"In 1997 the Law Commission published a paper which went into some detail about the use of mechanical and computer evidence in court. It seemed a little too fixated with the effective workings of speedometers, traffic lights and breathalysing devices called ‘Intoximeters.’ It concluded that the present law is ‘unsatisfactory’ because of the necessity for prosecutors to ‘prove that the computer is reliable.’"[0]
The amended law changed the burden of proof from the prosecution proving the system functioned correctly to the defence proving it didn't, without access to the systems being used to prosecute them.
[0]: The Great Post Office Scandal, Nick Wallis
It is mind boggling that someone thought it is OK to put this into law. What happened to the idea of innocent until proven guilty?
(not that it’s fundamentally just with speeding tickets either really! but it's also kind of understandable, you're the 27th person the judge has heard today trying to weasel out of a speeding ticket with the same set of "but the machine could have been wrong!" excuses. And frankly the brits seem to be a lot more "pragmatic" about individual right vs societal ones... the political class there seems to respect the people there exceptionally little even by political-class standards lol)
he breached his bail conditions and was rightly jailed for it
Judges in the UK have been so impartial they publicly made statements of him being a narcissist, not even pretending to even appear impartial. Nils Melzer, the United Nations special rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, concluded after visiting Assange in prison is treatment was nothing more than torture...
Yeah totally normal...for the UK legal system...
it turns out there's consequences for jumping bail
The fact that the Fujitsu employees had complete and un-audited access to all the remote terminals should have made the computer testimony unreliable, but of course the post office lied about that and denied that anyone had remote access.
In the case of the sub-postmasters the Post Office, as far as I'm aware, never proved where these stolen sums supposedly went. The computer evidence was thought terminating and was the only thing (except false confessions under duress) used to secure these convictions, rather than proper investigative work.
It's crazy auditors didn't spot discrepancies especially with the high base rate of reported frauds and errors, but if finding the receipts for stolen money was the threshold for prosecution any remotely competent thief would be in the clear
If there is absolutely nothing to corroborate the money going missing, no evidence presented for where or how the money was stolen then there shouldn't be enough to send someone to prison.
The amounts of money involved may be small to business owners in other domains but for SPMs many were almost bankrupted by trying to replace the sums out of their own earnings as you say. This wouldn't have been a rounding error to their lifestyle, it should have been provable to any halfway decent investigator. And if not? Then they get away with it and it's the price we pay not to live in tyranny.
Well, yeah. A defendant should be able to argue that because that can (and did) happen and it's bad to routinely wrongly convict people.
I thought when you called it a "tricky one" you were expressing that it might be a bad thing if it were difficult to convict someone based primarily on audit logs.
But if you don't want people to be wrongly convicted, then surely that's a good thing, right? As we know, there's no guarantee a particular audit log is correct.
Think of it like a diagnostic test, like covid tests. That sort of test has 2 measures, not one (anyone who just says "Test X is 95% accurate!" is selling you something) - specificity and sensitivity. Sensitivity is the percentage of true positives it generates out of all positives, and specificity is the percentage of true negatives it generates out of all negatives.
I don't want people to be wrongly convicted, no, so I want legal tests to have a very high specificity. But I could do that easily, by just throwing every case out as not guilty. The hard bit is raising sensitivity at the same time. You can't just say "if you don't want people to be wrongly convicted", because that justifies far too many things.
> As we know, there's no guarantee a particular audit log is correct.
There's no guarantee anything is correct. Three witnesses could have colluded and someone might go to jail for it, but unless there's a reason to think they colluded, we don't assume that. That's the problem I'm talking about: how do we get a feel for software systems without assuming like the Post Office that they work, or like you that they don't work?
Well, how the Post Office commissioned the Horizon system is something that the inquiry doesn't seem to have got to yet.
From what I've seen of the inquiry (not much), Post Office managers seem to have been desperate to protect the reputation of the Horizon system, and still are. But the miscarriages of justice have now been exposed, and the costs of putting them right are now unavoidable; so the reputation of Horizon can't now be just a matter of subpostmasters.
My guess is that defects in Horizon, and damage to Horizon's reputation, will turn out to affect much more than the wronged subpostmasters. I suspect that some very large commercial contracts will turn out to be affected, and paying compensation to the subpostmasters will turn out to be a tiny component of the costs of this catastrophe. The Post Office is already warning that it may not be able to pay the compensation, and that the government will have to step up.
The Post Office is a weird mess of subsidiaries and holding companies, and has contracts with all sorts of 3rd parties. I anticipate that we are going to witness a slooow explosion of the Post Office, over like ten years. It's ludicrous, of course, that a private company should be able to be complainant, investigator and prosecutor as well as being sole custodian of the evidence (Horizon logs).
It's also ludicrous that the Post Office's lawyers, Cartwright King, should describe requests for disclosure as a "fishing expedition". Defendants shouldn't have to request disclosure of evidence that might help the defence; that is an obligation that falls on the prosecution as a matter of statute law.
I'm waiting for the inquiry to find out how the Horizon system was commissioned, and how it was tested; and who was in charge of commissioning.
It was only subsequently that that believe changed to outright lying to cover their own backs.
As can be seen by following the story, this wasn't the case. The only evidence provided in criminal cases was essentially a witness statement saying that the system was working correctly and that was the end of it.
I'm not saying it wasn't. You're assuming a blind faith in all IT is the cause of this witness' belief. I'm disagreeing with you there.
> it was also enabled by a belief in the reliability and credibility of IT systems
The obvious mistake most likely made here is these senior people where not asked , " exactly how they formed this opinion." and what specific evidence they had.
I would have said , if they could NOT produce the evidence , that verified their statement, their is no way they could make the statement as accurate about the system accuracy.
The people must not have had experience in software development and testing.
I don't think this is a real thing. The individual system was vouched for by senior people. That's why it wasn't questioned any further.