WITN04600202
WITN04600202
From: Holmes Jan R[/O=ICL/OU=UKSOUTH FEL01/CN=RECIPIENTS/CN=HOLMESJ]
Sent: Thur 21/08/2003 8: 2 AM (UTC)
To:
Ce: cee
Subject: Cleverleys - Horizon Equipment
Jim:
For clarification, I am not part of Fujitsu's legal department. My role in Post Office Account is restricted to assisting Post Office
with litigation support as and when it is required.
Thanks for the papers. I've done some preliminary work and, perhaps inevitably, the picture is not as clear as we might wish.
Under the circumstances it might be best to fully understand the position before I commit to writing a Witness Statement that you
may later call upon in Court.
Let me start with the easy stuff :
1. We will have no record of any transaction data from Cleverleys dated before November 2000 in the central audit archive since
this is automatically deleted 18 months from the date that it is written. So, if 30th November 2000 was the last active day for the
Counter that data would have been deleted on or about 30th May 2002.
2. Similarly, there will be no Help Desk logs since these are also deleted after 18 months.
Now the hard stuff :
1. Transactions exist on the Counter for no more than 34 days after which they are automatically deleted by a Riposte routine
(Riposte is the messaging software that passes information around the whole system and generates the transaction information).
In the case of this particular system transactions MAY still exist, provided that the counter has not been powered up at any time
since the last "active day".
2. If a Counter has been switched off for more than 35 consecutive days and then switched on Riposte will not start-up. This is a
security device to deter a Counter being stolen and subsequently being attached back onto the network in order to conduct
transactions illegally.
3. If Riposte were made to work after 35 days it would immediately check for transactions >34 days old and delete them.
4. Under no circumstances would we allow a 3rd party direct access to a counter. The filestore is encrypted and for a 3rd party to
make sense of the data we would have to release to them details of the encryption key. This we would not do.
How we can help :
1. If this is to be pursued then the work would have to be undertaken by our technical specialists in Bracknell, possibly with the
3rd party in attendance as an observer. Said 3rd party would require to be security cleared before being allowed access ?
2. We could make no guarantees about recovering any data since there are a number of activities that we have had no cause to
attempt before and therefore could not be certain of the outcome.
3. There would be a charge associated with this work.
Regards,
Jan Holmes
mail has not been intercepted and amended or that it is virus-free.