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Forbes reports that a security researcher in California registered the vanity plate "NULL," partly for fun and partly in the hope that this spoofed the system into returning errors whenever his plate was seen.
Instead he received more than $12,000 in fines, as his plate became a dumping ground for erroneous data records.
Every single speeding ticket for which no valid license plate could be found was assigned to his car. The Los Angeles police department eventually scrapped the tickets but advised the man to change his plates, or the same problem would continue to occur. In response, the man has apparently said: "No, I didn't do anything wrong," insisting to his Def Con audience that, whatever happens, "I won't pay those tickets."
Also covered in the Guardian.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday August 16 2019, @05:20PM (3 children)
This is kind of in-line with the DMCA: if you're trying to break something, that makes the activity illegal. Not that I love the DMCA or anything, but that's how it works. No matter how lame and easily broken the system is...
So, now that we all know, the easy thing for the state(s) to do is register the NULL plate themselves, so cranksters like this can't get it.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2, Disagree) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Friday August 16 2019, @05:59PM (2 children)
It's not just the DMCA. Doing something that subverts justice has been the crime of obstruction of justice since LONG before the DMCA. And I fail to see how intentionally trying to do something that would get one out of earned violations is not a subversion of justice.
My understanding of DMCA is that there are specific exemptions [the-parallax.com] if one's purpose is lawful, although I'm willing to be corrected about that. Such exemptions don't have to be there, although I know the DMCA is used as the equivalent of a SLAPP club sometimes also. But if I go out and announce, "Hey, I just broke the encryption of X for the Lulz and so I could help the haxxors everywhere!" then I wouldn't expect too much sympathy as a safe harbor there. So maybe it is similar.
I'm not positive that in obstruction that knowledge of intent even matters, but announcing that one has intent makes that point moot anyway.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday August 17 2019, @02:40AM
I agree with you that the DMCA has nothing to do with this, and obstruction has been around for a long time. But, I think your definition of "obstruction" is far too broad. If I know police officers tend to patrol for speeders on 3 out of 4 roads I could take home, and I take the 1 out of 4 home that I think is likely NOT to have a cop and I speed, then I am guilty of the crime of speeding. I am NOT guilty of "obstruction of justice" by exploiting a potential hole in the enforcement system. Similarly, if the state offers a number of custom license plate designs, and the one of the American flag on it seems more patriotic to me, and I think cops are less likely to pull over someone who seems patriotic (and even if that is TRUE), requesting such a license plate to potentially get out of a ticket is NOT "obstruction of justice."
Nor, then, is choosing one license plate set of letters out of tens of thousands or whatever that I think may be less likely to incur tickets for whatever reason, whether it's "NULL" or "LOVECOPS" or whatever.
Obstruction is a serious crime. If this guy hacked into a police database and stole records of his violations or himself changed the code that processed them, obviously he may be guilty. But he did not. If he custom-designed a license plate in an illegal fashion (i.e., manufactured his own) that had some sort of weird property that wouldn't let police scan it properly, then yes, I suppose he might be "obstructing justice" (though even that's a pretty broad reading of the term -- he'd more likely be charged with whatever crime it is to falsify plates or whatever).
But he did none of this. He requested a plate and was granted a plate by the state. It was an official license plate. Just because he chose an option that he believes is less likely to be enforced is NOT in itself "obstruction of justice." Is it moral/ethical for him to do this? I would say "no" unless he was trying to prove a point and then report said element to authorities. But he was NOT "obstructing" justice according to any definition I'm familiar with. (Caveat: IANAL.) Of course, if his license plate got him out of any tickets for violations, once the flaw was recognized, he would (and should) be liable for any unpaid fines, etc.
If anything, what I think you're getting at is a type of evasion [wikipedia.org] of the law. For various topics in the law (taxes, contracts, etc. varying by municipality), evasion can be criminalized. That is -- situations where you apparently adhere to the law, but deliberately do something that also tries to get you out of compliance. I am not aware of any evasion laws that would apply to routine traffic violations. Otherwise, states could charge people with police radar detectors with "obstruction of justice" when they find them. But they can't. Instead, states had to pass separate statutes to criminalize possession and/or use of them.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday August 17 2019, @03:01AM
Also, after reading both articles linked in the summary, I see no clear intent to get out of tickets. Instead, it's a story about someone who is supposedly a "security researcher" who wanted to "test" the system and see what happened. According to TFA, he didn't know if he'd be "invisible" with this license plate, or whether the system would pop up errors, or what would happen.
Now, maybe he's lying, and he did in fact hope to avoid fines. And he only reported about it because it turned out differently. So maybe he's lying about his intent. But at no point in TFA do I see him saying, "I did this because I wanted to get out of tickets." He's a guy who is interested in security and wanted to see what would happen. So I don't even think he satisfies your condition of admitting wrongdoing -- he just admits that he thought it was possible the system would treat his plate in a non-standard way. Perhaps it would throw up errors during processing, which would cause police to fix the system. Perhaps the errors would bring more trouble to him (which they did). He didn't know.
IF we have proof that he DID know the database was exploitable in a way that could allow him to avoid paying fines with his NULL plate, maybe we could find him guilty of something else. But he didn't know that, and he didn't even admit that's what he was trying to do.