The Inscrutable Systems of the British Post Office

A century ago Nietzsche said that after we killed God we would search for him everywhere, tearing apart every institution and everything we love and believe in. Finally, we found computer technology. We now bow before it and throw onto the sacrificial pyre our time, our dignity and our fellow humans. Computers cannot be wrong. Even if good men and women must die to maintain that belief.

This is part one of a two part series on "inscrutable systems"

What happened at the British Post Office with the Fujitsu Horizon scandal is terrible. But it is small taste of much, much worse things to come unless we mend our relation to digital technology.

Attitudes that "computers are to be considered correct by default" are not merely wrong, they are an affront to computer science as well as to common sense and human dignity.

In this episode we go into the background of this scandal, its technical, legal and cultural aspects. We examine where British justice gets things wrong, and what it gets right.

We look at technical issues of syncing distributed databases, and talk about forensic issues, reliable logs, back doors, software engineering and standards of evidence. We also look at psychological notions of user error bias, spirals of silence, identification and victim blaming.

https://cybershow.uk/episodes.php?id=23

Part two is scheduled for next week.