Fujitsu is Sorry That Its Software Helped Send Innocent People To Prison (arstechnica.com) 143
Fujitsu has apologized for its role in the British Post Office scandal, acknowledging that its buggy accounting software contributed to the wrongful prosecutions of hundreds of postal employees. From a report: "Fujitsu would like to apologize for our part in this appalling miscarriage of justice," Paul Patterson, co-CEO of Fujitsu's European division, said in a hearing held by the UK Parliament's Business and Trade Committee. "We were involved from the very start. We did have bugs and errors in the system and we did help the Post Office in their prosecutions of the sub-postmasters. For that we are truly sorry."
The committee hearing focused on possible compensation for victims of what has been called "the worst miscarriage of justice in British history." Patterson said that Fujitsu has "a moral obligation" to contribute to the compensation for victims. A BBC report explains that between 1999 and 2015, "more than 900 sub-postmasters and postmistresses were prosecuted for theft and false accounting after money appeared to be missing from their branches, but the prosecutions were based on evidence from faulty Horizon software. Some sub-postmasters wrongfully went to prison, many were financially ruined. Some have since died."
The committee hearing focused on possible compensation for victims of what has been called "the worst miscarriage of justice in British history." Patterson said that Fujitsu has "a moral obligation" to contribute to the compensation for victims. A BBC report explains that between 1999 and 2015, "more than 900 sub-postmasters and postmistresses were prosecuted for theft and false accounting after money appeared to be missing from their branches, but the prosecutions were based on evidence from faulty Horizon software. Some sub-postmasters wrongfully went to prison, many were financially ruined. Some have since died."
Plus at least four suicides (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Plus at least four suicides (Score:5, Insightful)
It can, but more deadly still are idiotic police and overzealous prosecutors.
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ahhhh, anthropocene's apex predators ... what a fascinating and ferocious breed.
Post Office, not Police (Score:2)
ahhhh, anthropocene's apex predators ... what a fascinating and ferocious breed.
What the post office? Clearly, you viewed Postman Pat in a very different light...
These were private prosecutions brought using the UK Post Office's long-standing (over 300 years old), power to bring private prosecutions. The police we not only involved in the scandal but they are now investigating the Post Office to see if their management should be charged...so I guess they want to re-establish dominance?
Postman Pat (Score:2)
How can you trust that Black and White Cat running the show...
Re:Plus at least four suicides (Score:4, Insightful)
And the perjury. Don't forget that.
Re:Plus at least four suicides (Score:5, Insightful)
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They didn't do nothing, they awarded the head of the post office an OBE!
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You know I can never remember which one is better!
Re:Plus at least four suicides (Score:5, Interesting)
This is par for the course in the UK now. There's literally countless stories about HomeOffice cunts screwing up people's lives leaving them in hell for months or in some cases years at a time, and when the story gets run in the paper it is magically fixed within weeks along with a "we're sorry" *cryface emoticon*.
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This is par for the course in the UK now. There's literally countless stories about HomeOffice cunts screwing up people's lives leaving them in hell for months or in some cases years at a time, and when the story gets run in the paper it is magically fixed within weeks along with a "we're sorry" *cryface emoticon*.
13 years of Conservative government with the last 5 being the most ideologically driven, all pragmatism given up to pursue fake culture wars and throw red meat at their baying fans. Hundreds of millions pissed up the wall to avoid processing a few thousand asylum seekers because doing so would admit that most are legit and this "economic migrant" bollocks is a complete myth, worsening economy with over inflated house prices (much of which was a direct result of government interference). The next General Ele
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Even with the show, they're still not paying out very quickly. Justice delayed is justice denied, and many of these people not only lost their jobs but lost reputation needed to get new comparable jobs. The compensation is sorely needed soon. But the government is not keen to spend money merely because they're required to do so.
Re:Plus at least four suicides (Score:5, Informative)
Not only are they not paying out very quickly, but:
1. The Post Office sent out horrifically bad letters offering compensation to operators via its lawyers, which wrongly implied operators were under a duty of secrecy about the offers, in a pathetic attempt to stop them comparing notes. Now the lawyers have been reported to the SRA, and I hope they get a battering from it over this
2. The offers were badly structured so that operators who accepted were landed with huge tax bills. If I had to choose between malice and incompetence on the Post Office's part for this disaster, I'd go with the former
3. Even the MPs who are supposedly on their side have said that the compensation is deliberately designed to make operators whole. Where is the punitive element? Where is the compensation for all the knock-on effects? It's beyond absurd.
4. It would be fast, easy, and probably not more expensive to just have the government write a £1m cheque for each operator affected (upwards of 3,000, I believe. The 900 are just the ones who were convicted, many more succumbed to the blackmail and paid thousands to avoid prosecution). Then the government could sue Fujitsu to recover some of the money. And renationalise the Post Office while it's at it.
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Many of them may never be fully compensated. The law was changed about a decade ago to mean that people who wrongly spent time in prison have to prove their innocence, or they get nothing.
Most of the people affected will never be able to prove they are innocent, only that the software evidence is unreliable and so their conviction can't be proven to the required standard.
They might be able to sue the Post Office for compensation for the time spent in prison, but the PO will doubtless try to pass that cost o
Re:Plus at least four suicides (Score:5, Insightful)
They wouldn’t prosecute Jimmy Saville but someone allegedly steals a few hours of wages and the hammer comes down.
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Yes, it was still able to bring private prosecutions at the time (and *is still doing so today*).
POL's legal standing may have been no different from others, although as the Wiki you quote from shows, the CCRC and many others believe it was, but POL absolutely did act as "victim", investigator (ie police)_ and prosecutor in these cases. The police and CPS weren't involved in the vast majority of them. And it is absolutely clear that if POL had simply called in the police when it "suspected" a crime had been
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Depends whose wages. Wage theft is the biggest form of theft in the UK, but it is rarely prosecuted.
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What do you expect when you give people power with no accountability?
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Except for the fact that the UK Post Office has its own investigative body AND its own prosecution, an holdback from pre-Victorian times. So in this case the police were not involved, it was the post office making these arrests and guiding the prosecution.
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You seem really intent on quoting that Wikipedia article, while carefully not quoting the next sentence or paragraph. While anyone can bring a private prosecution, other institutions do not have what amounts to a private police force that investigates crimes against itself, which is a massive difference.
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The prosecutions were handled by the Post Office themselves, as were the investigations. We have a strange situation in the UK where the PO has that power.
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Not only can bad software kill, it can happen to the most innocent of software.
Guess what software was responsible? Fujitsu's software was accounting software. It was installed to help retail post offices manage their inventory and money.
What happened was outrageous - this accounting software kept coming up short - it kept (mis)reporting that the store should have more money than it did. Postmasters were accused of embezzlement - from amounts ranging from a thousand UKP to nearly a hun
the software was buggy, but so what? (Score:5, Insightful)
The software was indeed buggy. But if you read into this, management purposefully ignored all evidence that there were bugs, refused to believe, and THEY are 100% the cause of all issues in this story.
Re:the software was buggy, but so what? (Score:4, Informative)
The law allows those managers to act in exactly the way they acted. The law reads that the computer must be presumed to be correct.
When "management" reads the law and sees the tally sheet, which of them will abide by the law and which will not?
Re:the software was buggy, but so what? (Score:5, Insightful)
What law exactly is that?
On evidence already heard by the official inquiry it seems all but certain that several senior people at both the Post Office and Fujitsu knew something was badly wrong and continued anyway, which would likely make them guilty of perverting the course of justice at a minimum. The questions that now need answers include exactly which people were involved in both the original inappropriate actions and the subsequent cover-up and the degree of culpability and harm in each case.
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Re:the software was buggy, but so what? (Score:5, Informative)
Excerpting from https://www.theguardian.com/uk... [theguardian.com]
"In English and Welsh law, computers are assumed to be “reliable” unless proven otherwise. But critics of this approach say this reverses the burden of proof normally applied in criminal cases. Stephen Mason, a barrister and expert on electronic evidence, said: “It says, for the person who’s saying ‘there’s something wrong with this computer’, that they have to prove it. Even if it’s the person accusing them who has the information.”"
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That read more like a law on how evidence is to be treated in court. And it is hugely flawed yes. That doesn't obligate management to initiate the prosecution in the first place though. They are still personally and morally responsible for initiating proceedings when they knew the software was busted. Don't prosecute and you won't trigger the bad evidence law. Simple.
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Boss: Your till comes up short again, worker.
Worker: I did not steal from the till.
Boss: Computer says your till is short. Computer is reliable. I'm an automaton or a malicious prat or a nepobaby or infatuated with your spouse or will be lauded for finding short tills or other biased actor who will refer this to the prosecuting authority.
Prosecuting Authority: I'm an automaton. Computer says your till came up short. My moral responsibility and obligation is prosecute under the law, not under your flawed i
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This has been known about for a long time, not least because of false accusations of speeding made by computers (speed cameras). It used to be almost impossible to refute them, but now it is at least possible if you have very compelling evidence of your own. Typically that would be video and GPS records.
I imagine a lot of the victims here were advised by their legal council to not contest the computer evidence.
Re:the software was buggy, but so what? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not true at all. The law concerns what *courts* must assume in the absence of evidence to the contrary. It says nothing about how managers must act, nor does it authorize witnesses to lie about what they know.
Re:the software was buggy, but so what? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not true at all. The law concerns what *courts* must assume in the absence of evidence to the contrary. It says nothing about how managers must act, nor does it authorize witnesses to lie about what they know.
Included in "the law" is also a requirement that people who are defending themselves have access to the evidence, especially the evidence that the prosecutor has and especially the exculpatory evidence that might help the people with their cases. In most of the cases we are talking about, the Post Office was the prosecutor and the Post Office had plenty of evidence there were problems with Horizon so the Post Office managers and lawyers should have been telling the victims (the sub-postmasters) all about the problems with Horizon.
Failure to hand over this evidence, which they had, and even covering it up by using plea-bargains to stop people testifying about the problems comes under prosecutorial misconduct.
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Failure to hand over this evidence, which they had, and even covering it up by using plea-bargains to stop people testifying about the problems comes under prosecutorial misconduct.
Who cares? Nothing will be done about this instance and the next instance is coming rapidly. Sure, billions do care, but none of them matter. They will rot in jail or die. No big deal (except to the person it is happening to, but again, that person doesn't matter because they are they, not we.)
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From the very article you quote
The Post Office's unique position, with a history as a prosecutor going back to 1683, gave the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) the greatest cause for concern upon its referral to the Court of Appeal. Historically Royal Mail had been a public authority.
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The law reads that the computer must be presumed to be correct.
"Computer says no!" [Search for the phrase if you need an explanation]
Re:the software was buggy, but so what? (Score:4, Informative)
There's blame to go around and we can't leave the government off the hook. The Tories decided to award a gong to the head of the post office in 2019, after this was already widely reported and raised repeatedly in parliament.
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What's that got to do with it? The gong has never been awarded based on merit. It's always been 100% nepotism.
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everything? The people in power knew what was happening and chose to not only did nothing but reward the CEO. how on earth do they not share the blame?
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There's blame to go around and we can't leave the government off the hook.
Yes you can... and you will leave them off the hook. You have no choice.
Prosecution (Score:2)
I'm not sure how it works in the UK, but in the US, if a computer system says you stole something, the burden of proof is on the prosecution to show the computer system is correct. If this is accounting stuff, you go through the ledger and show that, at the beginning of the day there was 1,000 in some account, 1,000 was added, and only 1,500 was deposited. You can line those numbers up with what was deposited in the bank. If the bank says 2,000 but your system says 1,500, there is something wrong with your
So seppuku (Score:2)
So the entire board of Fujitsu needs to commit seppuku, that's what!
Now, as for the *british* malefactors . . .
Not so sorry (Score:5, Insightful)
Fujitsu knows that they should compensate their victims, but are waiting for the end of the enquiry before they actually do so.
How many more former subpostmasters will die while Fujitsu is waiting? How many former subpostmasters must struggle in poverty while Fujitsu keeps delaying?
And, let's be clear -- this wasn't just incompetence. There was malicious criminal action by Fujitsu employees that put people in prison.
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Yes, it's not that they knew they had buggy software. They actually went to court and declared that their software is correct and can be used as proof!
It's mind-boggling how it took so many years for this to be uncovered.You have hundreds among hundreds of postmasters being convicted, like how is that not a huge WTF moment for anyone in government, the justice system etc.
The people responsible should be prosecuted (both at Fujitsu and the Post Office), but as usual, they probably won't and the taxpayers wil
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I suspect the mindset here was something along the line of:
Gosh, there's been a huge pool of corruption going on here for years and the new system has finally managed to allow us to catch it.
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That's not a contradiction. POL Brought in Second Sight under sufferance. Many people in the org, at leadership, management and investigatory field force level, were clearly committed to a worldview in which it was more likely that an operator was a crook than that Horizon was wrong. That led to their treating all evidence to the contrary as irritating distractions that needed to be shut down before it obscured the larger "truth" to which they were committed. There was a culture of contempt for operators an
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There was malicious criminal action by Fujitsu employees that put people in prison.
I don't think we know the share of criminal actions here between the Post Office and Fujitsu yet, do we? There seem to be Fujitsu employees who lied under oath, but Fujitsu and others had told the Post Office there were known problems in Horizon, the Post Office was responsible for evidence handling in the cases and the Post Office effectively instructed them to keep quiet.
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There seem to be Fujitsu employees who lied under oath
So where are the prosecutions? There is sufficient evidence of perjury -- enough for a conviction.
The police claim to have been investigating, but, in 4 years, they have interviewed a grand total of two people under caution.
It's clear that there is not just criminal activity, but also corruption in the police and elsewhere.
Judges need to start being more skeptical of prosecution evidence. "Computer says no" [Google the phrase] should not be sufficient for a conviction, but it was for hundreds of people.
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There was malicious criminal action by Fujitsu employees that put people in prison.
Fujitsu did not take criminal action. The Post Office took criminal action against its own sub-postmasters, using dodgy evidence supplied by Fujitsu. Fujitsu knew it was dodgy, and told the PO it was dodgy, but the PO used it anyway, and Fujitsu did not speak up when they saw the PO using it to prosecute and extort money from its sub-postmasters. IMHO the PO should be criminally prosecuted for obtaining money by deception, and for perjury, and Fujitsu should be criminally prosecuted for aiding and abettin
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Fujitsu sent its people to lie in court.
Fujitsu covered up evidence when asked by defense counsel.
Fujitsu lied to auditors.
Fujitsu was party to defrauding subpostmasters.
There were plenty of criminal actions by Fujitsu employees.
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Fujitsu knows that they should compensate their victims, but are waiting for the end of the enquiry before they actually do so.
What makes you think they will offer compensation? They gave you an apology, you have no ability to ask for anything more and whoever represents you will not ask either unless it is part of a political stunt.
did they block handing the source code to the defe (Score:5, Insightful)
did they block handing the source code to the defense?
In a case like this you should be able to get the source code and if not then all of the software evidence needs to be removed.
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this is indeed an important point. courts do need expert advice to judge matters, but advice is often flawed, sometimes outright pernicious.
then again fujitsu should never again be allowed to sell software in any form. this is not parallel computing for realtime processing on quirky hardware under harsh conditions, it's fucking accounting software, and it was used in a process that could send innocent people to jail. besides compensation, someone high up in fujitsu does deserve jail.
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did they block handing the source code to the defense?
In a case like this you should be able to get the source code and if not then all of the software evidence needs to be removed.
People talk about source code as if that is an easy magic solution. It's not. Hand over the source code for any system, even small ones, and it could take experts months to verify the results. And even then the experts need to identify the code or bug, which may in itself be difficult, especially to outsiders not familiar with the systems.
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It's virtually impossible to get source code in British criminal trials, and even if you did you would have to pay an expert to examine it at great cost. And if you win, you don't get that cost paid.
The British legal system is in a pretty poor state.
Charles Ingram had miscarriage of justice with doc (Score:2)
Charles Ingram had miscarriage of justice with doctored evidence in his cheating case.
How does the court system allow edited evidence to be turned by an 3rd party to the prosecutor and not be forced to trun in all unedited tapes?
and in his case and the postmaster cases why does the defense not allowed to question the evidence or be given full access so they have there own team look it over?
Doesn't make a lot of sense to me (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't understand how any organization can lose 900 people due to accounting fraud and not second guess whether or not their data is faulty.
Obviously, the sub-postmasters lost their jobs, but then for the company to proceed with criminal prosecution 900 times against people with no previous record seems like it would raise some serious red flags all over the place.
Also, I know that people have been convicted for way less, but wouldn't even a minimal defense pose the question "where is the money, then? Because it isn't in my client's bank account..."
Incentives? (Score:2)
Obviously, the sub-postmasters lost their jobs, but then for the company to proceed with criminal prosecution 900 times against people with no previous record seems like it would raise some serious red flags all over the place.
Methinks there was some perverse incentive somewhere along the way, because as you say people cannot be that fucking incompetent at failing to notice such patterns.
But then again, maybe they were incompetent... criminally so.
Re:Incentives? (Score:5, Interesting)
Journalists, including those from the IT industry, were pointing out the extraordinary number of prosecutions since 2009.
When confronted, those responsible ignored, avoided, or outright lied-- and one of them was given a CBE for her job as head of the post office between 2013 and 2019.
It is literally the worst IT scandal I've ever heard of in the last 40 years.
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But I have a suspicion that *many* people must've known that there was an issue and that at some point, it would be public. And in that context, I suspect that the CBE award was specifically so that that person could be thrown under a bus later?
Not that that individual doesn't have questions to answer for... but just I think there's prolly a lot of other people who are likely more culpable.
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No, this isn't "an individual". This includes at least two of her predecessors. Fujitsu's development team. The Crown Prosecution Service. Many, many MP's, who were aware of this problem FOR YEARS.
This wasn't "a person". This was a systemic effort to divert blame, cover asses, and see just how deep people could put their fingers in their ears.
Parliament "launched an inquiry" in 2020-- I believe they interviewed two people.
The scale and scope of this is just mind-boggling. There was outrage when Paula.
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That, I had not heard. Must research more.
Thanks.
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> people cannot be that fucking incompetent at failing to notice such patterns
Managment is thinking, if I'm embezzling money, then of course everyone does it. I'm not the bad guy here. It's all of them.
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There was a somewhat similar case in the Netherlands, where a system incorrectly flagged people drawing child support (specifically: a stipend for day care) as fraudsters, sometimes on something as flimsy as having their kids enrolled in a day care with a "foreign sounding name". Coupled
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This is a really good point.
It's the same reason the state fights like hell against the overturning of wrongful convictions in the US. The apparatus is set up to perpetuate plan continuation bias [wikipedia.org]
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I never understood that aspect. Some of the sums where gigantic. 50,000 pounds sterling. Where do you put 50,000 pounds of loose bills and not have it show up on security camera or similar? And what was the turn-over in the office such that amount could plausibly go missing?
Many people must have deliberately switched off their brains.
Also, with at least US style disclosure rules, a good legal team would go through each transaction until they found some that looked very suspicious and see if they could
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The best way to understand what happened is to think about the people side of things. You're quite right that people must have noticed, but other explanations were more palatable. Chief among them: "we have tens of thousands of operators, and we've always thought we were being cheated by some of them, because we knew there were lots of wrong 'uns out there, and now Horizon is proving that. And they're attacking Horizon's integrity because offence is the best form of defence."
You can see this mindset at work
Software can be evidence of a crime (Score:2)
It should NEVER be the only evidence
The worst miscarriage of justice? (Score:5, Insightful)
I feel like literally every British colony might have something to say on that front.
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i guess that includes ireland too ...
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Depends on what you call "justice". The Anti-Catholic Laws, for instance, were horrific pieces of legislature. But they were publicly known, and worse, they were LEGAL, and none of the English citizens really cared-- after all, the Irish were sub-humans who didn't deserve rights.
So really, that's institutionalized discrimination, and it was all largely over by 1900, and Ireland had it's independence by 1921.
This was a conspiracy to ensure that innocent people were sent to prison, and prevented from being
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I'm in the US, with no known friends or relations in the British Isles, and I learned about this .... probably almost a decade ago. This wasn't anything that was secret. (Well, I didn't know that Fujitsu was involved...or I don't remember having known that.)
That, of course, doesn't make things any better. But it wasn't because it was secret that its a problem.
Every state punished people of the wrong religion (Score:2)
The unique achievement of the USA was to start to move away from that - though it's worth remembering that the good burghers of Boston executed Quakers who refused to stay away from the city as late as 1660. At the time of the adopting of the constitution most of the states of the US had an established church - the constitution only bans the FEDERAL government from having one. In that context - and given the role of the Catholics, at the behest of the Pope, in trying to overthrow the government of England i
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They're not even remotely comparable. Most of those countries were colonized centuries ago, at a very different time and a totally different standard of morality.
By heritage, I'm Irish. I know why the Irish hate the English, and frankly, I'm surprised they don't hate them much worse-- but this was a 20+ year cover-up, conspiracy, and judicial punishment of people who were innocent, for the sake of the reputation of a piece of shit software, the company that wrote it, and the people who bought it.
Quite lit
Re:The worst miscarriage of justice? (Score:4, Insightful)
It is, of course, relevant to consider the death penalty. For those countries that still adhere to capital punishment, every wrongful execution is a miscarriage of justice of huge ramifications. So, in terms of 'British History' itself, we should be limiting ourselves to miscarriages of justice that took place after The Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act 1965. Then for specific crimes, I guess one could look at the length of incarceration.. Stefan Kiszko, for instance, spent 16 horrible years in prison being blamed for murdering a schoolgirl. However, the there were over 900 subpostmasters convicted - this job is one of many low-paid, low-management, but high responsibility positions given to those who really want to serve their local community. Most of them were not educated in their rights and privileges, and had signed contracts that were punitive to say the least. The organisation responsible for their situation was - ultimately - the UK government. It was a royally assented cock-up of huge proportions.
Of course this doesn't compare to what the British Empire did in South Africa. But it doesn't make it ok.
Going on for years (Score:3)
This has been going on for years with these people suffering. Where was Fujitsu years ago ?
Only the TV News Program shown in the UK got people's attention. A real sad state of affairs when people had to wait for a series to be produced. I hope Fujitsu gets a huge fine and needs to have a large payout. Since this is in Europe, maybe there is a chance for that.
Re:Going on for years (Score:5, Informative)
Check out this timeline:
https://pressgazette.co.uk/new... [pressgazette.co.uk]
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Sense isn't a uniquely EU thing. Even non EU countries take a dim view on corporations fucking over people. Most countries in the world (including those in Europe) are (and this is 100% true) not the USA.
[...] in British history (Score:5, Insightful)
The committee hearing focused on possible compensation for victims of what has been called "the worst miscarriage of justice in British history."
How short and insular people's memories are.
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Yeah, William the Conqueror was a right bastard, wasn't he?
Definitely ought to be comparing that with a modern conspiracy and cover-up that sent hundreds of people to jail for doing nothing wrong.
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This is hundreds of lives destroyed (or ended). I would be interested to know of greater miscarriages of justice.
Unless you don't mean modern history, in which case I guess you can reference witch-hunts etc.
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The south park sorry (Score:3)
Fujitsu, can you also help with SPARC firmware? (Score:2)
Fujitsu is sorry that it's getting negative press (Score:2)
... so are attempting damage control, 20 plus years after the fact.
If Fujitsu hadn't been named in the media coverage, then they would not be apologising.
The full force of the law needs to be swung at them, but it's likely, because Fujitsu have so many other contracts with the UK government, they'll get a token slap on the wrist and maybe one or two middle managers heads will roll.
finally (Score:2)
Finally, someone calls it a bug and not a "glitch."
Terrible code (Score:5, Informative)
Saying that this code was poor would be an understatement.
The report (page 17) [postoffice...iry.org.uk] has this code as an example - describing it as "Whoever wrote this code clearly has no understanding of elementary mathematics or the most basic rules of programming."
The code could potentially be worse because the font that the report uses makes it hard to tell if they are testing "if d is less than zero" or "if d is less than the global variable o".
Was this a purge? (Score:2)
That is all you are getting (Score:2)
Dont hope for more.
The Net (Score:4, Interesting)
A really long time ago on Slashdot there was a poll for the worst tech movie and The Net (1995) won by a huge margin. However, it would seem that the scenario that it warned us about has come to pass, people trust what a computer says more than physical evidence and it leads to ruining people's lives.
Sorry? (Score:5, Insightful)
The British post office scandal is an excellent example of why you can never, and should never, trust or allow closed source software in your infrastructure. It's also a great sign as to why people need to be able to have software independently audited by third parties in all possible software related cases. This goes for everything from speeding tickets by camera, through to death by name field overflow.
There is nothing Fujitsu can do to make people whole. They could give every person wrongly convicted 1 million dollars, and that still wouldn't undo the massive damage caused by their total careless and reckless actions. I don't know how this is proceeding, but I would have every single piece of communication about this platform and issue collected, and analyzed by a third party. Every single person who knew of the issues, and didn't raise them, or try to fix them, should be jailed.
Very, VERY sorry (Score:2)
"We're so so so sorry that this happened and we pledge that it'll probably never happen again!"
Hold the decision makers accountable (Score:3)
"The police are investigating" (Score:2)
And have been for several years. The way that the TV programme has moved things into high gear strongly suggests that the entire establishment would have preferred it to go away - both Labour and Conservative governments are implicated in the mess, and the Liberal Democrat leader was the minister in charge of the post office after 2010, so even they were uninclined to talk about it. Add in the existence of a public enquiry, which makes prosecutions during its proceeding problematic, and I wouldn't hold my b
I see (Score:2)