What Went Wrong?

In April, 39 postmasters and sub-postmasters were cleared of wrongdoing by a court in the UK after being accused and sentenced for various forms of fraud and, in some cases, serving multiyear prison sentences [bbc.com].

In total, around 700 people have been prosecuted based on the “evidence” from a single IT system installed by the UK Post Office, and while some of them probably did embezzle money, it looks like the majority of them did not. They were sentenced based on evidence from an IT system, which… ehhh… to be honest, we don’t actually know what that IT system did, except we know it did it really, really badly.

Press reports have contained various mumblings and hand-waving about the shortcomings of the IT system, but nobody sat down and documented precisely what went wrong and what can be learned from it so that nobody ever makes a mistake like this again.

Read in full here:

https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3475967

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