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It took a television series for British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to announce legislation that would free and compensate victims of the scandal more quickly. He called it “one of the greatest injustices in the history of this country.” This is not an exaggeration. Up to 3,500 owners and operators of small postal branches were accused, persecuted and in many cases imprisoned and damaged, thanks to the help of…
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It took a television series for British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to announce legislation that would free and compensate victims of the scandal more quickly. He called it “one of the greatest injustices in the history of this country.” This is not an exaggeration. Up to 3,500 owners and operators of small postal branches were accused, persecuted and in many cases imprisoned and damaged, thanks to the help of a faulty operating system to serve the authorities.
The Post Office, a UK postal and financial services network, established an electronic point-of-sale system called Horizon, designed and managed by Fujitsu, for centralized management of its 13,000 franchises. He assured that it is a cleaner and more efficient system than traditional paper accounting. As soon as it arrived, Horizon started creating daily gaps, holes in the accounting of small offices. It’s full of bugs.
Fujitsu knew this from the start. David McDonnell, one of the project’s developers, said that “out of the eight people on the development team, two were very good, two were so-so, but we could work with them, and there were maybe three or four who weren’t so good. the height is not up to standard and is not capable of producing professional code.” Company technicians have “unrestricted and unaudited” access to all systems, including remote access to branch accounts. If you didn’t already know, the post office soon found out.
Instead of taking responsibility and correcting technological deficiencies, the Post Office invested all its resources and energy into prosecuting those responsible for small branches as criminals, resulting in 983 criminal convictions. Their lawyers classified defendants by race, separating “Negroid men,” “Chinese/Japanese men,” and “dark-skinned European men” from Caucasian operators as part of their legal strategy. In 2014, then-Justice Minister Chris Grayling changed the law so that those identified as victims of a miscarriage of justice could not receive compensation unless they could prove their innocence “beyond reasonable doubt.” Correos adhered to the law to avoid paying the appropriate compensation. But last year it extended its contract with Fujitsu to migrate its information technology systems to the cloud, and this year it extended another contract to continue using Horizon IT.
This is a real drama of lives destroyed due to the malfunction of one security program. software and the toxic culture of public companies that should be monitored more closely. But it also helps us think about the real consequences of implementing opaque solutions from private companies without adequate auditing to modernize health, education, financial and administrative infrastructure in a political context driven by powerful technology and a lack of sense of responsibility. Especially this year, when AI is only being used in schools, administration, courtrooms, health centers and other essential services, not for what they really need: better working conditions and more staff.
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