Remember the time when a typo by an Amazon engineer almost took down the whole AWS( Amazon Web Service). Something like that happened again, not the down of Internet but the typo error affecting a man’s life. Mr. Nigel Lang is a UK resident and he got arrested at his home in 2011. According to the police, he was a suspect for holding child pornographic content on his devices. This is when his nightmare began.He was actually innocent but he got arrested due to a typo in an IP address.
This means he was never involved in the crime but arrested and Lang went through hell due to a mistake of a police officer who didn’t even bother to double check the information he has about IP address and the address they are raiding.
Further, the police went on to search his devices for the indecent images, but since the content they are searching for never existed in the first place, they found nothing but embarrassment. And it was too late for Lang who has to quit his job immediately as a counsellor for troubled teenagers.
According to the BuzzFeed “Lang was bailed but under very strict and devastating conditions. The social services had visited his partner while he was being interrogated and inerviewd to conduct a “safeguarding assessment,” and they even decided that he could not visit his son there, live at the family home, or have any unsupervised contact with his son anywhere.”
Lang has requested to file the complaint only to be denied, but a letter sent to him by the police revealed that the arrest order came from Hertfordshire Constabulary, a police force which is over 100 miles away from where he lives.
Now after they came to know the truth of their mistake, Hertfordshire apologised for what happened Lang is still waiting for an apology from the officers who raided his house and arrested him in front of his son. The slight bit of a good news is that Lang received £60,000 ($75,000) in damages and is now gearing up to start a new life.