Hacker Cinema
Mr Bates vs The Post Office
2024 · TV series · 1 season
Created by James Strong
The story of one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in British legal history, where hundreds of innocent sub-postmasters and postmistresses were wrongly accused of theft, fraud and false accounting due to a defective IT system.
8 positive4 neutralfrom 12 commenters
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13 comments on Hacker News
If you can get your hands on it, I recommend the 4 episode BAFTA-winning mini-series about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr_Bates_vs_The_Post_Office
I think that "Mr Bates vs the post office" (https://m.imdb.com/title/tt27867155/) should be required watching for software developers.
It was an internal developer bearing witness that made a material difference here. If you're the developer logging in to fix errors and the postmaster scandal is in full swing, then it's time to look at being a whistleblower. If you're the developer writing code to hack emissions tests in cars, again, look at your ethics.
I became aware of this fraud involving Fujitsu/Horizon and the UK Post Office at the beginning of this year because I watched the movie 'Mr. Bates vs The Post Office.' I can recommend it.
It's sad to see all these people losing their livelihoods and beliefs. And it gives me hope to see how they fought back and started to help each other over the decades.
The four-part mini-series Mr Bates vs The Post Office is worth checking out:
> A faulty IT system called Horizon, developed by Fujitsu, creates apparent cash shortfalls that cause Post Office Limited to pursue prosecutions for fraud, theft and false accounting against a number of subpostmasters across the UK. In 2009, a group of these, led by Alan Bates, forms the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance. The prosecutions and convictions are later ruled a miscarriage of justice at the conclusion of the Bates & Others v Post Office Ltd judicial case in 2019.[4][5]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr_Bates_vs_The_Post_Office
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal
The four-part miniseries with Toby Jones (mentioned above in §Media:Dramatisation) was really good and goes over things pretty well:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr_Bates_vs_The_Post_Office
May I highly recommend the British TV series on the scandal, with the always-excellent Toby Jones as Bates.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr_Bates_vs_The_Post_Office
The article credits a docuseries I've never heard of for making this a widely known issue:
> A four-part television drama, Mr Bates vs the Post Office, was broadcast on ITV in January 2024, after which the scandal became a major news story and political issue.
I swear I read some long form journalism on this issue years ago. Anyone know what I might have found? For the Brits who have previously heard of this scandal, did you know about it prior to January of this year?
> I know this comes down to institutional incompetency
"Incompetency" is an interesting word.
The old maxim about incompetence versus malice suggests a binary choice.
I prefer the more nuanced take that there is a spectrum of positions between the two, and other dimensions that describe a cluster of intents, both conscious and unconscious.
Take the UK Post Office scandal where we see incompetence layered on top of malice, layered on top on incompetence. In some organisations obviously deliberately harmful positions are written into "policy". Often this comes under "PR" [fn:1]. More and more "AI" will be used to disguise malintent and deflect scrutiny.
In the final episode of the ITV dramatisation [0], Alan Bates (played by Toby Jones) delivers an absolutely shocking, knock down line. When talking about incompetence and evil he says: "They're the same thing" At some point there is no difference between incompetence and evil. For a deeper psychological discussion of that listen here [1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr_Bates_vs_The_Post_Office
[1] https://cybershow.uk/episodes.php?id=23 (from 39:20)
[fn:1] Edward Bernays seminal definition of public relations outlines a creed of deception, manipulation and disinformation which is antithetical to security [2].
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Relations_(book)
The documentary that accompanied the recent ITV Drama "Mr Bates vs The Post Office" provides a good overview. Listening to the actual people impacted by this is heart breaking.
Someone has put it on YT, also available in the torrent bundle on PB. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHIr5fqfqKs
I've attempted to compile the HN threads on this. Can anybody find other significant ones? (It's interesting that there was one submission, with one comment, in 2012, and seemingly nothing for the next 7 years...)
Fujitsu CEO Deposition – Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39059302 - Jan 2024 (1 comment)
Fixing Horizon bugs would have been too costly, Post Office inquiry told - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39039712 - Jan 2024 (59 comments)
Fujitsu says it will pay compensation in UK Post Office scandal - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39023695 - Jan 2024 (26 comments)
How a software glitch at the UK Post Office ruined lives - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39010070 - Jan 2024 (326 comments)
Post Office Horizon scandal explained: Everything you need to know - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38983144 - Jan 2024 (8 comments)
A TV Show Forced Britain's Devastating Post Office Scandal into the Light - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38951802 - Jan 2024 (168 comments)
British Post Office Scandal - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38937705 - Jan 2024 (149 comments)
How the Post Office's Horizon system failed: a technical breakdown - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38931792 - Jan 2024 (4 comments)
Ex Post Office CEO hands back award after IT failures lead to false convictions - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38930011 - Jan 2024 (127 comments)
Post Office Horizon Enquiry – Fujitsu Report on Eposs PinICL Task Force (1998) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38926582 - Jan 2024 (1 comment)
Fujitsu bosses knew about Post Office Horizon IT flaws, says insider (2021) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38890468 - Jan 2024 (8 comments)
Mr Bates vs. the Post Office - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38869011 - Jan 2024 (3 comments)
What went wrong with Horizon: learning from the Post Office Trial - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38867712 - Jan 2024 (19 comments)
UK Post Office: 700 Horizon software scandal victims to receive £600k each - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37561428 - Sept 2023 (40 comments)
After 20 years, the Post Office scandal cover-up is happening in plain sight - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36778486 - July 2023 (1 comment)
The UK post office database scandal – “can't see the bug = user is a thief” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35837576 - May 2023 (2 comments)
Hundreds of lives ruined by faulty UK Post Office computer system - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35792896 - May 2023 (4 comments)
Ex UK Post Office staff tell inquiry of stress of IT scandal - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30394685 - Feb 2022 (2 comments)
Post Office scandal: Public inquiry to examine wrongful convictions - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30329668 - Feb 2022 (149 comments)
Post Office scandal: 'I want someone else to be charged and jailed like I was' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30329510 - Feb 2022 (2 comments)
Bad software sent postal workers to jail - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26973583 - April 2021 (1 comment)
Convicted Post Office workers have names cleared - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26924882 - April 2021 (187 comments)
UK court clears post office staff convicted due to ‘corrupt data’ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26913037 - April 2021 (284 comments)
UK legal system assumes that computers don't have bugs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25518936 - Dec 2020 (24 comments)
Post Office scandal: Postmasters celebrate victory against convictions - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24661321 - Oct 2020 (2 comments)
Bankruptcy, jail, ruined lives: inside the Post Office scandal - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24440476 - Sept 2020 (1 comment)
Postmasters were prosecuted using unreliable evidence - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23454606 - June 2020 (2 comments)
Faults in Post Office accounting system led to workers being convicted of theft - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21795219 - Dec 2019 (104 comments)
Post Office hires accountants to review sub-postmasters' computer claims - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4143107 - June 2012 (1 comment)
My wife and I watched Mr Bates vs the Post Office, recently, it was one of those watches where you spend a lot of time yelling "How the fuck?! What the fuck?!" at the screen because the malice and dishonesty was so deliberate, so persistently maintained, lest the "brand" be sullied.
I've been following this story for years, I know BBC's Panorama covered it in 2015, and was really surprised there wasn't more of an outcry in the UK about such blatant unfairness, guess technical cases like this are really helped by a TV drama with quality actors making it easily accessible to the general population, as soon as ITV aired the miniseries, the petition to have Vennall's CBE stripped jumped from 7K signatures to 700K+, and she said she would return it. (not the golden handshakes and "performance" bonuses though lol)
I just can't believe that no-one has been held criminally accountable (yet) for the sheer (to quote the judges in the civil case) affront to justice that this represented - whether it was Post Office Limited (POL) misleading (well, lying to) the courts, or Fujitsu employees lying in prosecutions, or POL deliberately withholding evidence in their role as a prosecutor (wild that this power to prosecute as transferred from Royal Mail to the spun off entity), and some of the cynically legalistic games they played (like asking the judge to recuse himself for being biased against them, to further delay the outcome of the civil suit).
And the crap they pulled with the Second Sight independent analysis that they commissioned themselves...
I was just reading the Clarke Advice(s), and god-damn, I can't see how any former POL executives can claim "we honestly believed all that stuff we said in court, honest", after their own goddamn independent legal advice told them "stop these prosecutions, like now, your expert witness is full of shit" The 2nd Clarke Advice is a great read too, basically "STOP TRYING TO HIDE EVIDENCE, JESUS CHRIST".
Oh, and some of the code that turned up from Horizon in an internal Fujitsus report is egregiously bad (how do I turn x into -x or -x into x? What's -(-x)? nevermind, I got this), from what I've read, the team that wrote Fujitsus was considered low skilled and mocked by other groups within Fujitsu as basically a group of clowns merely lacking a circus.
Clarke Advice 1: https://www.postofficescandal.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Clarke-advice-re-Jenkins.pdf
Clarke Advice 2: https://www.postofficescandal.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/20130802-Clarke-advice-re-shredding-1.pdf
Fujitsu report: https://www.postofficehorizoninquiry.org.uk/sites/default/files/2022-11/FUJ00080690%20Report%20on%20the%20EPOSS%20PinICL%20Task%20Force%2014052001.pdf
Discussion of recusal application by Court of Appeal: https://taxpolicy.org.uk/assets/recusal_judgment.pdf
Made into a limited series with some very fine actors.
A starry cast takes on one of the worst miscarriages of justice in British history. They’re the ideal way in to skulduggery so terrifying it could be a Black Mirror episode
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2024/jan/01/mr-bates-vs-the-post-office-review-toby-jones-is-perfect-in-a-devastating-tale-of-a-national-scandal
Is this Mr Bates vs the Post Office? Worth watching? I am just finishing up the latest season of The Crown, and was looking for some other british docudrama to watch (sometimes it's nice to watch a show without a mandated sex scene, car chase, etc)