At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says
503 comments
·July 11, 2025jordanb
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.
klik99
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).
AceJohnny2
> Traditionally America likes to pretend this kind of class contempt doesn't exist
It just manifests as racism.
b00ty4breakfast
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
munificent
Porque no los dos?
Henchman21
There’s class contempt too, no one wants to be one of the poors.
SpaceManNabs
> 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.
gota
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)
jorts
Some high class Brits have been some of the most elitist and entitled people I’ve ever met.
njovin
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?
lawlessone
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
citizenpaul
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.
wagwang
Well yes, you're trying to take money from other people, of course you need to prove that you need it.
IshKebab
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).
knowitnone
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.
flir
I see you've worked with a moribund bureaucracy before.
LiquidSky
> 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.
dimal
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.
m101
Let's not even talk about the financial crisis
downrightmike
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.
sarreph
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.
klik99
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.
sarreph
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.
null
hermitcrab
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.
ionwake
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.
jordanb
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.
I_dream_of_Geni
>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.
null
shkkmo
> 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.
horizion2025
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.
7952
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.
ionwake
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.
Brian_K_White
"victims of confirmational bias"
dude
duxup
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.
partdavid
Accusations are often confessions.
pipes
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.
hardwaresofton
> 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.
hermitcrab
>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:
boppo1
Where can I listen to these tapes, particularly the ones you describe as black-mirror level?
hnfong
Fascinating. Do you have references for the motives/biases of the PO leadership?
jordanb
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.
amiga386
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.
akudha
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
rossant
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-...
fn-mote
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.
rossant
Yes, that's me.
IshKebab
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.
insane_dreamer
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...
hermitcrab
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.
arp242
> 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.
amiga386
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.
hermitcrab
Indeed. Fujitsu were totally complicit in the false accusations and the coverup.
williamscales
Thank you for the added detail.
akudha
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
gowld
It's not a crime when the government does it :-(
EngineeringStuf
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.
whycome
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.
Anthony-G
I haven’t followed this issue closely but would lying in court about their ability to remotely modify data not be perjury?
jordanb
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.
PaulRobinson
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...
hermitcrab
>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.
akudha
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...
mxfh
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...
Akronymus
afaict, the assumption was they already were, and were just uncovered.
nullc
> 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.
pinoy420
[dead]
justin66
> 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.
arrowsmith
> 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?
helloguillecl
In Germany, calling someone by a crime they have been sentenced of, constitutes defamation.
jen20
> 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.
Jooror
Show me a system for which you believe the audit trail is absolutely correct in every case and I’ll show you a midwit…
dagmx
I really wish someone had the political capital to do something about the tabloids. They’re really a detriment to society.
johnnyApplePRNG
Politicians love the tabloids. They distract from the real goings-on.
hermitcrab
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.
immibis
The Internet is giving tabloids wider reach with less printed paper
flir
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.
arrowsmith
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.
dagmx
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.
cgriswald
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.
BobaFloutist
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.
jedimastert
Aren't defamation laws in the UK almost shockingly restrictive? How the hell are they able to operate?
junon
When tabloids circumvent due process to commit slander and get away with it there should be penalties, yes.
skywhopper
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.
s_dev
>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.
wat10000
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.
akudha
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
TechDebtDevin
fortunately, (most) governments will let you leave.
SCdF
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.
whycome
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.
arrowsmith
"Driven to suicide" may be more accurate. And damning.
mbonnet
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.
hotpocket777
[flagged]
mousethatroared
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.
CamperBob2
(Shrug) Some people need killing.
gblargg
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.
jedimastert
Jesus I desperately wish real ethics classes were required for computer science degrees
izacus
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.
jedimastert
"ethics classes are useless because no one would willingly choose to act ethically" is an interesting stance to take...
UK-AL
In the UK they are I think? Well if they want to be BCS accredited.
cedws
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?
rwmj
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...
mystraline
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.
gnfargbl
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
daveoc64
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.
varispeed
> Why governments don't do this is beyond me.
Brown envelopes most likely and de facto non functioning SFO.
noisy_boy
> 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?
michael1999
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.
whycome
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.
arrowsmith
> who wrote a law
That's not what "common law" means.
mbonnet
> 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.
bauble
Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/2030/
cedws
I was not aware of this. Wow.
I hope they're taking a hard look at past cases where they've done this.
masfuerte
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.
imtringued
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?
PaulRobinson
This happened a long time before the current resurgence in AI.
jen20
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.
nightpool
Oxford is the world's what? If you believe that then I have a bridge to sell you.
blipvert
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.
foldr
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.
blipvert
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).
throw0101c
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]
ThisNameIsTaken
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.
duncans
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.
worik
The Guardian was reporting this for years, that I saw
Private Eye too, I hear
The TV programme made it a political football
penguin_booze
Wheels; justice: all these are just weasel words. Litigation is an exclusive privilege of the rich. And prison, of the poor(er).
throw0101c
> 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.
PaulKeeble
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.
SCdF
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).
whycome
> 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.
mparkms
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.
aspenmayer
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.
varispeed
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.
varispeed
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.
evanb
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-...
nextos
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."
nlitened
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.
hungmung
Why not all of the above?
tonyhart7
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
mike_hearn
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.
KingOfCoders
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.
pjc50
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)
tw04
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.
KingOfCoders
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.
phendrenad2
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.
exiguus
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.
foldr
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.
nwienert
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.
tokai
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.
mr_toad
> There’s incredible utility to the term.
It’s a red flag, so there’s that.
mike_hearn
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.
mannykannot
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?
PaulKeeble
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.
noisy_boy
> 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.
mannykannot
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.)
hinkley
He should be charged with perjury and sued by the families.
mike_hearn
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.
maweki
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.
sitkack
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...
barbazoo
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.
mike_hearn
That's good to hear. I'm sure the story makes an impact!
dagmx
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.
ImHereToVote
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?
dagmx
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.
__turbobrew__
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.
koolala
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.
null
cedws
>if software developers screw up
Well, yes, they did screw up, but the fallout was amplified 100x by bad management.
mrkramer
"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#:~...
ptero
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.
mr_toad
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.
tialaramex
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".
PUSH_AX
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
voxic11
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.
wat10000
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.
nirui
[flagged]
aenis
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.
drweevil
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.
Vegenoid
> 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.
rolandog
> 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.
whycome
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.
immibis
This is the same organization that talks about Palestinians dying, while Hamas slaughters Jews by the millions. Don't expect unbiased voice.
cman82
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.
rossant
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-...
nickelpro
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.
NoMoreNicksLeft
>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.
nickelpro
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
NoMoreNicksLeft
>> 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.
hermitcrab
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.
mrkramer
I thought British legal system and computer forensics were serious but this case is just a travesty of justice.
duncans
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).
closewith
The British legal system is and always has been a litany of injustices dressed up in formal attire. To be avoided at all costs.
sparsely
Indeed. The goal of the British legal system is to appear serious. Justice is an occasional byproduct.
penguin_booze
Just say British system; 'Legal' is extraneous. But boy does it appear serious.
null
mystraline
The stuffy 17th c clothes and powdered wigs were a warning that you are entering the Clown Zone (not the Twilight Zone).
tialaramex
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.
mathiaspoint
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.
zapzupnz
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.
LtWorf
Isn't the american legal system the one who famously killed Sacco and Vanzetti?
closewith
> 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.
jekwoooooe
[flagged]
https://archive.md/oldest/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/10...