Registration of IT professionals and the role IT ethics should play in protecting the public were centre stage during a recent event where a Post Office Horizon Scandal victim shared their harrowing story.
A recent event, held in the BCS London office and hosted by the BCS ICT Ethics specialist group, saw the former postmaster Lee Castleton share his harrowing story with an enthralled audience. The event, attended by over 100 virtual and in-person guests, served as a salutary and emphatic reminder of how truly damaging software failures can be.
Professor Neil Gordon MBCS, Chair of the BCS ICT Ethics Group, said: ‘The evening was memorable and important. It showed that ethics is a real challenge for the computing industry, and how ethical failings in organisations have real consequences for people. It shows how brave Lee and Lisa Castleton are, and the tenacity of investigators such as Karl Flinders who investigated in spite of pressure to stop.’
Lee Castleton described his pre-Post Office court case life as ‘beautiful’. He was, however, eventually declared bankrupt after losing a legal battle to clear his name, which was tarnished by the Post Office falsely accusing him of stealing £25,000.
‘I lost everything, every single penny’, Lee Castleton recalled, on occasions holding back tears, recounting how the Post Office’s actions damaged him and his family. ‘It completely changed our lives. It was the most crushing thing I can think of. Not because of the money — it’s about your reputation.’
‘It’s incredibly important to hear about the human impact and misery caused by software failures’, said BCS President, Alastair Revell FBCS. ‘I believe by listening we will be galvanised into action.’
Professional registration
Alastair stated that one key action was the need for IT professionals who work on critical systems to be registered professionally — in the same way that surgeons, accountants and architects are required to be.
‘Chartered Professional registration is close to my heart’, Alastair stated. ‘It is really important that we actually start seeing widespread and large scale adoption of chartered and professional registrations. The Post Office Scandal shows that it is time for computing to start taking this seriously. We can’t be a wild west profession anymore.’
Karl Flinders, the Computer Weekly journalist renowned for tirelessly investigating and exposing the Post Office Scandal, sat with Lee Castleton and discussed the ex-post master’s terrible experiences.
‘Alan Bates was the first to contact us in 2000’, Karl said. ‘But the reason we took the story up was that more than one person contacted us. Lee Castleton was the second person. Lee triggered our investigation.’
Discussing the scale of the Post Office Horizon IT scandal, Alastair stated: ‘It’s important to stress that, while there is an IT system at the heart of the scandal, it’s not all just about IT. There were a lot of other professions who were implicated. There were a lot of systemic failures that led to what we call the Post Office IT Scandal.’
Presumption in law
The event also spotlighted Dr Sam De Silva, Chair of the BCS Law Specialist Group. As public outrage about the Post Office began to ferment, Dr Se Silva campaigned to change the legal presumption that computer evidence is always right. In early 2024, Dr De Silva said: ‘If the Post Office had been required to prove that its computer system was operating reliably, most of the individual cases against the Post office staff may have had a different outcome.'
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Ahead of the 2023 Bletchley AI Safety Summit, the BCS ICT Ethics specialist group surveyed IT professionals about ethics in IT. The research found that around one in five professionals questioned said they had faced ethical challenges in the previous five years. The reported data also showed that 82% of those polled thought that UK organisations should be required to publish ethical policies on their use of AI and other high-stakes technologies.
The survey formed the basis of the report Living with AI and emerging technologies: meeting ethical challenges through professional standards. Among many recommendations focused on keeping the public safe, the report stated, ‘AI and other high-stakes technology practitioners [should] meet shared standards of accountability, ethics and competence, as licenced professionals.’
In October 2024, Karl Flinders received the BCS Society Medal for his journalistic work exposing Fujitsu and the Post Office as knowing participants in the UK’s largest miscarriage of justice. The BCS Society Medal is awarded annually to individuals who contribute to using technology for societal good.
