a final Court of Appeal, politically independent and empowered even to decide that the government's actions are illegal. Sounds great.
The UK had this rather antique thing called the "Lords of Appeal in Ordinary" aka "Law Lords" who were in theory just some Lords (ie people who are arbitrarily in the upper chamber of the Parliament, maybe because their dad was) but served the same purpose as a final court of appeal in practice and so had for a very long time all been Judges because duh, of course they should be judges, that's a job for a judge, just make some judges Lords and forget about it. They met in some committee room in the Palace of Westminster, because they're Lords and that's where the Lords are, right? So, there was practical independence, but the appearance was not here.
About 15 years ago now, the dusty Law Lords were in the way of an attempted reform of parliament. A Supreme Court sounds like a good idea, so the UK got a Supreme Court. It fixed up a nice building nearby, gave the exact same people a new job title and sent them over the road. Done.
But the UK version does what it says on the tin. It said on the tin they're politically independent. In the US of course this "independence" is bullshit, but in the UK since there's already a politically independent process to pick judges the same process continues for the Supreme Court. So a Prime Minister might hate the supreme court but they can't pick the judges.
I know I'm long winded, but, you did see there's a lot more text right?
The US Supreme Court says it's politically independent. And so the UK's Supreme Court just did that. It wasn't difficult, unlike the US the rest of our court system, including the predecessor "Law Lords" were in fact chosen by an independent non-political process already, the law making a Supreme Court more or less says "Oh, when we need more Supreme Court justices do the thing for judges again, only more so"
The Prime Minister can influence earlier in the chain though: they get to approve appointments to the Lords as a whole. Who then gets appointed to positions within the Lords is none of their business, but they can tip the scale if they need to.
It's actually for this reason that for hundreds of years until the early 21st century there was real concern about having a Catholic prime minister. There was even hand-wringing over PMs of other denominations, but the history of Catholicism in the UK in particular raised concern. Why? The PM has final approval of the Lords Spiritual - the bishops from the Church of England who are there to provide a protestant spiritual dimension to all debates before that House.
It's allegedly for this reason that Tony Blair (married to a Catholic) waited until after he left office to convert. I think it was either Brown or Cameron who then got the law explicitly changed to not bar Catholics and other religions to serve as PM.
The Prime Minister could, in principle, instruct the Queen (this whole arrangement was abolished before Brian got his mum's old job as we'll see shortly) not to issue the Letters Patent for a new Lord, but Parliament has explicitly laid out the rules for this, so, he is in contempt of Parliament. This seems like an unwise course of action as of course he serves only at their pleasure and even Sir Keir, who has an unusually large majority, has discovered that if they don't like what he proposes they can just ignore him.
None of this matters for the Supreme Court, and thus for about 15 years now. It's true that the Supreme Court's justices are made life peers (its original members were of course already peers having previously constituted the Law Lords, but new members are granted a peerage) - however that's merely a convention, if you don't make them a life peer it makes no difference to their job on the court, it just makes you look petty. I don't even think it's contempt now, because the law saying they should be elevated was repealed - unless the new law also says they must be given a peerage when they get the job, I glanced through it and didn't find that, but it's a huge law because making a Supreme Court was not its main purpose.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It could be that. It could be that they just have separate code paths for measuring "amount in" and "amount reported" with an if-clause missing in one and present in the other. From the description the debugging programmer provides, it doesn't look like they had any sort of coherent design.
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.
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
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.
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."
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 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?
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.
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.
It's a headline. It's not supposed to convey any nuance, it's just there to encourage you to read the article.
I agree that the wording isn't ideal, and I agree that the headline fails to capture the nuance of the circumstances that lead to suicide, but I disagree that subeditors who write headlines need to encapsulate that nuance. That's what the article is for.
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).
> Traditionally America likes to pretend this kind of class contempt doesn't exist
It just manifests as racism.
Most claims of racism in America are in fact classism. Very, very few people have actual dislike of others based on race. But a whole lot of people dislike people due to culture or class signals.
Do you think Stephen Miller is a classist rather than a bigot? Why not both? I mean he is only worth somewhere between 1-10 million. Shrug.
I think Vivek Ramaswamy found out how that worked out for himself in politics and at DOGE as a billionaire.
I suspect your view of very, very few is suspect.
The founding ideas of MAGA certainly cling to it. The 60-70 million voters for it have zero issues with it.
there's still regular ol classism, too, racism is just part of the calculus. Poor white folks don't have it good, they just have it less bad than poor not-white folks
In America maybe, in south africa it's quite the opposite considering the government provides a lot more support for poor non-white folks than for white folks (specifically based om race)
Some bits here and there. That faded as the US became a super power, and came back a bit as the 80's started stripping down the middle class thst was growing.
Of course, but the 2010's it was decided by the powers that he to re-introduce identity politics as the new form of class warfare. Which was 80% sexism/racism and 20% classisn.
Porque no los dos?
There’s class contempt too, no one wants to be one of the poors.
Wealth is not the same as class, either. Even in America. A teacher with an annual salary of $60k is higher class than a plumber making $100k annually. Unless the teacher is black, of course, then racial elements of class come into play.
I agree that wealth is not the same as class, but just as a counter anecdote, my dad is a (small business) plumber and I never felt like we were treated less than any other middle class family. If anything, it seemed like people were often really grateful and giving random gifts like food from gardens or tickets to local events.
There isn't as much contempt for the rich as there should be. The poor despise themselves for being poor, instead of the rich for making them that way.
> 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.
I think you misunderstood the parent post. It states people in the UK are more aware/recognizant of "class" - not that they are less classist (i.e. prejudiced)
The example of lower class people not recognizing so in the US is meant to be an example of lack of class awareness/recognition; not of less (or more) classism (prejudice based on class)
Some high class Brits have been some of the most elitist and entitled people I’ve ever met.
[flagged]
>libs think
Please don’t bring that nonsense here
Fascinating watching the vote count on this slide up and down even when the other comment isn’t viewable
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
There is a rather famous book written on this subject.
Catch-22.
In order to be given disability you must jump through so many hoops that no one whom is actually sick could complete them. Or how in unemployment you must prove you must spend your time proving you are looking for a job so you cannot spend you time actually looking for a job. My personal fav because its almost universal is sick-day policies that codify 100% abuse of sick days because people are punished for not using them because some people were "abusing" their sick days.
In the case of the book to be discharged from military service they must prove they are insane which no insane person could complete.
Minor correction, but in the book the act of asking to be discharged on account of insanity is taken as proof that one is sane, because no sane person would want to keep flying bombing missions day after day with low odds of survival.
Well yes, you're trying to take money from other people, of course you need to prove that you need it.
The general logic is that money is going to be taken from people no matter what (crime, expensive late interventions, etc.) and that relatively preventative measures are preferable because they cost less while preserving the social contract.
Sorry, but citation needed. Means testing might seem “obvious” from first principles, but from a policy point of view, it makes little to no sense.
The macroeconomic effects of welfare programs create a society that is better for everyone to live in. Reducing the issue to a matter of personal responsibility is a reframing that allows you to completely lose sight of the big picture, and create programs that are destined to fail by not reaching many of the people they need to.
Citation needed for the right to other people's money.
Government running charity interferes with the normal feedback in society. And the need to ask politely, justify one's apparently bad decisions and change failing behavior.
People become "entitled" to regular cash so a lot of the fear that ordinarily motivates the rest of us goes away.
Any system that asks nothing of people is a bad system.
I grew up on welfare. I've also seen how a lot of people on welfare actually live and how they spend their time. They don't spend it cleaning, I can tell you that.
Administration of means testing is often more expensive than doing away with the means testing.
How about UBI coupled with repealing the minimum wage?
> Administration of means testing is often more expensive than doing away with the means testing. How about UBI coupled with repealing the minimum wage?
Er... why wouldn't UBI be more expensive?
I'm not even arguing against UBI here, I'm just trying to make sense of your claim, which seems quite dubious.
That’s my soapbox — I think that’s the only feasible hope for the future, taking into account increased efficiency, fewer jobs, and higher corporate profits. UBI funded by higher corporate taxes.
I just don’t see any realistic way to make it actually happen.
> a lot of the fear that ordinarily motivates the rest of us
No, that seems like mostly you. Most people are not motivated by fear.
I would rather we have a system that is too generous and gets taken advantage of than one that is too parsimonious where people die for want of food and shelter that we could provide for them.
We exist in a world where people can be unable to work or even advocate for themselves through no fault of their own. As we raise the bar for how people have to prove that they "need" help, there will be people who die because they don't have the capacity to prove that. In theory we have social workers (as a societal role) but in reality they're underfunded/don't have capacity for the same reasons.
This feels like the same moral argument behind the presumption of innocence in the American legal system: far better to let criminals walk free than to falsely imprison an innocent person. Why do we not apply the same logic to welfare?
I mean, I know why: we're worried the system would get taken advantage of and not serve the people it's "meant" to help.... but then, who does it help? How much effort is it worth making people spend to prove they need help when that effort comes with a blood cost?
I agree with GP that welfare systems make for better societies--see also, public healthcare. I have several friends who are alive because of welfare systems. I grew up with people whose family squandered the welfare they got, but I don't view that as sufficient reason to withhold welfare from anyone else; I just accept that's the cost of a system that helps people.
Yep. Better to catch $1m in fraud by spending $20m than to spend $10m helping people with a possibility of $2m in fraud.
It makes no economic sense. It’s not more humane/helpful. But it’s what we ‘choose’ over and over.
> Any system that asks nothing of people is a bad system.
Ok bro, while you're out there building morally pure systems the rest of us will do research and learn what actually works in the real world.
Yeah but in the UK there actually are lots of people claiming benefits that probably shouldn't be. Especially Personal Independent Payments.
It's enough of an issue that even Labour (left wing) is having to deal with it. Though as usual Starmer has chickened out (I think this is like the third thing that was obviously a good move that he's backed down on after dumb backlash).
Can you provide sources for your claim?
If you're looking for hard numbers on how many people shouldn't be getting them then you won't find it. Only the government has access to the details of individual claims.
However you can infer a lot from a) the insane rise in claims, especially mental health related:
https://obr.uk/docs/box-chart-3-f.png
Has the mental health of the nation got twice as bad in 2 years? Obviously not.
And b) whenever the BBC does touchy feely profiles of people there are always some weird red flags:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2gpl4528go
£400/month help with her bills because she struggles with time management? I'm sympathetic to her problems but that is a shit ton of money!
Even some of the people receiving it agree:
> "I was shocked by the ease with which it was granted. I was expecting to be interviewed, rightly so, but it was awarded without interview and he received backdated pay for the maximum amount." > > She was also surprised that her husband got mobility allowance for not having a car, even though she had a car and could drive him around.
(This reminds me of WFA where plenty of people receiving that also thought it was ridiculous.)
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn0ry09d50wo
> Paul Harris, from Barnard Castle, gets £72.65 a week in PIP payments to help with extra costs associated with his anxiety and depression - such as for specialist therapy apps and counselling.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn4llx4kvv8o
> Nick Howard, 51, from Cambridge, is neurodivergent and has been claiming Pip for five years. > > "Without Pip I would not be able to work as it pays for my transport to and from my workplace. > > "I'm currently buying an electric bike on credit, others I have had have been stolen or vandalised," he added.
Great... but I don't think paying PIP for 5 years is a good way to buy someone a bike.
Obviously not all cases are like this, but clearly something has gone wrong. And this isn't a partisan issue. Both parties agree that it has to change. The Tories just ignored the problem and Labour gave up after predictable "N people will die!" press.
And to be clear I'm not anti-poor or anything like that. I also thing WFA is ridiculous and that mostly goes to the rich. Child benefit also goes to lots of people (myself included) who totally don't need it. They all need reform, but look what happens when the government tries...
Nothing sounds wrong to me in any of the cases you mentioned?
> £400/month help with her bills because she struggles with time management? I'm sympathetic to her problems but that is a shit ton of money!
£4800/yr is a shit ton of money? Things must be pretty rough over there!
> Child benefit also goes to lots of people (myself included) who totally don't need it.
Is that a bad thing?
> £4800/yr is a shit ton of money? Things must be pretty rough over there!
For the average person in the UK, it definitely is.
there is lots of welfare fraud. if you think money should just be handed out without question then you start handing your money out first.
I see you've worked with a moribund bureaucracy before.
> 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.
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.
Let's not even talk about the financial crisis
We solved that by printing money and bailing everyone out, they didn't even have to promise not to do it again, such good chaps.
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 agree that contempt arises in both cultures. My point about the UK was more around the phenomenon that the class "obsession" stems from the notion that somebody's class in the UK is ostensibly immutable from birth. (It is my impression that class in the US is much more about money; your status and class can be correlated / increased by your level of wealth).
In the UK it doesn't really matter if you become a millionaire or billionaire, you still won't be able to perforate the perception of "where you came from". This leads to all kinds of baseless biases such as OP's observation / point.
Yes, this is mostly true - class is thought of as upbringing in UK and it's malleable in US. But you can still be rich and low class in the US, there are a ton of class signifiers in US but it's more like a club that you get inducted into, money just gets you the chance to try to enter that world. Increasingly though it's something you're born into.
The British are open about it, Americans go to great length to pretend that it doesn’t exist.
Americans use stuff like occupation, home area, and education as the manifestation of class, with a sprinkle of racism.
From my experience living most of my life in the UK from birth there is an element of truth to class being immutable - being directly linked to money and the status of property ownership - for now anyway.
The Thatcher years created an opportunity for working class (who traditionally lived in rent controlled properties due to low income) to purchase their houses for pennies on the dollar.
Suddenly, millions of families felt they had moved up a class. They were no longer at the mercy of landlords and had moved up in society from a tenant to an owner.
The traditional three tiers of lower, middle and upper class changed to lower, lower-middle, upper-middle and upper.
From my observations the lower-middle class are still adjusting not to having money but rather _access_ to money previously denied. Having equity in a property as a guarantee of a loan opens up a world previously off limits by the banks.
A bit like when someone turns 18 and they have access to credit cards - lots of cash easily available!
I come from a family where (with the exception of a mortgage), if you can't pay for something in cash (and still have plenty in reserve), you can't afford it. My folks were very proud of raising a family with zero debts (minus the mortgage), and I'm forever thankful.
The families I knew (and by extension others living on the typical "cookie cutter" UK housing estate) were swimming in debt. What surprised me the most was how "normal" it was - 3yr (or less) car on the drive; massive flatscreen TVs (in 2007); multiple cruise holidays per year; flying off to a warm destination mid-winter.
Many of them said when they were younger they never experienced such things and told stories of growing up in near poverty. Going into debt for holidays and having a new car on the drive was normalised.
These were nurses, postmen, truck drivers, retail staff, hospitality etc. all traditional working class jobs with low salary expectations.
They were trying desperately to _appear_ like they were middle class at whatever cost.
I'm of the belief it will still take a few generations before the wave of lower-middle class learn that it's not about having a new car on the drive but rather having that cash in the bank as savings - and a significantly cheaper (& older) car on the drive.
And yet the UK school system doesn't teach pupils about sensible financial matters - we all rely on our parents to guide us - so escaping the "buy it now on credit" mentality will be easier said that done!
To clarify: Right to Buy your rental home applied to homes rented from the local government, not ones rented from a private landlord.
These days you can get a big mortgage on a cheaply constructed apartment and still get hit for huge maintenance charges by a grasping building management firm.
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.
The money is implied by having parents who can afford your private school fees.
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 they did was profoundly wrong and they have blood on their hands.<
This, so much this. Not ONLY that but they kept DOUBLING DOWN for YEARS.
I SO SO wish they would be held accountable for the pain, suffering, Chapter 11's, AND the suicides.
Bankruptcy is probably not chapter 11 in the UK. (or is it?)
> 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.
It would be reasonable, but that also assumes the ass-covering started post rollout rather than pre rollout.
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.
Organisations can be fiendishly good at cultivating this kind of unaccountability. The software is managed by a contractor, maybe a project management company, a local PM team all of which focus on the performance of management and maybe budgets and timelines. Then you have some internal technical experts who just focus on the detail but have no influence on the whole. When things go wrong it is sent down a tech support ticketing system with multiple tiered defenses to deflect complaints. At some point it maybe gets to the point that an investigation is started. But obviously it needs to be done by someone neutral and independent who doesn't actually know the people involved or necessarily the technical details. And they are accountable not for outcomes but how closely they follow policy. A policy written by people outside the normal chain of command and no real skin in the game. At some point it reaches a legal team and then everyone else takes a step back. No one ever takes any responsibility beyond.an occasional case review conducted in a collegial atmosphere in a stuffy conference room by bored people. All the structures are put in place with good intentions but just protect people from actually having to make a decision and accept consequences. Except for the poor soul on the front line who only ever has consequences.
You're probably right—I just wanted to share a few thoughts and would welcome any corrections or clarification.
If I were in leadership, I'd assume there are edge cases I'm missing and take responsibility accordingly. Id just assume that is my job, as the leader, that is why I am paid, to make important decisions and stop the company from making big mistakes.
This isn’t a critique of your view—just an observation: there's a recurring theme on HN that leadership shouldn't be held responsible when things break down, as if being a CEO is just another job, not a position of accountability.
Where does this come from? Is it a uniquely American or capitalist norm?
I recall ( i dont think incorrectly) 1980s Japanese leadership—tech/auto who took failures so seriously they’d resign or even mention/think of sudoku.
Well, resigning to play sudoku is certainly preferable to seppuku. :)
CEO really is just another job, though. Perhaps you meant to say director? That is where the accountability lies, both practically and legally.
CEO is the top of middle management, but still middle management all the same. The board and owners sit above that position, if you want to picture it as some kind of hierarchy, and are the driving leadership. They call the shots. The CEO has to answer to them.
Perhaps what you are trying to say is that middle management should carry more accountability? But if we were to go down that road, why stop at CEO?
"victims of confirmational bias"
dude
tbh thats what bothered me
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?
For a while the YouTube algorithm was suggesting clips of them to me. I think it was from a British newspaper.
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.
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
I haven't listened to the podcast, but I think you may be oversimplifying.
The origin of Horizon is that ICL won the tender for a project to computerise the UK's benefits payment system -- replacing giro books (like cheque books) with smart cards (like bank cards):
https://inews.co.uk/news/post-office-warned-fujitsu-horizon-...
https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm199899/cmselect/cmtr...
Sure, it was also expected to detect fraud, but overall it was a "modernising" project. The project failed disastrously because ICL were completely incompetent at building an accounting system, the system regularly made huge mistakes, and the incoming government scrapped it.
ICL was nonetheless still very chummy with government, as it was concieved of by 1960s British politicians who basically wanted a UK version of IBM because they didn't want Americans being in control of all the UK's computer systems. ICL used to operate mainframes and supply "computer terminals" to government and such, which is why they needed a lot of equipment from Fujitsu, which is why Fujitsu decided to buy them.
ICL/Fujitsu still kept the contract to computerize Post Office accounting more generally -- Horizon. Post Offices could literally have pen-and-paper accounting until this! Yes, the project was also meant to look for fraud and shrinkage, but at its heart it was there to modernise, centralise and reduce costs. If only it wasn't written by incompetent morons who keep winning contracts because they're sweet with government.
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.
I bet number 3 on your list there is super-appealing to many people. It sounds lovely to be the kind of person in a smaller community that everyone knows and says hi to, that helps you out with paying your bills or whatever it is. I’m guessing you’re also often the closest contact to the state in a smaller village, so there’s probably all sorts of applications and permits you’re asked to help out with.
Especially if you’re on the older side, it sounds like an absolutely wonderful way to spend your time. Assuming the post office doesn’t try to ruin your life afterwards.
It might not be fully clear to the reader, but many of these Post Office franchises are co-located with a Spar, or other shop. People have to go to the Post Office (IME to a greater extent than here in the US where I now live) and they then shop for other items. Obviously, other businesses tend to cluster around as well.
There are situations where franchisees don't offer other services. These folks tend to be older and for most of the life of the franchise haven't had the need for additional income earlier in the life of the franchise. They don't have the energy and don't want to take on the risk of expanding now. When they retire, they'll probably close up shop as their children have other jobs.
The rural Post Office where I grew up in the 80s and 90s was accessible to a wide area just off the main road. It served a wider area than the current one. The Postmistress' family also farmed. When that closed the natural place to setup was in the closes village because that was projected to grow in population. That development would result in the old Post Office building being knocked down to make way for a dual carriageway. Eventually a few more Post Office franchises appeared with their shops in that part of the county.
People can read more at https://runapostoffice.co.uk/.
My inlaws ran a rural UK post office for a time (70s, maybe early 80s?). I'm not sure how they got in to it, but seemed to enjoy it while they did it. Small village, low volume of foot traffic, etc. I got a sense it almost felt like a civic duty, but I may be reading too much in to the earlier conversations.
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.
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.
> And yes, a lot of people are willing to go into debt to effectively pay to have a job.
That's the same _class_ element that OP was talking about, no?
I guess most of the people on HN don't see issue with people going into debt to get a degree, which is supposed to get them a job.
So how is it different to people going into debt to buy a franchise?
It's even a more straightforward way to actually get a job, while a degree, if it goes out of fashion on the job market, would have absolutely no use, and you'll have to flip the same burgers as the lad with no degree and no student debt.
Running a pub is a time-honoured way to lose money in the UK. They're essentially scams to steer the life savings of the working class into the accounts of large breweries.
Edit: A timely news article: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvg8llxmnx7o
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.
Pick up a TV license! Something else no sane person would do.
Some folks like running a small shop, being their own boss, and serving their neighborhood community.
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?
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?
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.
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...
There has been a lot of questions just in the last few days about Fujitsu continuing to bid for government contracts even when they said they wouldn’t. A random google result https://www.politico.eu/article/post-office-scandal-hit-fuji...
Wow. That is the kind of thing that every reasonable person should be calling their MP's office about daily.
What do you mean? The government very strongly responded to this scandal, including having the person directly responsible, who instructed the post office to hide proof of the postmaster's innocence, appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
She has since been thrown under the bus, though, of course, not prosecuted or imprisoned (despite ordering wrongful prosecutions of over 900 others)
The politician responsible for her was Vince Cable, who since became leader of the Liberal Democrats, and holds 10 positions, most of which are either funded by the government or related to it.
Indeed - the accepted mechanism to influence the range of issues MPs care about (outside of election times) is to bombard their office with communication until they have no choice but to care. That is what needs to happen here.
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.
> That was never done, I believe, because the software was matching the leadership's priors.
That has to be the most egregious confirmation bias I've heard about.
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://cambridgeblog.org/2023/05/a-journey-into-the-shaken-...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37650402
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.
Yes, that's me.
Wow, that is you.
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.
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...
It is crazy to think that anyone believed these nursery workers were committing massive levels of abuse on children in broad daylight at the nursery. Somewhere that parents were coming and going all the time. I can't imagine what it was like for the people wrongly accused.
> 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.
Indeed. Fujitsu were totally complicit in the false accusations and the coverup.
Thank you for the added detail.
Fujistu is a business - they're gonna lie and do all kinds of shady things to maximize profits, avoid litigation etc. Nobody expects a big business to be ethical or even do only legal things at this point.
It is the prosecutors conduct that is maddening here. They need to have higher standards - it is their job to prosecute actual criminal behavior, and not be lazy in fact checking
Firstly, no, people do expect big business to act legally. Businesses should not "lie and do all kinds of shady things", and it's up to regulators (and those they harm, using the courts) to hold them to account.
Secondly, I don't think you understand the situation if you talk about the "prosecutors conduct". The Post Office itself - a private company (owned by the government at arms length) - was the entity doing the prosecuting. These were private prosecutions.
You're hearing it right. The aggrieved party is also the prosecutor, in the criminal courts. They are not a claimant in the civil courts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prosecution#England_an...
The Crown Prosecution Service (who work with the police, act for the government and prosecute most criminal cases in England and Wales) were not involved. In fact, much of the criticism of the CPS in the Post Office scandal is that they could have been involved; they had the statutory right to take over a prosecution, and if appropriate, discontinue it due to lack of evidence. But they did not intervene.
It's mad we let such organizations run systems for us, let alone exist in the first place. If they were humans, they'd be labeled sociopaths.
It's not a crime when the government does it :-(
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?
Many people committed perjury. Many barristers advised their clients to perjure themselves. Many executives within the post office and at Fujitsu conspired to deceive the courts. Many prosecutors submitted evidence to the courts they knew to be fraudulent.
The only people who received criminal charges were the sub postmasters.
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.
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.
[dead]
> 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.
Why does it not make sense? If I was involved in a robbery at age 18, as a dumb kid, should I still be called "robber xyz" for the rest of my life? Especially if I turned my life around?
I agree that we should be forgiving, give people second chances etc, but that doesn't change the meaning of words. "Defamation" is when you damage someone's reputation by saying things about them that aren't true. If you were convicted of a crime long ago and someone draws attention to that fact, they're not defaming you. The truth isn't defamation, by definition.
> but that doesn't change the meaning of words.
Words can have multiple similar definitions with small variations. If I look up "defamation" I get:
> Defamation is a legal term that refers to any statement made by a person, whether verbal or printed, that causes harm to another person’s reputation or character. --- https://legaldictionary.net/defamation/
> Defamation is a communication that injures a third party's reputation and causes a legally redressable injury. The precise legal definition of defamation varies from country to country. It is not necessarily restricted to making assertions that are falsifiable, and can extend to concepts that are more abstract than reputation – like dignity and honour. --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defamation
I stand corrected.
Truth (in English law) is merely a defence to an accusation of libel or slander, and it is not an absolute defence. If you say or print true things about a person, that lowers their reputation in the eyes of an ordinary person, and you are motivated by malice, then you have still committed the crime of defamation.
English libel law is an evolution of the former English law known as scandalum magnatum -- "scandalizing the mighty". Basically, if you say bad things about powerful people, those powerful people will crush you with the law.
As an example, Robert Maxwell embezzled millions from his company's pension fund, and also used that money to sue anyone who slighted him - including anyone who said he was embezzling from his company's pension fund. He was never prosecuted for embezzling millions from his company's pension fund.
> He was never prosecuted for embezzling millions from his company's pension fund.
He escaped that. By dying. Probably suicide.
The walls were closing in
Calling someone a robber means they are currently a robber. It can be inaccurate and untrue in the same way that calling someone a bartender would be inaccurate and untrue if they are a lawyer who hasn't tended a bar in 20 years.
I don't like the idea of prosecuting people for this, but I don't think it's illogical.
Would you extend the same courtesy to a murderer or child rapist?
Just in case this is a leading question: there are many courtesies we extend some but not all people convicted of a crime. Bail, parole, etc.
Why is such a person wandering around free if they were convicted? Do you think prison sentences are not harsh enough?
Honestly I don't know, I think it would depend on how long ago the crime was and if there's a credible reason to believe they won't do it again. I do think there's a meaningful difference between "they murdered someone" and "they're a murderer", and in general I do prefer to describe people's actions as opposed to using "they're a ___" labels.
> The truth isn't defamation, by definition. This is a famously American position.
I'm not American, and we're discussing a UK news story.
But I genuinely didn't know that other countries do things differently. What does defamation even mean if it doesn't include the concept of untruth?
Previously, [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40682485 (obviously, it means different things to different folks; I can't properly answer your question)
FWIW I'm only really familiar with the American usual.
> The truth isn't defamation, by definition.
Perhaps you mean slander/libel?
Slander and libel are subcategories of defamation.
Libel = defamation in writing. Slander = defamation in speech.
> 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.
TIL, thanks!
I was attempting to emphasize the absurdity of any software system being “absolutely correct at all times”. I don’t believe such a system can exist, at least not in such strong terms.
What's important is that the audit trail can be replayed to derive the state of the system - and preferably in such a way that investigators can determine what _would_ have been seen by someone using it on a specific day at a specific time. Whether the system is free from bugs is a different matter - no system is, which is why deriving state from the audit trail instead of a parallel process which is guaranteed to diverge is so important!
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.
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.
The Internet is giving tabloids wider reach with less printed paper
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.
Civil defamation laws could equally be used to undermine freedom of the press. In any case, the 'can of worms' you are talking about was the state of affairs in the UK until 2009 and is currently the case in several US states and yet somehow we still have people in those states openly criticizing a sitting president.
Rather than throwing our hands in the air, maybe we could expect our governments to craft laws in such a way that we can punish people for willful lies resulting in death while still preserving our right to free speech and the press.
The UK already has extremely strong defamation laws, to the point where we attract "libel tourism" - foreigners find dubious excuses to bring their libel cases to the UK courts so that they have an easier chance of winning.
Lots of people in my replies are telling me that I'm wrong, but no-one has yet answered my question: what specifically should the government do?
That’s because your question appears rhetorical. You had already come to the conclusion that governments couldn’t or shouldn’t do anything.
What could be done: (1) Stronger penalties, perhaps tied to proportionate burdens of proof. (2) Criminal penalties.
A weak burden of proof with mediocre penalties is just a cost of doing business.
Simple things like anti-harassment rules, paparazzi regulations and rules against publishing known fabrications would be a good start without impugning on the freedom of press.
The United States (famously) has stronger free speech protections and weaker libel/slander laws, yet seems to have less of an issue with tabloids. Is there maybe more of a divide between what's alloweable for "public figures" versus private citizens? Or maybe even our right-wing rags are more skeptical of the government? I don't know what the difference is, but you seem to see less of this sort of thing, gross as our tabloids still are. Maybe it really is just a cultural difference somehow.
The US tabloids are awful. Any checkout isle at a Walmart, Dollar General, etc is just littered with them, right next to the disposable lighter packs and chewing gum.
But nobody reads them in the US[1], and many are about celebrities or cryptids or what-have-you rather than current events or private citizens. There's definitely a cultural difference here.
[1] UK has 1/4th of the population of the US but The Sun has 4x the circulation of The New York Post. The Daily Mirror every day puts out 4x the number of papers that The National Enquirer puts out in a week.
Sure, I did say they were gross, but they just seem to mostly cause less concrete damage. Not sure why.
they aren't nearly as toxic as the UK tabloids.
Also, I never hear anybody talk about what the tabloids are reporting. There's a lot of social stigma attached to them in the US.
Aren't defamation laws in the UK almost shockingly restrictive? How the hell are they able to operate?
It is so expensive to sue somebody for libel that it is out of reach for most people. No matter how egregious the libel.
When tabloids circumvent due process to commit slander and get away with it there should be penalties, yes.
Defamation is already illegal. People sue each other for defamation all the time - in fact UK libel law is notoriously weighted in favour of the plaintiff. If these men were defamed they can sue the tabloids and they'll probably win.
GP was saying the government should do something. What more can the government do?
If they have a ton of money, which these postmasters do not.
No other country has as toxic a press culture as the UK. Addressing that doesn’t have to mean restricting press freedom. If something is a destructive cancer on society, you can’t just ignore it, or eventually it will destroy those freedoms for everyone else.
>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.
In law enforcement, people tend to decide on a suspect and then look for proof.
Yikes, such people shouldn't be in working in law enforcement then
Everyone does it. You and me too. It's just how brains work. First the opinion, then the evidence to back up the opinion.
Maybe everyone does it at some level, but not everyone works in a job that has the potential to wreck other people's lives and freedoms. There should be a higher standard for doctors, prosecutors, cops, judges etc than someone writing a todo CRUD app or a cashier at a bodega.
It is not too much to ask for prosecutors to be a bit more careful, bit more factual, understand the powers that come with their position and use it wisely. If they are not able to do that, they should pick some other profession which has lesser potential to cause damage than law enforcement.
Also - now that the software has proven defective, are they doing to go after Fujitsu or those who tested/signed off on the software? Probably not, maybe they will find a scapegoat at best.
Law enforcement could definitely do better here. The nature of the job tends to attract people who like exerting power over others, and I imagine that correlates with deciding people are guilty first, and finding evidence later.
But everybody is like this to an extent, so you need to fix this in other ways too. This is why reasonable countries have a whole bunch of process around legal punishment, and don't just throw someone in prison after a police officer says so. All the restrictions on how evidence is gathered and what kind of proof needs to be provided are ways to work around this problem. The police and prosecutor might decide someone is guilty, but they still have to convince twelve ordinary people. (Or whatever the process is in your country of choice.)
It sounds like this is where things really fell apart with the postal scandal, and the courts were willing to convict with insufficient evidence.
...and this is perfectly fine as long as one is willing to change one's opinion should the evidence demand it.
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.
Are you proud of that or something?
Look your question is not unreasonable and the s answer is interesting, but your tone implies loathing and belittling.
Which maybe we (I also work in "defense") deserve to burn in hell, but who are you to be self righteous? For example, if you ever put up a Ukraine flag sticker you'd be a hypocrite too.
(Shrug) Some people need killing.
Jesus I desperately wish real ethics classes were required for computer science degrees
The best available evidence is that ethics classes reduce ethical behaviour.
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.
"ethics classes are useless because no one would willingly choose to act ethically" is an interesting stance to take...
In the UK they are I think? Well if they want to be BCS accredited.
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.
Governments don't do get source code for the same reason as every other customer doesn't get source code: software vendors are incentivized to refuse the request.
Why are the vendors so incentivized? Well, coming back to Fujitsu and the Post Office, the answer is that refusing to share the source was worth about a billion dollars: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cgm8lmz1xk1o
This is why it's unethical for governments to use closed source software. Anything related to government functioning should be auditable.
Then they shouldn't get the contract.
I hope lessons are learned, but I doubt it.
Governments (certainly in the UK) aren't willing to pay enough to make this work for vendors.
An escrow approach is quite common to protect the government in the event of a vendor going bankrupt or similar.
> Why governments don't do this is beyond me.
Brown envelopes most likely and de facto non functioning SFO.
> 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?
It's incremental, and goes back to things like clocks.
Imagine a witness says "I saw him go into the bank at 11:20. I know the time because I looked up at the clock tower, and it said 11:20".
Defence argues "The clock must have been wrong. My client was at lunch with his wife by 11:15".
Clocks are simple enough that we can presume them to correct, unless you can present evidence that they are unreliable.
This presumption was extended to ever-more complicated machines over the years. And then (fatally) this presumption was extended to the rise of PROGRAMMABLE computers. It is the programmability of computers that makes them unreliable. The actual computer hardware rarely makes an error that isn't obvious as an error.
The distinction of software and hardware is a relatively recent concept for something as old as common law.
Maybe Napoleon should have conquered Britain after all.
Yeah but then every criminal case would presume guilt.
What makes you think presumption of innocence is not a thing in civil law?
Isn’t it a similar case in the USA where intoxication breath test computers are similarly obscured from scrutiny? People have argued that they have a right to “face their accuser” and see the source code only to have that request denied. So, black box.
Breathalyzers aren't typically considered sufficient evidence in of themselves to convict (or exonerate), iirc many PDs have a policy of treating a breathalyzer hit as probable cause more than anything and then either they throw you in the drunk tank if you don't demand a blood test to verify, or, if they want to actually prosecute you, they get a warrant for a blood test.
AIUI breath test only establishes probable cause. If you fail a breath test you are taken for a blood draw.
Breath test results are routinely challenged (sometimes successfully) by demanding records showing that the device has been tested and calibrated according to the required schedule.
In my country (Aotearoa) the breath tests are "strict viability ", so proof
You can demand a blood test, but you have to know. Most people do not know
> who wrote a law
That's not what "common law" means.
> 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.
No chance. The article concludes with the depressing statement that the government has no plans to reform the law, so the injustices will continue. They certainly won't be spending money on digging up old injustices.
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?
This happened a long time before the current resurgence in AI.
Imagine how much will "machine is right and can't be changed" happen with AI.
Arguments made towards right-wing government (which the UK had for the past decade) from higher education are unlikely to be well received. Perhaps somewhat by Cameron, certainly not in the post-Brexit idiocracy of May, Johnson, Truss or Sunak.
Oxford is the world's what? If you believe that then I have a bridge to sell you.
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.
Well, hey, far be it for me to tell you that you’re wrong, but the BBC says that you’re wrong as do numerous other sources.
> The Post Office itself took many cases to court, prosecuting 700 people between 1999 and 2015. Another 283 cases were brought by other bodies, including the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS).
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1wpp4w14pqo.amp
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prosecution#United_Kin...
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.
The Guardian was reporting this for years, that I saw
Private Eye too, I hear
The TV programme made it a political football
Wheels; justice: all these are just weasel words. Litigation is an exclusive privilege of the rich. And prison, of the poor(er).
> 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.
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.
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.
FIFA tried to make a movie to whitewash their reputation during one of their many corruption scandals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Passions
It didn't work because it was a terrible movie and blatant propaganda, but I could see someone doing this successfully if they were more subtle about it.
I suspect it’s a deliberate strategy in other venues. I see a lot of comments on HN that seem like they’re rage/troll/flame bait to cause a line of inquiry they are advancing to be flagged/downvoted, but if done as intended, their reply will be divisive enough that the troll trigger man isn’t identified as a troll, but they induce trolling in others.
Anyone Can Become a Troll: Causes of Trolling Behavior in Online Discussions
Justin Cheng, Michael Bernstein, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Jure Leskovec
> In online communities, antisocial behavior such as trolling disrupts constructive discussion. While prior work suggests that trolling behavior is confined to a vocal and antisocial minority, we demonstrate that ordinary people can engage in such behavior as well. We propose two primary trigger mechanisms: the individual’s mood, and the surrounding context of a discussion (e.g., exposure to prior trolling behavior). Through an experiment simulating an online discussion, we find that both negative mood and seeing troll posts by others significantly increases the probability of a user trolling, and together double this probability. To support and extend these results, we study how these same mechanisms play out in the wild via a data-driven, longitudinal analysis of a large online news discussion community. This analysis reveals temporal mood effects, and explores long range patterns of repeated exposure to trolling. A predictive model of trolling behavior shows that mood and discussion context together can explain trolling behavior better than an individual’s history of trolling. These results combine to suggest that ordinary people can, under the right circumstances, behave like trolls.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5791909/
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 propaganda that was manufactured by the government around this was particularly clever. Most people believe the captive labour market that has been created was for the benefit of the tax payer - see the downvotes and no comments - and reject the idea that it is actually the opposite and only benefactors are big corporations. The idea that subsequent governments could be so corrupt, doesn't compute.
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-...
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
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
>> 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]
This is hilarious... in the land of "you can't defend yourself or especially your property", he was partly to blame. That one is hilarious.
>I disagree that anything similar could happen at this scale in the US or France.
In the US, the US Mail is sacred, so I agree it could never be attacked like this. But other industries, other scenarios? That level of prosecutorial malfeasance isn't unusual at all. I will concede that the scale of it may differ, but only because I have no ready examples, not because I believe that there is some sort of safeguard that would prevent it.
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.
Me: "have their cliques" You: "I'm not sure that's really fair. Within any organization there are subgroups."
"you're bad because th[e] company you work for was doing X"
Which I didn't write.
All the other parts about Suzanne, also not what I wrote.
"But please don't try to oversimplify large organizations."
I didn't, I feel your comment misrepresents what I've said.
"The higher up the chain the more responsibility you can place for what the organization as a whole does"
No. Al Capone killed no one himself. People did that for him. They share the responsibility. My boss made me do it is not an excuse.
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.
No, the Post Office doesn't have its own "law enforcement" (if you mean something like a police force) or its own judges.
Any company has the right to bring a private prosecution under UK law, and this was the basis for the prosecutions in question. It just means that the company pays for some of the costs involved.
Whether or not private prosecutions should be allowed is certainly a legitimate topic of discussion. Let's not muddy the waters with misinformation about the Post Office having some kind of parallel police and courts system. It just doesn't.
> Any company has the right to bring a private prosecution under UK law
That's a simplification. The Post Office has a more privileged position due to its history; it has both formal access (e.g. to police computers) and informal deference from CPS that regular companies do not enjoy.
Thanks for setting the record straight. For me, as a non-Brit, the movie and the term “prosecution” helped me to misunderstand.
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.
"littered with deep state plots"
My argument is that these are not deep state plots, these are just plots. This are plots that states are doing. This is the state. This is an organization of millions of people. There is no deep state. The state is just like any other large organization.
Take for example the eBay stalking scandal.
"The eBay stalking scandal was a campaign conducted in 2019 by eBay and contractors. The scandal involved the aggressive stalking and harassment of two e-commerce bloggers, Ina and David Steiner, who wrote frequent commentary about eBay on their website EcommerceBytes"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_stalking_scandal
The CEO was not involved.
There is no "deep eBay", there is just eBay. We don't use the phrase "deep eBay" for a reason. And in the same way "deep State" does not make any sense.
Iraq war was definitely not the work of any deep state, if you follow your definition. It was pushed by the president and his government, not faceless bureaucrats.
Certainly the pressure on them and the “intel” they saw on WMD was in part the work of the deep state, that the president was captured by them is sort of the point.
That's completely backwards.
The CIA was very clear that there was nothing there, and the publicly appointed leadership (Rumsfeld, Feith, Cheney, etc) badgered them until they gave in and made some wishy-washy statement that Powell could pretend was real.
The war was led from the top - Sec Def and VP. That Bush was a moron and appointed liars to Sec Def and VP is on him. Cheney and Rumsfeld had a long history of making things up, going back to the 70s.
Source being that ridiculous fanfic Cheney movie? You’re even further off than me, even high level CIA was divided, along many other orgs that supported it. Where did Colin Powell get his evidence from? And the OSP?
Even if we agreed Iraq wasn’t a good example, it’s irrelevant to the point as I don’t think anyone actually thinks there aren’t powerful and largely behind the scenes figures - defense, lobbying, billionaires, and so on that aren’t actively steering the government away from the will of the people.
They knew there were no WMD.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/mar/18/panorama-iraq-...
That shows some set of intelligence had some sources that told them they don’t, far from proof of anything let alone anything relevant here. And we know several high up yet largely unknown to the public defense ops claimed the opposite, ie, the deep state.
You've got it backwards, at least in your description.
They went after the intel they wanted to find to justify their position. It didn't matter if it was real or true, it just needed to come from the intelligence apparatus.
> There’s incredible utility to the term.
It’s a red flag, so there’s that.
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.
Partly on account of the "perhaps" in the original, and partly because I have seen (elsewhere) "just doing his job" defenses.
In corner cases, culpability for uncertain expertise can be a tricky issue - you may recall the case of the Italian geologists, a few years back, indicted for minimizing the risk of an earthquake shortly before one occurred - but the case here seems pretty clear-cut (again, I'm speaking morally, not legally.)
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...
OT but what a shit site that is. A third of the page is taken up by a “best prime day deals” countdown banner. What a consumerist piece of shit website.
You need adblock
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#:~...
Every system has bugs, even deployed, high visibility accounting systems. Debian stable, which I personally view as the gold standard for a robust general purpose OS, has hundreds of bugs.
That is not to say that bugs are good. They are bad and should be squashed. But the Horizon failure, IMO, is with the management, that pretended that the system was bug free and, faced with the evidence to the contrary, put the blame on postmasters. My 2c.
If any large system wasn’t constantly logging errors I’d immediately assume there was something wrong with the error logging system. Only trivial software is bug free.
So long as the jury understands this, it's all fine.
If you're on trial for doing X and your jury is told by a prosecution witness "mrkramer did X" and under cross they admit that's based on computer records which are often bogus, inconsistent, total nonsense, it doesn't take the world's best defence lawyer to secure an "innocent" verdict. That's not a fun experience, but it probably won't drive you to suicide.
One of the many interlocking failures here is that the Post Office, historically a government function, was allowed to prosecute people.
Suppose I work not for the Post Office (by this point a private company which is just owned in full by the government) but for say, an Asda, next door. I'm the most senior member of staff on weekends, so I have keys, I accept deliveries, all that stuff. Asda's crap computer system says I accepted £25000 of Amazon Gift Cards which it says came on a truck from the depot on Saturday. I never saw them, I deny it, there are no Gift Cards in stock at our store.
Asda can't prosecute me. They could try to sue, but more likely they'd call the police. If the police think I stole these Amazon cards, they give the file to a Crown Prosecutor, who works for the government to prosecute criminals. They don't work for Asda and they're looking at a bunch of "tests" which decide whether it makes sense to prosecute people.
https://www.cps.gov.uk/about-cps/how-we-make-our-decisions
But because the Sub-postmasters worked under contract to the Post Office, it could and did in many cases just prosecute them, it was empowered to do that. That's an obvious mistake, in many of these cases if you show a copper, let alone a CPS lawyer your laughable "case" that although this buggy garbage is often wrong you think there's signs of theft, they'll tell you that you can't imprison people on this basis, piss off.
A worse failure is that Post Office people were allowed to lie to a court about how reliable this information was, and indeed they repeatedly lied in later cases where it's directly about the earlier lying. That's the point where it undoubtedly goes from "Why were supposedly incompetent morons given this important job?" where maybe they're morons or maybe they're liars, to "Lying to a court is wrong, send them to jail".
It's worse than that - in UK law you cannot question the evidence produced by a computer unless you can prove the computer is not operating correctly - it's an inversion of the normal burden of proof.
They've started the process of thinking about if that law makes sense given this case: https://www.gov.uk/government/calls-for-evidence/use-of-evid...
A juror can, and should IMHO, however consider that evidence based entirely upon computer records may potentially be erroneous and therefore unable to secure proof 'beyond a reasonable doubt'. If I were a juror, I'd default to non-guilty if a case were based entirely upon the results of an algorithm or computerised records because they introduce doubt.
It’s only an inversion of the usual burden of proof if you assume that evidence from a computer can only ever be used to aid the prosecution. It can also be used to aid the defense, in which case this presumption makes it harder to convict someone, not easier.
> Asda can't prosecute me.
They can, actually. Anyone in the UK can launch a private prosecution. It's rare because it's expensive and the CPS can (and often do) take over any private prosecution then drop it.
Nevertheless, the power exists and has been intentionally protected by parliament. I think most would agree it needs reform, however.
Unfortunately the "its rare" isnt true. it is more common now than it was back in the horizon days. It also isnt necessarily expensive since you can apply for costs with the default being for it to be paid (unless good reason not to). As such whilst its not an option for the average person who cant afford the upfront cost it is very practical for large businesses especially if they engage in it often and hence can stand up a department for it.
Its one of the offerings from TM-Eye aka one of the "private police forces". https://tm-eye.co.uk/what-we-do/private-prosecutions/
It is an actual example of a two tier justice system since those who can afford the private prosecution skip the queue for the public system but will still normally have the taxpayer pay for it.
There is currently a consultation underway as per below article which, incidentally, mentions a more recent dubious example of private prosecutions which got slapped down.
https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/oversight-and-re...
This is Technically Correct, which is, I admit, the Best Kind of Correct, but in practical terms it won't happen.
[Edited: Got the Futurama quote wrong, fixed that]
> If you're on trial for doing X and your jury is told by a prosecution witness "mrkramer did X" and under cross they admit that's based on computer records which are often bogus, inconsistent, total nonsense, it doesn't take the world's best defence lawyer to secure an "innocent" verdict. That's not a fun experience, but it probably won't drive you to suicide.
I imagine digital records are involved in nearly every trial at this point. Good luck getting this point admitted by the justice system.
There are plenty of examples, Light Blue Touchpaper talks about this a bunch. You do have a problem that courts will believe technicians very broadly unless somebody competent is cross-examining to highlight where the limits of their evidence are. So your defence will need to hire such an expert and your legal team need to get the judge to understand why everybody is going to listen to nerd stuff for however long when they thought this was a case about, say, theft.
Well not really, no one should be committing suicide due to a buggy system. If you know the details of the case it was widespread but the post office decided to gaslight everyone and put people in debt and prison. That’s what caused this, the bugs were just a catalyst for shitty humans to do shitty things
Yea management failed but wouldn't the most logical thing be to call in computer forensics experts and quality test the software, reverse engineering it and try to catch the bugs. This wasn't the classic case of financial fraud, this was all about faulty software.
The Post Office management knew about the bugs but didn't want to take the blame for the accounting issues they caused (since it was management that purchased and approved the software some blame would have fallen on them).
Fujitsu was all to blame, after all they created and maintained the software. It just blows my mind why would courts pursue the individuals and not the creator of the software, when they realized that this mess was widespread and not isolated.
because UK law says (said?) the computer can't be wrong
and the post office management had no interest in proving otherwise
they should be going after the management
UK law said that there was a presumption that computer systems were working correctly unless there was evidence to the contrary. That’s not inherently nuts. It makes roughly as much sense as assuming that, say, a dishwasher is in working order unless there’s evidence to the contrary. This presumption in and of itself could just as well aid a person’s defense as hinder it (e.g. if they have an alibi based on computer records).
In this case it should have been very easy to provide evidence to override the presumption that the Horizon system was working correctly. That this didn’t happen seems to have resulted from a combination of bad lawyering and shameless mendacity on the part of Fujitsu and the Post Office.
Don’t get me wrong — the whole thing is a giant scandal. I’m just not sure if this particular presumption of UK law is the appropriate scapegoat.
>UK law said that there was a presumption that computer systems were working correctly unless there was evidence to the contrary.
Defense had to prove that only one Horizon/Fujitsu accounting software was buggy and the whole prosecution falls apart e.g. If John's Horizon/Fujitsu accounting software has bugs then Peter's Horizon/Fujitsu accounting software most probably has bugs too.
IIRC one issue was that every time someone advanced the theory something was wrong with Horizon, the Post Office kept claiming that nobody else was experiencing any issues. They also lied under oath, claiming no bugs that could cause such situations were known. Given this most the of defence lawyers abandoned that line of inquiry (they were nothing special, seeing as village postmasters aren't rich).
Proving bugs can be pretty hard if you don't have access to software & source code. That is similar to the US, courts usually won't give you access to source code to verify if software is operating correctly, you generally only get cross examine the company representative & person who performed the test. DNA tests are one good example.
One case where defense did get access to the code (FST developed by NYC) led to discoveries (https://www.propublica.org/article/federal-judge-unseals-new...) that led to it being retired from use.
In principle, yes. It may be that the bar was set too high and that there needs to be some clarification of exactly what the presumption means.
I’d argue that some kind of weak presumption along these lines clearly makes sense and is probably universal across legal systems. For example, suppose the police find that X has an incriminating email from Y after searching X’s laptop. Are they required to prove that GMail doesn’t have a bug causing it to corrupt email contents or send emails to the wrong recipients? Presumably not.
> Yea management failed but wouldn't the most logical thing be to call in computer forensics experts
Yea and who is responsible for engaging them?
I meant courts should've called in multiple expert witnesses and even computer forensics companies. This case looks like government or in this case courts colluded with British Post Office.
> I meant courts should've called in multiple expert witnesses and even computer forensics companies.
UK courts don’t (can’t) do that, that’s up to the plaintiffs or defendants.
But it was the decision to gaslight and charge the postmasters with crimes that caused the suicides, not the bugs in the code. If they had just admitted that the accounting issues were due to bugs in the system then I really doubt anyone would have committed suicide.
I'd be shocked if any piece of software large enough to qualify as an "accounting system" didn't contain at least hundreds of bugs. We're just not that good at building software. Especially if you consider that the system encompasses all of the dependencies, so you should count bugs in the OS, CPU, any relevant firmware, etc.
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Where are you getting the idea that anyone suggested this?
At any rate, it was the persecuted postal workers who committed suicide, not the software developers.
I meant top management is in deep shit if their finical departments run low quality buggy accounting software not the staff. Or in this case post office branches run the buggy software. All in all, decentralized nature of post office system was the thing that drove everything to this madness.
The suicide victims weren't programmers, they were postmasters, who had been falsely accused of fraud by the software.
Damn! That's dark. I should've read the article first, but I did not. Sorry.
I kinda understand the false guilt these postmasters must have felt when they were wrongfully accused. These people should not be dead like that, those who puts them into that living hell should.
Oddly though, the justice of this world usually don't work like that. Usually, it's the people at the lowest level who suffer the worst fate/abuse, simply because they are the most defenseless, while the people "on the top" pets themselves for "resolving" the problem they created.
It's a odd place to mention, but from one of Donald Trump's story (The Verrazano-Narrows Bridge one where he noticed the unnoticed engineer) I've learned it is important that one must actively take what they deserved (recognition in his story, justice in this case), and at least don't be silent when other people is stealing it away. This is "a nasty world", and if you want to make things right, you must "Fight! Fight! Fight!" and never give up.
> Damn! That's dark. I should've read the article first, but I did not. Sorry.
Now you will remember to at least skim the article before posting.
This is not at all what happened or what anyone suggested, yikes.
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?
A 90 year old is much more physically fragile than a 20 year old. If you hit a 20 year old and they are bruised you get an assault charge, if you hit a 90 year old and they die you get a murder charge, despite using the same amount of force.
I do agree with the sibling post that suicide would be weaponized which is the real problem.
Sounds unrealistic they would blame it all on one remark like that.
I'd be more afraid people would kill themselves just to get retribution on their tormentors and it would increase suicides.
Do you see a lot of people harming themselves physically and framing people in their suicides?
A single comment is not really bullying. Continued harassment is.
And much like assessing how physical violence might contribute to the end result, so could this be actually assessed. I don’t know why people reach for binary classifications strawmans like this.
> 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.
> 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.
This is the same organization that talks about Palestinians dying, while Hamas slaughters Jews by the millions. Don't expect unbiased voice.
"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.
What makes “committed suicide” any more plain or honest than “died by suicide”?
I don't have a big issue with that particular phrase itself. Although the passive voice is designed to conceal or obscure the actor, which doesn't accomplish anything here. Attributing a suicide to anyone other than the actor starts to appear oxymoronic very quickly. Yes life is complex and whatnot -- that's a given, we don't need a reminder every time anything happens.
But really it's the transparent and ham-handed attempts by some others to smooth over the sharp edges of reality merely by re-phrasing how things are written.
People generally don't want pity, but these re-phrasings accomplish nothing other than to make clear that one person feels sorry for another.
> Attributing a suicide to anyone other than the actor starts to appear oxymoronic very quickly.
No one is an island. We’re all deeply intertwined/interconnected. We’re the sum total of our lived experiences and without a doubt some have lived far more challenging lives than others and are influenced by factors that would lead just about anyone down a dark path.
The grief felt by those left behind is the result of that aforementioned interconnectedness.
Getting back to the quoted bit, isn’t this a bit like saying “attributing grief to anyone other than the person experiencing it is oxymoronic”?
My point is not to diminish the impact on those left behind in any way. Clearly this is a traumatic event that causes excruciating grief.
But I think we also need to be honest about the environmental factors that lead to suicide. Hopelessness is one of the large causes. If there are systemic reasons causing people to feel hopeless, and if those systemic problems could theoretically be changed/improved, and such improvement lowered the suicide rate, there’s a strong case to be made that the systemic factors share the responsibility.
> Yes life is complex and whatnot -- that's a given, we don't need a reminder every time anything happens.
I don’t think it’s a given. Clearly some lives are far more complicated than others. There exists a subset of people for whom that complication will become an insurmountable problem. Often those people have been traumatized, or have never learned the tools necessary to work through their feelings.
Some people are bullied into killing themselves. Should that be attributed wholly to the person who was bullied?
Yes I already said that life is complicate because I KNEW that someone would write this very comment. But reminding people that life isn't simple isn't the PSA that you believe it to be.
Yes, everything causes everything, there is no one single thing to blame. Life is hard and complicated. Every rule has exceptions. Every truth has contradictions. Every one is a hypocrite. The world is big and complex.
We all know this already. We don't need this disclaimer to every statement that anyone makes. At a certain point, it just becomes noise.
> Although the passive voice is designed to conceal or obscure the actor, which doesn't accomplish anything here.
No, passive voice is not in general designed to conceal or obscure the actor. Especially not in the sentence here.
There were valid similar complains about crime reporting. But the language there was different. The sentence "The innocent McKay family was inadvertently affected by this enforcement operation" is trying to hide culpability. We can discuss that. These two are incomparable:
- A deputy-involved shooting occurred. (Ok, we are avoiding the actor. We do not know who was shooting.)
- A person died by Suicide. (Clear to anyone who done what.)
The latter implies that suicide just happened to the person, like they got hit by a bus.
The former correctly attributes the action to the person who killed themselves. Certainly the motivations and causes that drive people to suicide are complex, but ultimately it is a choice the person makes.
"Committed" is perhaps not the best word, since it's associated with crimes (and suicide is not a crime in many places anymore), but it's at least more active.
Because the latter implies some external attribute to it?
That's what makes the latter more accurate.
How come?
Because there often is an external attribute, especially if you consider illness to be “external” as is conventional for most deaths caused by illness.
It assigns agency to the person who died.
Think about it this way: I have relative who is vegan, so she has been trying to convince me to kill myself for many years now.
I can still choose whether I do it though, and obviously I chose not to so far, although during COVID I didn’t have much other social interaction, so I nearly went through with it.
I had agency throughout though. I’m not dead because I chose not to go through with it.
That’s the difference.
whats veganism got to do with comitting suicide?
Many vegans think everyone else is evil/demonic for eating meat. “Meat is murder” etc etc. So the natural conclusion to that is, according to several vegans I know, that everyone who eats meat should be forced to either stop being a mass murderer or kill themselves.
Keep in mind there was a point where I was vegan, I know several vegans, so I know what I’m talking about.
They’re not shy about it either—look up That Vegan Teacher on YouTube for relatively middle-of-the-road vegan behavior in action.
I was vegan for 7 years, one of my vegan friends had the opinion that human hospitals should be banned and only animal hospitals should be allowed.
Mental illnesses usually occur in conjunction with other mental illnesses.
Comparing nagging from a relative to wrongful prosecution is asinine. You might as well say that you had heartburn and it didn't kill you, so what's with all these people dying from heart attacks?
What?
Agency is the ability to act. If someone dies against their own will, they don’t have agency, which is why we don’t use language like “they committed their own death” to refer to such instances.
That's a really hard thing to go through. I'm sorry you had to bear that as a fifth grader.
It's possible that both you and your dad are victims in different ways.
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.
This seems to be a common topic in the current pendulum swing.
Healthy, sane people in good situations don't kill themselves.
It follows from that fact that if someone kills themselves, at least one of those things was not true. And those things can and often are thrust on people, or at least occur against the will of the person.
In this case, a bad situation was thrust on a whole bunch of people, and it ended up killing some of them.
> Healthy, sane people in good situations don't kill themselves.
Correct. This has no bearing.
> it ended up killing some of them.
No, and it's irresponsible and unhelpful to act like agency and choice is not part of the equation. As if to say that basically everyone chooses the same way (euthanasia) in the face of terminal illness, or depression.
Tautologically, if you want to convey that help is out there and that a better life is possible, then you're saying people have a choice to make.
There's a lot of agency in heart attacks too, but we still say that the heart attack killed them, not that they killed themselves with a heart attack.
There is agency, but it's equally irresponsible and unhelpful to act like outside factors are not part of the equation, and that someone who drives a person to suicide is blameless.
Let's say someone jumps out of a burning building and they're killed by the fall. Did they have agency? Responsibility? Should we describe that as "committed suicide"?
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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.
That explanation based on lies by the tech staff, is another variation of the Volkswagen explanation that the emissions scandal, were just some low level engineers.
The essence of this story is how the UK establishment can lie, and be corrupt to levels that will shame big time criminals.
[1] "...Vennells was the CEO of Post Office Ltd during the latter part of the Post Office scandal, which involved more than 900 subpostmasters being wrongly convicted of theft, false accounting and fraud between 1999 and 2015 because of shortfalls at their branches that were in fact errors of the Horizon accounting software used by the Post Office.Thousands of subpostmasters paid for shortfalls caused by Horizon and/or had their contracts terminated. The actions of the Post Office caused the loss of jobs, bankruptcy, family breakdown, criminal convictions, prison sentences and at least four suicides. In total, over 4,000 subpostmasters would eventually become eligible for compensation..."
"...In 2013, Post Office Limited hired forensic accounting firm Second Sight, headed by Ron Warmington, to investigate the Horizon software losses. Warmington discovered the system was flawed and faulty, but Vennells was unhappy with Warmington's report and terminated their contract. Prior to her role as CEO, Vennells was the Chief Operating Officer of Post Office Ltd, a position in which – according to the evidence of the then CEO, David Smith – she had responsibility for management of the "operational use" of the Horizon software...."
"...During the case, the Post Office's conduct under Vennells's leadership was described as an instance of "appalling and shameful behaviour..."
"...During her testimony, Vennells consistently stated she was unaware of the facts or, when confronted with documents that showed she had been made aware of them, said she had not understood them..."
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paula_Vennells
Why is she not in jail?
Surely the engineer wasn't acting alone, lying in court without some inside pressure?
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
I’m not nitpicking the poster’s grammar, I’m nitpicking the claim about the grammatical structure of a particular sentence that’s the factual basis of their criticism of the article.
> 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.
Not arguing against that at all. It is a function of the state. My issue was purely about the emotive language of “deep state”, which is used (in my experience) to delegitimise all aspects of the state.
The legacy of the Post Office having prosecution powers was clearly a big part of the problem.
"Deep state" is, or at least to be, a perfectly respectable political term for bodies that retain power across changing governments.
Or in other words: the state. No ‘deep’ needed unless you’re trying to be emotive. Fujitsu is not part of the state and although the Post Office is owned by the state, it’s a stand-alone company.
> “Perfectly respectable”
Maybe in some fringe circles, but this term is certainly attached to a huge amount extreme propaganda and conspiracy that attempts to undermine western democracy and institutions.
The point, I think, is that that The Post Office acted like part of the state, notably in that they acted like an unconstrained branch of the CPS in bringing prosecutions against thousands of people.
> Maybe in some fringe circles
I would say the fringe circles co-opted it over the last couple of decades, and the term's obviously become heavily associated with them in some people's minds (eg. yours). But it's an older term than that.
Edit: Why would the loons have adopted it, if it was such a disreputable term?
> The point, I think, is that that The Post Office acted like part of the state
I agree. The are part of the state. They are a standalone company, but wholly owned by the state. But other aspects of the state (eventually) reacted to the injustice: MPs, select committees, ministers, the public inquiry, and hopefully next the legal system as some of these people should be in jail.
> But it's an older term than that.
Fine, I’m happy to accept that. Just like I’m happy to accept that R&B has nothing to do with BB King any more (well, actuality I still struggle with that).
Definitions and usage change. The current usage is the one that matters. Not the legacy definition.
When the original poster wrote “massive deep state cover-up” I think the implication is that shadowy figures throughout the state are pulling cover-up levers, when it was one privately owned company and one publicly owned company. The rest of the state moved (albeit slowly) to expose this and make it right.
I think your struggle with shifting meanings is a worthwhile one. At least, if you said BB King was an R&B artist, and somebody tried to correct you, you'd be within your rights to stand your ground.
But particularly with regard to politics, I don't think you should let go of useful ideas because arseholes pollute them. At least, it feels uncomfortably like letting the arseholes win, to me.
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.
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".
I’m fine with that. And I agree with the sentiment, just not the conclusion that we should be reporting these as not-suicide. If the original comment was indeed that tempered then I have no issue.
It's the lack of clarity in what happened. I think the rephrasing mike suggested is much clearer:
> 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.
That's just better writing!
It is the passive voice, not the word suicide that is the issue.
> 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.
Interesting.
> Some people actually made a deliberate act to let innocent people take the blame.
And those people are at fault and should be criminally prosecuted for the harm they caused.
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.
Oh, well if everyone else is parroting it, then it must be correct.
I hope you see the irony of “ everyone else is parroting it, then it must be correct”.
You should probably just state what your opinion on it is, instead of bouncing between different complaints.
It was an extremely common criticism of the passive voice. Yours is the weird take.
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.
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.
"damaging", in no quantifiable way whatsoever. It's just the euphemism treadmill at work, nothing more.
> in no quantifiable way whatsoever
You may disagree with my assertion, but there has been considerable research into the role of media and reporting in suicide, indicating that contagion is real and that words matter when reporting on these issues.
Source: https://reportingonsuicide.org/research/
That words matter is why I'm in opposition, as this diminishes agency in people.
Today I would say that framing suicide as "immoral" in secular society is banal and has no traction, but most, excepting certain circumstances, would suggest it is a bad choice. That surely follows if you as well as I would try to talk an able person out of suicide.
I don't think it helps to diminish agency as though suicide is an inevitability following tough circumstances. That's the message I am getting from the euphemism treadmill game, and I reject it.
The message should be that you can go through hell and recover, and you still have a choice. And granted there's always nature vs nurture; just as we are not entirely the product of our environment, the environment does shape us. But it's not all-or-nothing.
The person you are replying to shared some research by experts on the topic giving recommendations. You can argue for or against anything, but it’s useful to at least engage with the evidence being presented.
I would say it's not the treadmill at work in this case. It's not simply a replacement.
The article linked by the parent comment explains it well and references plenty of considered material. But the tldr is that committing suicide aligns with an active criminal/immoral act, while dying by suicide is a factual cause of death with many possible causes.
Consider how people would like your death, or the death of a loved one, described by others. And if you can't, maybe consider how others might be affected.
> But the tldr is that committing suicide aligns with an active criminal/immoral act, while dying by suicide is a factual cause of death with many possible causes.
The projections are doing the work here. Colloquially today what's understood is that "commit" merely means they did the deed. People can judge that to be immoral or not regardless; most people don't, except through the lens of religion.
They might judge it to be the wrong choice, as I surely do, and I don't think it helps to diminish agency as though suicide is an inevitability following any given circumstance.
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.
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-...
> 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.
That’s a very optimistic take on how “rational” society tends to be. The thought that “if things are in a certain way in society, then it must make sense (from a moral or societal point of view) for them to be that way.”
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://cambridgeblog.org/2023/05/a-journey-into-the-shaken-...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37650402
[3] 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.
Just say British system; 'Legal' is extraneous. But boy does it appear serious.
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.
I’m curious to know how American legal system is better than any other country’s. From the outside looking in, it looks just as broken if not worse.
You may have been kidding, but I’m sure someone will genuinely think so and have some decent arguments for it.
My favourite inspiration goes the opposite direction. The United States has this Supreme Court, a final Court of Appeal, politically independent and empowered even to decide that the government's actions are illegal. Sounds great.
The UK had this rather antique thing called the "Lords of Appeal in Ordinary" aka "Law Lords" who were in theory just some Lords (ie people who are arbitrarily in the upper chamber of the Parliament, maybe because their dad was) but served the same purpose as a final court of appeal in practice and so had for a very long time all been Judges because duh, of course they should be judges, that's a job for a judge, just make some judges Lords and forget about it. They met in some committee room in the Palace of Westminster, because they're Lords and that's where the Lords are, right? So, there was practical independence, but the appearance was not here.
About 15 years ago now, the dusty Law Lords were in the way of an attempted reform of parliament. A Supreme Court sounds like a good idea, so the UK got a Supreme Court. It fixed up a nice building nearby, gave the exact same people a new job title and sent them over the road. Done.
But the UK version does what it says on the tin. It said on the tin they're politically independent. In the US of course this "independence" is bullshit, but in the UK since there's already a politically independent process to pick judges the same process continues for the Supreme Court. So a Prime Minister might hate the supreme court but they can't pick the judges.
Politically independent?! Between an extremely dry sense of humour and sarcasm, I can't tell which.
I know I'm long winded, but, you did see there's a lot more text right?
The US Supreme Court says it's politically independent. And so the UK's Supreme Court just did that. It wasn't difficult, unlike the US the rest of our court system, including the predecessor "Law Lords" were in fact chosen by an independent non-political process already, the law making a Supreme Court more or less says "Oh, when we need more Supreme Court justices do the thing for judges again, only more so"
The Prime Minister can influence earlier in the chain though: they get to approve appointments to the Lords as a whole. Who then gets appointed to positions within the Lords is none of their business, but they can tip the scale if they need to.
It's actually for this reason that for hundreds of years until the early 21st century there was real concern about having a Catholic prime minister. There was even hand-wringing over PMs of other denominations, but the history of Catholicism in the UK in particular raised concern. Why? The PM has final approval of the Lords Spiritual - the bishops from the Church of England who are there to provide a protestant spiritual dimension to all debates before that House.
It's allegedly for this reason that Tony Blair (married to a Catholic) waited until after he left office to convert. I think it was either Brown or Cameron who then got the law explicitly changed to not bar Catholics and other religions to serve as PM.
The Prime Minister could, in principle, instruct the Queen (this whole arrangement was abolished before Brian got his mum's old job as we'll see shortly) not to issue the Letters Patent for a new Lord, but Parliament has explicitly laid out the rules for this, so, he is in contempt of Parliament. This seems like an unwise course of action as of course he serves only at their pleasure and even Sir Keir, who has an unusually large majority, has discovered that if they don't like what he proposes they can just ignore him.
None of this matters for the Supreme Court, and thus for about 15 years now. It's true that the Supreme Court's justices are made life peers (its original members were of course already peers having previously constituted the Law Lords, but new members are granted a peerage) - however that's merely a convention, if you don't make them a life peer it makes no difference to their job on the court, it just makes you look petty. I don't even think it's contempt now, because the law saying they should be elevated was repealed - unless the new law also says they must be given a peerage when they get the job, I glanced through it and didn't find that, but it's a huge law because making a Supreme Court was not its main purpose.
Isn't the american legal system the one who famously killed Sacco and Vanzetti?
> That mess inspired the American legal system though, which is probably one of if not the best in the world.
Poe's Law strikes again.
The American legal system isn't even the best legal system in the US.
> in the US
Huh? What does this mean? Are there other systems in the US that I’m not aware of?
Yes, the indigenous domestic nations.
Indeed, and science can’t account for the wonders of indigenous ways of thinking either.
How dare you. Do you want to get sued?
/s
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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
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is why there should be tort law in England and other common law locales.
What was the actual bug in the software that caused the accounting errors?
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-...
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?
It could be that. It could be that they just have separate code paths for measuring "amount in" and "amount reported" with an if-clause missing in one and present in the other. From the description the debugging programmer provides, it doesn't look like they had any sort of coherent design.
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.
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.
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.
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...
Some context:
"How a software glitch at the UK Post Office ruined lives" - 2024 | 331 comments - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39010070
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
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.
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).
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44499498
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.
This is horrifying.
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
Wow, that video was hard to watch.
She needs to go to jail yesterday.
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.
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.
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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At the moment yes but always has been in the UK.
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.
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.
It's a headline. It's not supposed to convey any nuance, it's just there to encourage you to read the article.
I agree that the wording isn't ideal, and I agree that the headline fails to capture the nuance of the circumstances that lead to suicide, but I disagree that subeditors who write headlines need to encapsulate that nuance. That's what the article is for.
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.
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.