I went on a deep dive on this scandal about a year or so ago. One thing that struck me is the class element.
Basically, the Post Office leadership could not understand why someone would buy a PO franchise. It's a substantial amount of money up front, and people aren't allowed to buy multiple franchises, so every PO was an owner/operator position. Essentially people were "buying a job".
The people in leadership couldn't understand why someone would buy the opportunity to work long hours at a retail position and end up hopefully clearing a middle class salary at the end of the year. They assumed that there must be a real reason why people were signing up and the real reason was to put their hands in the till.
So they ended up assuming the postmasters were stealing, and the purpose of the accounting software was to detect the fraud so it could be prosecuted. When the accounting software started finding vast amounts of missing funds, they ignored questions about the software because it was working as intended. I bet if the opposite had happened, and it found very little fraud, they would have become suspicious of the software because their priors were that the postmasters were a bunch of thieves.
Someone brought this up in a previous HN comment section as an example of trust in software ruining peoples lives. But your explanation is far more human and recontextualizes it a bit for me - it just happened to be that this was done with software, but the real motivation was contempt for the lower classes and could have easily have happened 100 years ago with an internal investigation task force.
Growing up half in England and US I feel British culture is more attuned to the class aspects to this kind of event. Traditionally America likes to pretend this kind of class contempt doesn't exist (think of, people on welfare angry at welfare queens, unaware they will be affected by legislation they support).
> Growing up half in England and US I feel British culture is more attuned to the class aspects to this kind of event. Traditionally America likes to pretend this kind of class contempt doesn't exist (think of, people on welfare angry at welfare queens, unaware they will be affected by legislation they support).
As an immigrant to the US from latin america that has spent significant time in britain, this statement is the complete opposite of my experience to the point of ridiculousness.
Britain is the most openly classist western country I have ever been in.
So the PO creates a franchise program that they later decide isn't suitable for any sane, good-faith actor, and instead of revising the terms of the franchise program to make it so, they assume that the participants are criminals and prosecute them?
I think this is the parent’s point: this is the POV of the rich and powerful who lead the organization. They can’t imagine someone in a different position seeing these franchises as a way to secure good (or at least decent), long-term, stable employment.
Interesting how supposed fraud from lower class people is a high priority that must be punished, but fraud from upper class people is almost always protected by the corporate veil.
I came to realize spending few minutes every so many years to cast a vote in between the purchase of that great massage gun and groceries shopping, for party members who have been extensively vetted and not by you, doesn’t entitle to any control. Democracy is simply the most successful strategy to make believe into fairness and reduce costs of exercising power. With the capability to excise taxes and leverage them into debt that will always be repaid, one way or another, until the last citizen breathes government is, and always was, the greatest business of all times. Corporations who invest at every level, all the time, to make a buck do buy control. Mostly proportional to their investments into the wheels of government.
This is a salient observation that I don’t think has been presented bluntly enough by the media or popular culture (such as Mr Bates Vs The Post Office).
The UK is class-obsessed, which is not as immediately clear to the rest of the world (especially US). Lends a lot of credence to your theory.
As a cultural mutt between US and UK, I think UK is "class-aware" and US is more obsessed with the idea that if we all wear jeans then class isn't a thing. I see the same class contempt in US as the UK, and not recognizing it for what it is keeps people divided.
I found this comment insightful but I feel I must itirate ( maybe its not needed), that it is not "clear" if leadership were ignorant, as you said, ( though Im sure you are part right ), I have read that it was malicious leadership trying to protect their own asses as per another comment.
I don't mean to let the leadership off the hook. What they did was profoundly wrong and they have blood on their hands.
There were two phases though: the initial rollout, and sometime later the coverup.
If they had asked very reasonable questions about the software during the rollout there would have been no need for a coverup. No software rolls out without any bugs and it's really reasonable to ask why so many post offices had missing funds and if they were sure if it was real or not. The PO leadership basically ignored all evidence that there were bugs from the very beginning, and that makes no sense until you realize that they were starting from the premise that the postmasters are thieves and this software is going to catch them.
What I've seen so far suggest they were just ignorant and victims of confirmational bias etc. You can see that when they won some cases they wrote internally something to the effect of "Final we can put to rest all those concerns about these cases blablabla". So it became self-validating. Also the courts and defense lawyers didn't manage to the see the pattern and in the huge numbers of such cases. Each defendant was fighting their own battle. Also, a mathematician from Fujitsu gave "convincing" testimony they didn't have any errors. A lot was down to lack of understanding of how technology works. The fact that xx millions of transactions were processed without errors doesn't preclude that there could be errors in a small number, as was the case. In this case sometimes coming down to random effects like if race conditions were triggered.
I'd wager there was a solid amount of general incompetence involved at the PO "corporate" - management politically couldn't admit that their consultingware could be anything other than perfect, because they signed off on the decision to buy it, and probably on all the work orders that got them to that point.
If anyone from PO management or that of the consulting firm (Fujitsu, I believe?) ever get any work again, it will be a travesty of justice.
Yes at some point it turned into CYA. When the leadership started realizing that there were problems with the software they started doubling down, getting even more aggressive with prosecutions, because they were trying to hide their own fuckups.
But when the ball started rolling, as the software rolled out and was finding missing funds everywhere, you'd think a normal person would have asked "are we sure there are no bugs here?" That was never done, I believe, because the software was matching the leadership's priors.
These kinds of assumptions about fraud always make me wonder about the folks in charge.
I was at a company acquired by silicon valley company. Our tech support department was folded into another tech support department. Immediately the folks in the valley were upset that we closed more cases / had far higher customer satisfaction scores ... by far. They made no secret that they assumed that us mid-westerners doing the same job had to be inferior at the same job.
Eventually a pool of managers in the valley developed a full blown conspiracy theory that we were cooking the books by making fake cases and so on. It just had to be that right? No other explanation.
They finally got someone in an outside department to look into it. They found folks closing cases prematurely and even duplicating cases. The people doing it all worked for the managers pointing fingers at everyone else ...
Sometimes the folks who talk about fraud think those things because that's how they work.
I've been following this since the guardian wrote about it, maybe 2011 or 2013 (private eye was earlier) It was insane. I couldn't understand the lack of fuss. Maybe it is because as a programmer I guess that 95 percent of all software is complete shit and most of the developers don't know or don't care.
You've hit the nail on the head "why would anyone want a middle class life" yeah they have never known anything less than that.
The other factor to me is the careerism, all that matters is the project success, who cares if the riff raff end up committing suicide. Honestly listening to some of the tapes of those meetings makes me feel sick. Thing is, I think so many career orientated people I know wouldn't even consider that what went on in the meetings was beyond the pale. It's black mirror level.
I'm from Ireland, but I live on "mainland Britain" the UK class system is mind boggling. I think the establishment here despises the "great unwashed". God help any working class person who ends up in the courts system.
One final thing, Paula Vennells was an ordained church minister. She was preaching while she was overseeing the destruction of so many innocent hardworking people. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paula_Vennells
I don't know why that makes this all worse but some how it does. Somehow it speaks to what the UK is or has become.
I doubt she'll get the prison time she deserves. Actually I doubt she'll serve any time at all.
>One final thing, Paula Vennells was an ordained church minister. She was preaching while she was overseeing the destruction of so many innocent hardworking people. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paula_Vennells
She was very nearly parachuted in a Bishop of London, off the 'success' of her term in the post office:
> One final thing, Paula Vennells was an ordained church minister. She was preaching while she was overseeing the destruction of so many innocent hardworking people. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paula_Vennells
>
> I don't know why that makes this all worse but some how it does. Somehow it speaks to what the UK is or has become.
It makes it worse because most people are familiar with the tenets of christianity and know that this behavior is counter to that value system.
I think it's one of the most redeeming points of christianity/religion in general -- there is a standard to which people can be judged and agree to be judged. That's why it makes it worse, this person is not only doing terrible things, but doing terrible things while professing to believe a value system that would not condone it.
My entry-point was listening to this podcast, it's pretty long but it goes into the fact that the purpose of horizon was to detect fraud and reduce shrinkage, that the leadership and their consultants were coming up with outsized estimates for the amount of fraud and using that as financial justification for the project.
They also talk about postmaster's motivations for buying a franchise and how sitting behind a retail desk in a small town with a modest but steady income is actually one of the best outcomes available to the type of working-class Briton who was buying the franchise.
1) The franchise actually does represent a decent amount of stability and financial security for the franchisee. Well-run locations typically could clear a modest profit for the owner. These were not money losing franchises for the most part (until the prosecutions started of course).
2) The post offices were geographically distributed pretty evenly throughout the UK so there were positions in far-flung locations well outside London. In many of these communities it was a good and stable job compared to what else was available.
3) Many of the postmasters reported liking working retail positions where they get a lot of face time with customers. In many small towns the post office was a central part of the community.
Nevermind sibling comment about money-losing businesses, there are many small business operations like this where a substantial amount of capital buys a relatively moderate paying retail job. Think things like Subway franchises, or gas stations.
Historically it wasnt a bad thing since it was an add on to an existing shop.
The general idea being that I would come in to pick up my pension/tv licence or various other things the PO used to be the source for and then spend it in the other part of the shop.
> a retail position and end up hopefully clearing a middle class salary
Normal retail work is below the poverty line.
Beyond that i think it might be the social/community aspect. I simply can't use the post office in my town as its used as a social club for everyone over 70. Some people are just in to that kinda thing i suppose.
This is utterly illogical. Who in their right mind would commit a crime with a 100% probability of getting caught?
This isn't a classic embezzlement of public funds, where the people receiving the money are also the people deciding whether it was well spent or not and hence could easily divert some of the money through behind the scenes deals with contractors without getting caught.
The "embezzlement" here is on the level of getting an invoice and not paying it.
This was depressing to read. Failures at so many levels.
1. Immediately after Horizon was rolled out, issues were reported. But ignored
2. Prosecutors didn't bother to verify if there is another explanation before accusing thousands of people of stealing? Isn't it common sense to pause for a second and think, "could we please double check the evidence? how can thousands of postal workers suddenly turn into thieves?"
3. local newspaper had published a photo of her and labeled her the “pregnant thief.” - of course, UK tabloids. Click baits and write whatever the fuck they want, no matter whose lives are destroyed
4. post office has said that it does not have the means to provide redress for that many people - so they have the means to falsely prosecute and destroy the lives of thousands of people, but they don't have the means to correct their blunders?
This happened more than a decade ago. Citizens are expected to do everything on time (pay taxes, renew drivers license...) or get fined/jailed, but the government can sit on their butt for 10 YEARS and do nothing about a blunder they caused?
What about Fujitsu? Why can't the government make Fujitsu pay for the destruction caused by their shitty software?
Read about this [1, 2]. This is not yet a well-known scandal, but I expect (and hope) it will surface in the coming years or decade. It is on an even bigger scale, not limited to a single country, and it has been going on not just for 10 years but for many decades.
Reminds me somewhat of the child sex abuse hysteria in the 80s/90s involving daycare centers and the many horrific accusations that people took at face value and without question, being (rightfully) concerned for the wellbeing of the children. It was finally understood that it was relatively easy to plant false memories in young children through suggestive questioning. People went to jail for years before their convictions were overturned, and the impact on society lives on.
> What about Fujitsu? Why can't the government make Fujitsu pay for the destruction caused by their shitty software?
Because the software didn't cause it.
Look, by all accounts the software was/is a piece of piss, but what made it such an egregious scandal is how the Post Office leadership dealt with things. There was really no good reason for that to happen. They just ignored reports of problems (proper reports written by auditors, not vague rumours). They lied to postmasters by saying that no one has problems (when, in fact, there were hundreds of people). Lots has been written about all of this and I won't repeat it all here.
So I must object to the phrasing of "caused by their shitty software". Of course lots can be said about the failings of the software itself and Fujitsu also lied and covered their tracks so they are not entirely blameless. But they emphatically did not "cause" any of this: it was the Post Office leadership who primarily caused this mess.
Lots of things go wrong in the world, lots of things are defective. What often matters the most is not so much the mistake or defect itself, but what the response to that is.
I'm going to have to pull you up on this detail, as you seem to care about the details.
Fujitsu/ICL won the contract to develop and run Horizon. They got a commission on every EFTPOS sale. They paid for all the computers, all the network setup, all the staff training. They literally ran the helpline. If you were a sub-postmaster and had a problem with Horizon, you called Fujitsu.
It was Fujitsu that then told you that the bug you found in Horizon wasn't a bug and nobody else was experiencing it, at exactly the same time their internal IT tickets had fully documented the bug and their staff were trying to patch up that bug before it happened to anyone else.
Fujitsu also claimed, in many court cases, that they had no remote access to Horizon. But they did. They also let engineers use it, and push one-off code fixes, to "fix-up" known errors that had been made in ledgers on the computer in your Post Office, so there was no source of truth anywhere in the system. If courts had known this, almost every Post Office private prosecution would have been thrown in the bin for unreliable evidence. Instead, courts ran on the belief that computers were like calculators, and can be assumed to be reliable unless proven faulty.
It was Fujitsu not volunteering this fact, and indeed barristers coaching Fujitsu expert witnesses on what to say and what not to reveal, ignoring procedural rules that the barristers knew had to be followed that say you have to reveal pertinent facts to the defence.
Fujitsu were in it up to their necks along with the Post Office. They made material gains by denying bugs existed, denying they had remote access, falsely claiming their system was reliable, and having their staff perjure themselves in prosecutions brought by the Post Office.
Without Fujitsu's complicity and mendacity, the Post Office might not have succeeded in prosecuting anyone - and of course, without the phantom losses caused by their broken software, they'd have no cases to prosecute.
I was a lead Technical Architect and authority on behalf of HM Treasury for a while, and I will tell you this: this is just the tip of the iceberg in government procurement.
I've witnessed faulty systems in DVLA, DEFRA, DWP, Home Office, MOJ and Scottish Government. Systems that have directly resulted in suicide, false convictions, corruption and loss of money to the public purse.
The problem with Horizon and Fujitsu is that in the end the government has to sign it off, and there will be someone who is the Accountable Officer (AO). More often than not, all parties (customer and supplier) become incredibly motivated to protect the AO because it protects profits, protects reputational damage and essentially builds a good news story around the whole thing.
It's just elitism, wrapped up in cronyism, veiled in lies so that AOs can fail upwards into positions with suppliers. I've seen it too many times and I'm fed-up with it. Government is completely and utterly corrupt.
I suggest you keep an eye on what's being published in Private Eye and Computer Weekly if you have access to those where you are. They're holding feet to the fire on all these points.
One thing I would say is that if somebody is convicted in the UK, it's acceptable legally and culturally to call them by the crime they committed.
The problem is that in this case the Post Office had unique legal powers, and was being run by people who did not want to "harm the brand" by admitting they had made mistakes, so kept digging.
There is also a fundamental flaw in how the courts - and the Post Office prosecutors - were instructed to think about the evidence in common law.
Bizarrely, it was not (and may still not), be an acceptable defense to say that computer records are wrong. They are assumed correct in UK courts. IT systems were legally considered infallible, and if your evidence contradicts an IT systems evidence, you were considered a liar by the court, and a jury might be instructed accordingly.
Yes, that's awful. Yes, it's ruined lives.
But also, I think all involved have realised pointing fingers at one or two individuals to blame hasn't really helped fix things. Like an air accident, you have to have several things go wrong and compound errors to get into this amount of trouble, normally. There were systemic failing across procurement, implementation, governance, investigations, prosecutions, within the justice system and beyond.
I already know people who have worked for Fujitsu in the UK are not exactly shouting about it. And yet, they're still getting awarded contracts before the compensation has been paid out...
>And was being run by people who did not want to "harm the brand"
We've seen this time and again. Organizations would rather throw people under the bus than damage the organizations reputation/brand. For example, the Church of England has tried to cover up numerous sexual abuse scandals. This is a recent and particularly nasty case:
Lets ignore everything else for a second. Isn't it common sense, common decency to ask how can thousands of postal workers become thieves overnight? We're talking about postal workers for fuck's sake, not a bunch of mafia dudes. Is there some kind of perverse incentive for the prosecutors to send as many people to jail as possible, guilty or not?
run by people who did not want to "harm the brand"
Oh well, now their precious brand has been harmed, how exactly do they expect to gain the trust, respect of the people back? Maybe they think the public will forget and move on? These people suck...
> They are assumed correct in UK courts. IT systems were legally considered infallible
This will change when elected officials start getting hoisted by their own electronic petards.
The Venn diagram of midwit enterprise developers who build systems with audit trails yet could not swear under penalty of perjury that the audit trail is absolutely correct in every case is almost a circle.
I don't like the tabloids either but what exactly do you propose we do? Are you sure it's a good idea to undermine the freedom of the press?
A government with the power to censor the tabloids is also a government with the power to censor the news outlets that you do like. I'd be careful about opening that can of worms.
I think the Internet is gradually destroying them economically. Google stole their lunch money. Unfortunately it is also destroying the broadsheet papers. I'm not sure any of them profitable now. And that means much less investigative journalism.
>2. Prosecutors didn't bother to verify if there is another explanation before accusing thousands of people of stealing? Isn't it common sense to pause for a second and think, "could we please double check the evidence? how can thousands of postal workers suddenly turn into thieves?"
They genuinely thought that the new software was uncovering a lot of theft that previously went undetected. This actually spurred them on even further thinking that the software was a godsend.
The sickening part is the people responsible won't ever see the inside of a prison cell despite sending many to prison for their failures.
Rationalization is a powerful force. People rarely come to objective beliefs based on evidence. They come to beliefs and then search for evidence. In law enforcement, people tend to decide on a suspect and then look for proof. Hence why you so often see prosecutors and police fighting to punish innocent people, sometimes even after they've been proven to be innocent.
Describes pretty much the vast majority of people. All groups/institutions/enterprises made of such people will follow a similar path. Point being - there is no hope.
One of the things that frustrates me with how ethics is taught in computer science is that we use examples like Therac 25, and people listen in horror, then their takeaway is frequently "well thank god I don't work on medical equipment".
The fact that it's medical equipment is a distraction. All software can cause harm to others. All of it. You need to care about all of it.
Therac 25 is exactly what I thought of when reading this story. The software didn't have direct hardware control to kill patients with radiation, but it still resulted in thousands of victims.
I work on satellites that are intended for use in missile tracking. If I fail in the software, it might not "kill people", but people will die due to the failures.
Though, I used to work on fighter jets and SAMs. People do die due to my work.
Ethic classes are pointless without ethical liability and accountability of people causing suffering. Yes, even the Jira javascript ticket punchers hould be accountable for what they do.
The four-part mini-series Mr Bates vs The Post Office is worth checking out:
> A faulty IT system called Horizon, developed by Fujitsu, creates apparent cash shortfalls that cause Post Office Limited to pursue prosecutions for fraud, theft and false accounting against a number of subpostmasters across the UK. In 2009, a group of these, led by Alan Bates, forms the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance. The prosecutions and convictions are later ruled a miscarriage of justice at the conclusion of the Bates & Others v Post Office Ltd judicial case in 2019.[4][5]
What is particularly striking about the scandal is the impact of the mini-series. From what I understand (as a foreigner to the UK) is that it was the mini-series that sparked national interest in the case. Without it, those involved would still be in a bureaucratic and legal nightmare, in which all institutions rejected their innocence claims, and hardly anyone would have been held accountable. See also the "Impact" section on the linked wiki page.
It leaves me wondering how the situation would have been if it would have been a (dramaturgically) 'bad' series. It might have left those involved even worse of.
It's worth pointing out that Mr Bates vs The Post Office screened in early 2024. The Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry was set up in 2020/2021 and the public hearings started in 2023.
So it may have looked like "it was TV what done it" but the wheels of justice were turning long before the show came out.
We were in the middle of an election cycle. If you were paying attention you were aware of the scandal slowly grinding its way through legal slop, but most people probably weren't that clued in (as per normal).
But that mini-series threw it into the current public consciousness, and so suddenly it wasn't just the judicial system working through it but the Tories now gave a shit (briefly), because they thought showing that they care might save them (it didn't).
> It leaves me wondering how the situation would have been if it would have been a (dramaturgically) 'bad' series. It might have left those involved even worse of.
Holy shit. You might see big corps like the post office fund big dramas as a way to sway public opinion. A tool in the pr playbook.
There are other scandals in the UK, like IR35 that basically prevents worker owned businesses from making profit, then resulting cottage industry of parasitic "umbrella companies" and tumbling economy. But directly affected people are easily generalised as those with broader shoulders so the public couldn't care less if they cannot run their little businesses. Meanwhile big consultancies that lobbied for it are getting minted on public sector contracts, they have very much a monopoly now. Things are more expensive and shittier. Oh and then Boriswave - as if captive services market wasn't enough for big corporations - they also got to import the cheapest available workers instead of hiring locals.
The failing is as much with the court as it is with Fujitsu. Why did they blindly accept Horizon’s data as evidence? What if the computer said the Queen stole all the money and ran off to Barbados, would they have thrown her in jail? Why was the output of a black box, which may as well have been a notebook Fujitsu could have written anything they wanted into, treated as gospel?
The actual answer to this is terrible. Courts had to trust the computer was correct. There was a common law presumption that a computer was operating correctly unless there is evidence to the contrary (and getting that evidence is basically impossible for the individuals being charged who were post office workers, not computer experts, and the source code was a trade secret).
Governments should have access to all the source of code they buy licenses to (and provided at sale), as a precondition of selling to a government.
When these sorts of things happen, the source can be subpoena'd with the relevant legal tool, and reviewed appropriately.
Why governments don't do this is beyond me. It greatly limits liability of gov procurement, and puts the liability on the companies selling such goods.
> The actual answer to this is terrible. Courts had to trust the computer was correct. There was a common law presumption that a computer was operating correctly unless there is evidence to the contrary
That is just mind bogglingly stupid - who the hell are the idiots who wrote a law like that? Any of them wrote a line of code in their life?
The emperor has no clothes. Oxford is the worlds AI Safety research hub and yet they didn't think about campaigning to overturn a law which negates their entire reason for existing?
Part of the answer is that the Post Office had (has?) special legal status in that it can prosecute cases by itself - no need to present a convincing case to the CPS like the police do.
Many people were scared into pleading guilty just to avoid the upfront legal costs and the ruinous fines if contesting and found guilty (“the computer is always right”).
Often the PO knew that they didn’t have much of a case but just used their special status to bully them into submission.
This is a myth as far as I’ve been able to determine. The prosecutions were ordinary private prosecutions. The Post Office didn’t need any kind of special legal status in order to prosecute.
I have followed this scandal quite closely over the years, and these two quotations sum it up. Pretty sad:
"The report alleges that even before the program was rolled out in 1999, some Fujitsu employees knew that Horizon could produce false data."
"As the years went by the complaints grew louder and more persistent [...] Still the Post Office trenchantly resisted the contention that on occasions Horizon produced false data."
It would not surprise me if some developers at that time reported to journalists that they had a bug in their code, they'd go to jail for fabricating evidence, cybercrime, stealing of trade secrets, breaking an NDA, or something like that.
What can you do when you know you are innocent but the court trusts the software more than it trusts people? And you are asked to repay something you never stole which off course leads to your financial ruin/divorce/... your kids bullied because you as a parent were deemed a thief... Imagine your spouse leaving you because of something you didn't even do...
Someone absolutely needs to go to jail over this. This kind of software is supposed to go through a lengthy compliance and certification process, so clearly whatever person put their signature on that "certified" document is responsible for these death.
Readit News
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.
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.
It just manifests as racism.
Dead Comment
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
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.
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.
In the US I get the impression that it is much more about money. And therefore less static.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
And yes, a lot of people are willing to go into debt to effectively pay to have a job.
> 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.
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
Demand for postal services is, on a long horizon, generally more consistent than demand for any particular junk food.
The better question is: why the hell would the government sell a PO franchise?
This 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.
Deleted Comment
This does explain why the leadership was so stubborn.
"Every system creates,
the bullshit it deserves"
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
[1] https://cambridgeblog.org/2023/05/a-journey-into-the-shaken-...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37650402
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day-care_sex-abuse_hysteria
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/10/us/the-trial-that-unleash...
The link is to a book by a PhD neuroscientist investigation the scientific basis for shaken baby syndrome.
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.
Fujitsu/ICL won the contract to develop and run Horizon. They got a commission on every EFTPOS sale. They paid for all the computers, all the network setup, all the staff training. They literally ran the helpline. If you were a sub-postmaster and had a problem with Horizon, you called Fujitsu.
It was Fujitsu that then told you that the bug you found in Horizon wasn't a bug and nobody else was experiencing it, at exactly the same time their internal IT tickets had fully documented the bug and their staff were trying to patch up that bug before it happened to anyone else.
Fujitsu also claimed, in many court cases, that they had no remote access to Horizon. But they did. They also let engineers use it, and push one-off code fixes, to "fix-up" known errors that had been made in ledgers on the computer in your Post Office, so there was no source of truth anywhere in the system. If courts had known this, almost every Post Office private prosecution would have been thrown in the bin for unreliable evidence. Instead, courts ran on the belief that computers were like calculators, and can be assumed to be reliable unless proven faulty.
It was Fujitsu not volunteering this fact, and indeed barristers coaching Fujitsu expert witnesses on what to say and what not to reveal, ignoring procedural rules that the barristers knew had to be followed that say you have to reveal pertinent facts to the defence.
Fujitsu were in it up to their necks along with the Post Office. They made material gains by denying bugs existed, denying they had remote access, falsely claiming their system was reliable, and having their staff perjure themselves in prosecutions brought by the Post Office.
Without Fujitsu's complicity and mendacity, the Post Office might not have succeeded in prosecuting anyone - and of course, without the phantom losses caused by their broken software, they'd have no cases to prosecute.
I was a lead Technical Architect and authority on behalf of HM Treasury for a while, and I will tell you this: this is just the tip of the iceberg in government procurement.
I've witnessed faulty systems in DVLA, DEFRA, DWP, Home Office, MOJ and Scottish Government. Systems that have directly resulted in suicide, false convictions, corruption and loss of money to the public purse.
The problem with Horizon and Fujitsu is that in the end the government has to sign it off, and there will be someone who is the Accountable Officer (AO). More often than not, all parties (customer and supplier) become incredibly motivated to protect the AO because it protects profits, protects reputational damage and essentially builds a good news story around the whole thing.
It's just elitism, wrapped up in cronyism, veiled in lies so that AOs can fail upwards into positions with suppliers. I've seen it too many times and I'm fed-up with it. Government is completely and utterly corrupt.
Fujitsu falsely claimed that they couldn't remotely modify data.
They used technical info to obfuscate things for the accused and the judges.
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...
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.
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...
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.
Which certainly contributed to the suicides.
Is this not the case in other countries?
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.
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.
Describes pretty much the vast majority of people. All groups/institutions/enterprises made of such people will follow a similar path. Point being - there is no hope.
One of the things that frustrates me with how ethics is taught in computer science is that we use examples like Therac 25, and people listen in horror, then their takeaway is frequently "well thank god I don't work on medical equipment".
The fact that it's medical equipment is a distraction. All software can cause harm to others. All of it. You need to care about all of it.
Though, I used to work on fighter jets and SAMs. People do die due to my work.
Dead Comment
> 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
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.
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.
I first saw news about this scandal and the early evidence of wrong doing by the Post Office in 2008.
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.
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).
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.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-great-post-office-...
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...
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.
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?
This is horrifying. I presume software is working incorrectly until proven otherwise.
I hope they're taking a hard look at past cases where they've done this.
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.
"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."
hmm sounds like silicon valley work ethics
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.