Gregory's ServerFujitsu bugs that sent innocent people to prison were known “from the start”
Software bugs were hidden from lawyers of wrongly convicted postal workers.
 28 comments
@RealGene @arstechnica ideally charged with a crime and spending some prison time. As should those who kept quiet when they knew what was going on. Fujitsu should have blown this wide open in the very first court case. There is no defence for this at all. None.   @arstechnica It's not a bug, it's a feature. Remember that now next time you see a computer program accuse people of a crime.  @arstechnica highly can recommend reading this book!  @arstechnica literally the people that hid them should be the ones in jail. AND paying reparations.   @arstechnica Hey, what if all code used by the government had to be auditable, huh? What about that? https://publiccode.eu/en/  Same as Toyota did with their sudden unintended acceleration problem when a guy was on trial for murder because of it.  > Software bugs were hidden from lawyers of wrongly convicted UK postal workers. Not saying open-source is perfect, but if there was ever a good reason for copy-left licenses such as the #GPL where the end user has the right to ask for the source code, this is it. Not that the post master would be able to understand it themselves, but their legal defence could request it, then have a trusted third party review it.  @stuartl Giving the Post Office access to the Fujitsu source code wouldn't have helped the people accused by the Post Office. What would have been needed here would have been public code, going further than even copyleft.  @arstechnica  The broken lives. Time lost. Lives lost. Financial losses. The prosecutors and all involved in covering up those errors should be reporting to prison right now... to serve similar time / penalties- handed out to innocent workers. There must be at minimum equal consequences imposed - especially due to level of power they had in the cycle. @arstechnica Remind me why people that work in the judicial system and do this kind of nightmarish thing aren't sent to prison like the rest of us?   @dexter Mr. House always wins, at least till you destroy all his robots and rip him out of his life support pod... @arstechnica we had a problem like that in Australia called Robodebt where algorithms were used to supposedly detect overpayments of welfare benefits. It was illegal but was ideologically sound so they all conspired to go with it and people suicided, developed mental health issues, had money stolen from them and had their lives ruined while the government defended the scheme. @arstechnica Do they have class action lawsuits in the UK? Because, I see a HUGE lawsuit against Fujitsu and the Post Office here.  These lawyers should be in jail and bankrupt. "the Post Office's lawyers had rewritten Fujitsu witness statements."  |
@arstechnica
The Postal Service lawyers responsible for editing witness statements should be disbarred, or whatever they call it in the UK.