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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: 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.