I have been working on two longer posts, which should be up in the next few days.
One is on the Post Office miscarriage of justice: in particular, the legal rule that computers are presumed to be operating correctly.
The other is on the case of Roberts v Hopwood, where it would seem the House of Lords held it was unlawful for a council to pay its workers equally.
Very much looking forward to your views on both these significant issues.
As someone who has spent his entire career programming computers (mostly correctly) I’m looking forward to reading about the legal presumption about computer operation.
Computers do operate correctly in that they do exactly what their programs (software) dictate., even if this is incorrect in a broader sense. If Horizon is no longer “ fitting up” sub post masters (SPMs) then changes have been made to the software to make it not do so. The Post Office’s “don’t know how it happened” stance is therefore not credible.
The “follow the money” maxim seems not to have been applied. If Horizon invented liabilities that SPMs had not collected money to cover this might look like fraud on their part but it seems far more likely that Horizon misappropriated money either into a Post Office Suspense account or into the accounts of persons unknown. If the former the Post Office displayed a marked lack of curiosity as to where the money had come from especially since they were prosecuting SPMs who all said they did not know where the money was. One would think there were dots to join up. If the latter then persons unknown have pulled off a masterful theft. My money is on the former.
I’ve no special knowledge about this subject. I just used to write computer code and test it until it did what it should.
Post Office miscarriage of justice: in particular, the legal rule that computers are presumed to be operating correctly.
I am astounded. I have worked in the IT industry since the 1970s and I was never aware of any such presumption. Given the old adage”.. to err is human (etc)” I would have assumed a neutral stance on such matters subject to proof one way or another.
Indeed, on first learning of the outrageous presumption of guilt in multiple cases by the PO, my immediate instinct was to assume the system was performing incorrectly (as has every colleague I know) and to put it mildly, some specific organisations were being very economical with the truth. I look forward to your upcoming post.
Almost anyone who has carried out computer programming professionally would aver to the existence of bugs, which are ways in which programs do unexpected things, and which might have a variety of causes: misapprehensions about what a program is meant to do; incorrect translations from a (possibly inadequate) specification into code; mishandling interactions with ‘the real world’; failures in the hardware on which the program is running; and possibly other mechanisms. As a result, presuming that a computer is operating correctly is unwise. There is a whole discipline, termed ‘Formal methods’ which attempts to produce code mathematically proven to be correct. The expense and difficulty of using the approach means that it is not mainstream. It really should be incumbent upon the prosecution to demonstrate that a computer is, or was, operating correctly rather than it being a presumption.
Professor Ross Anderson, Professor of Security Engineering at the Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Cambridge has for many years documented problems various bank customers have had combatting accusations of fraud when disputing credit and debit card transactions. Much is documented at the website: https://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/ under than category ‘Banking’. It contains many examples of banks acting in similar ways to the behaviour of the Post Office. Get an AI or minion to skim-read and give you a summary.
It is also worth noting that even if a computer is operating correctly, the information it provides is dependent on the information it is given to process. Some people have difficulty with this concept, as the Victorian computing pioneer Charles Babbage pointed out “On two occasions I have been asked, “Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?” … I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.”
There is a very long-running mailing list documenting computer-related risks that have, or could, cause loss or damage: https://seclists.org/risks/ (again, worth a summarisation by an AI or minion). It has many examples where the presumption that a computer is operating correctly is false.
Famous examples of incorrectly operating computer systems include: from aerospace are the Mars Climate Orbiter, Ariane Flight V88, and the Boeing MCAS software; from medicine, the Therac-25; and from public administration, the Australian Robodebt scheme.
If the presumption that a computer system is operating correctly is to stand (in the same way that items sent by First-class post are deemed to arrive) then I would hope that any defence is given vastly greater inquisitorial powers to look at computer logs, data, and source code to test that presumption. In many cases such logs do not exist, or are denied to defendants.