But I'm not going to.

People were jailed, wrongly, people had reputations and lives destroyed, some are sadly no longer with us due to this crusade against them.

Protecting a brand, when it was known to be flawed, then going on to prosecute people to this extent is morally reprehensible and legally shocking!

Post Office need to have all of the BS "rights" to prosecute removed, if that hasn't happened already.

Fully agree.

Incidentally, the Royal Mail is believed to be the first organisation to carry out investigations and prosecutors in the world.

Not that been first is best...

When people stop speaking truth to power for fear of retribution, that is no longer a democracy.

The issue is not that he received assurances from his senior team and Fujitsu, but that he did not check the basis on which those assurances were made. he did not ask for an independent technical security assessment report, or even an audit to ISO27001 by a competent independent team. He just relied on what he was told without questioning it too hard. That is what some people would call 'sloping shoulders', I call it abrogation of responsibility.

I call it fear.

A recurring theme people use in their defence is that 'someone else' told them the system was fine and that was that.

Who are these 'someone else'?? Why did even the head of IT have 'someone else' telling him everything was hunky dory?

Sooner or later names will have to be named, if it's not the head of IT then who was it?

His job was not to know anything, that's why he was paid so much.

At least none of these lying, malevolent, incompetent bastards has resorted to the Nuremberg defence - "I was only obeying orders", Well, not yet.

This is the new version "I was going on what I'd been told." It should carry as much weight when you're in a position where you can demand the truth.

Genuine question.

My understanding of this case is that in simple terms Fujitsu had access to remote systems and were able to edit transaction data. They did this to make it appear as though bugs were either resolved or had never occurred in the first place. However they did this without any real form of audit logging (for dubious reasons) or understanding/caring about the ramifications of doing this in a financial application.

Naturally anyone who is now being "accused" is simply pointing the finger elsewhere.

Realistically how is anyone going to get definitive answers on a case like this when identifying and tracing the source of every bodged transaction is effectively impossible?

I'm not for one moment saying any of this is alright but I also don't see how anyone expects to get all the relevant information to prosecute the appropriate people.

They've put themselves in a position where they can't - or shouldn't be able to - convict even a genuine case without completely independent proof.

There was no audit logging.

No any form of double-entry by the looks of it.

I've only worked in accounting software once, and when I said "we have two ways of tracking transactions" shall I get rid of one, the accountant in the team said "no! great, keep them both, we can use them to counter-check against each other". A principle that seems lost in Horizon (probably, to this day. Which lays it open to fraud.).

Everything was rotten back at HQ and Fujitsu.

Bastards.

If he had nagging doubts he was the best placed person to satisfy them yet he didn't. In his position plausible deniability isn't. There were obviously too many who didn't want to start turning over stones for fear of what might lie beneath.

So who abused it? It doesn't appear to have been the poor bloody postmasters.

Lots of money (LOTS and LOTS of money) is still missing. Since it is now obvious that it was not the Postmasters who were stealing it, where did it go, how, and where is it now? Those who had access to the system and could "adjust" it at will, look to me to be the primary suspects. Whether within Fujitsu or even the Post Office itself? And who is now looking into this? Obviously can't let either the Post Office or Fujitsu anywhere near to running the investigation themselves. This story has only just begun......

The “missing” money never existed.

Post office terminal sent a sales transaction to head office. Head office sent an ack packet back. Ack packet didn’t arrive at the terminal. Terminal retransmitted the transaction. Head office logged it as a second sale.

As far as I am aware, none of these convicted postmasters have been found with the ill-gotten-gains, which would, of course, be recoverable if they existed.

Those who were 'forced' to pay back 'lost money' were contributing to the PO bosses bonuses.

It now appears that it was 'somebody else's fault'. They've been coached by their legal team who have no incentive to get matters concluded.

An audit should have shown up phantom "profits"

You're CTO with nagging doubts, but you don't do anything about it ?

Of what use were you, exactly ?

Oh, right : signing off reports saying that everything was fine.

So, corrupt to the bone, eh ? And now you're pretending to have a conscience ?

A bit late for that.

Didn’t anybody wonder about the scope of this supposed crime wave? Seven hundred some-odd independent and disorganized small business people embezzling from the Royal Mail? Only in some dystopian sci-fi film.

Sure, one or two, or even ten might try that. But, not one judge, or detective, or silk-wearing barrister or auditor stopped to think and to ask the obvious questions when the number of accused started climbing into the hundreds? Impossible to believe. There is an untold story somewhere in this mess about a suppressed whistleblower.

The Post Office had long viewed Sub-Postmasters as outsiders who were all thieving bastards, they just never had any proof. Horizon comes online and confirms their already existing bias, instead of being surprised at the number of 'thieves' they were instead impressed by how well it was catching them.

To be fair, implementing a more robust accounting system could EASILY generate that kind of response, things that were totally missed before because there was no way to check them, but which flag up immediately in a newer system.

And judges are not there to do the research for you, they judge the case in front of them based solely on the evidence in front of them. Anything else is dangerous. It would be for the lawyers (especially defence) to say "There have been X hundred court cases in recent years because of the Horizon system, which is far in excess of the previous system, can you account for that? Is it not possible that my client is one of many being unjustly accused?"

Fact is, many of the people that went to court PLEADED GUILTY because they were advised to do so. In that instance, neither the lawyers or judges have much to do beyond dotting the i's and crossing the t's. It's why you never plead guilty to something that you know you didn't do. You've basically said "Yes, I did that, exactly as described." and there's no way back short of a pardon or major scandal.

But a new accounting system suddenly detecting 100's of cases of potential fraud over 16 years (so barely 50 cases a year), out of about 7000 subpostmasters, their other employees, etc.? Yeah, it's significant but it's not implausible. Especially when some of those pleaded guilty and in the process even accepted the evidence from Horizon was accurate.

If you were to suddenly implement "insider trading laws" on 7000 stockbrokers and their employees and departments, I would bet that you'd find more than 100 cases a year.

The real problem is the Post Office's rather unique ability to act on its own: "when an organisation is allowed to act as a prosecutor when it is also the victim and the investigator of an alleged offence".

i.e. crusty old laws with no modern need for them and people able to run amok and avoid oversight.

If they'd had to push their case through the normal entities (such as they had to do in Scotland and Northern Ireland), the number of instances would have been less but still might have flagged something in people's brains along the way.

Easier said than done. Especially in this scandal.

The accused subpostmasters were royally fucked over in so many ways. The Post Office knowingly withheld evidence that would have proved innocence or at least raised sufficient reasonable doubt if cases went to court. The PO anf Fushitsu were also perjuring themselves by claiming Horizon was infallible even when they knew it wasn't. The PO intimidated their victims: threatening to spend gazillions on prosecutions => the accused couldn't possibly hope to afford the resources of mounting a matching defence. This meant the logical but wrong choice for many victims was to cop a plea for a lesser charge to avoid bankruptcy, homelessness and jail time even though they were innocent.

What would any rational person do in these circumstances?

Private Eye was asking those questions > 20 years ago. I believe Computer Weekly was too, though I never read that publication.

According to his witness statement, his job titles were "Operations Director", "Chief Technology and Operations Services Director" or "Chief Operations Officer". Never CTO. See pdf at:

https://www.postofficehorizoninquiry.org.uk/evidence/witn11130100-mike-young-witness-statement

The statement gives a summary of what he claims his different roles involved.

It also notes he is a former soldier in the British Army, and a former policeman (rank of Detective Sergeant).

It's been interesting to hear the evidence and cross-examinations about remote access. It seems to me that there has been obfuscation. IMHO remote access is pretty much an intrinsic requirement for IT Systems and should not come as a surprise. The key issue is whether the remote access is used to alter the ledger and whether or not the audit log can be bypassed. Double-entry book keeping has been around for hundreds of years and no doubt there will be endless case law surrounding security of the ledger and how corrections are handled. To my way of thinking common sense would apply - any adjustments would have to be logged and signed-off by the business owner, not least to protect whoever is applying those adjustments. What were they thinking?

Generally speaking, you should never be able to change an entry. You would add a new entry saying that a previous entry should be reversed.

As I understood it, double entry bookkeeping consisted of having two ledgers, each of which was updated individually. Reconciliation was then done between the two ledgers. If they didn't match there was a problem. Modern systems seem to accept an update to the first ledger and then apply that to the second ledger - or am I really, really wrong?

So in short, his testimony was "well, I was pressured to lie, so I did, even though I thought maybe I shouldn't have, but it's OK because I can blame someone else for it"

Did I get that right?

How can outdated equipment "mess up" with numbers this way?

Makes no sense.

Sure, bad memory, occasional bit flips can happen, but what a coincidence these would happen there.

Did they all get lobotomy and don't know about it?

One of the big ones was lottery tickets, those sales were handled with a different machine which was connected to the Horizon POS. The connection would keep dropping and cause the messages to get re-sent, but Horizon would count them as multiple sales even though they had the same sale number.

So that's a software error, nothing to do with outdated equipment. You always have to account for dropped connections, double spend etc. these are the basics.

Jail for CTO! Jail for one thousand years!

They manipulated people to the point where the innocent had no choice other than to confess to a crime they didn't commit rather than risk losing absolutely everything.

They manipulated people to the point where some of those who weren't happy admitting to something they didn't do decided instead to cease existing.

They withheld information that may well have demonstrated the innocence of the accused; this is where it gets really nasty - they knew something was amiss and decided to carry on screwing people over anyway .

The whole bloody board/directors/the lot should be behind bars - and for a good long time, none of this "we'll let you out in three months if you promise to be good" shit. If everybody blames everybody else, great, means they're all guilty. Don't wait for the first domino to fall, push.

And the laws need changed to ensure that this sort of abuse of power doesn't happen again.

Knowing how they buried these people under suspicion and allegation, knowing they were innocent, knowing they couldn't fight back and knowing that the prosecutions were driving people into despair such that suicide became an option and the craveness to allow it to go on is beyond the measure of any human metric of criminal culpability. This is murder by system.

I'd bring back writs of outlawry for everyone involved. As they so denied innocents the protections of law or even common decency - let's see how iron-jawed they are when someone toys with their existence in the same arbitrary manner.