What a surprise
Musk lying?! Never!
Who would’ve thought
Here is the [article](http://archive.today/s1psp) with the paywall removed
/u/greentheonly very nice job, congrats!
The hacker they mention uses Twitter extensively it seems. If he's trying to remain anonymous, I can assume he's using a VPN to hide his location? Because Elon would 100% want every bit of data on him that they can get. On another note, I can't help but notice that Bezos' newspaper published this story. I'm going to assume that Trump approved the publication in advance to rattle Musk.
"Your honor, it was an honest mistake. BigBalls and HairyPussyLips had the data, but they didn't know. But JizzOnMyKeke remembered they had it and we turned it in immediately after."
Obstruction of Justice is a criminal offense, isn't it?
Oops! How'd that get in there?
And now it seems tesla are making it harder to access the data. At what point does the actions of tesla start to be proven as impeding law enforcement?
If you're poor.
Elon Musk implemented a culture of lies and deceits? Totally earned his requested $10k per car made payout.
eventually, the house of cards will collapse... Just takes longer in a world of insanity
Amusingly, that hacker was once one of the biggest Tesla shills on the face of the planet. A few years ago, he would have been one of those aggressive fanbois who constantly leap to Tesla’s defence. Maybe there’s hope for them all…
You are doing God's work, sir!
Well this is a new development
For real. You're a fucking hero. In this specific instance at least.
Every time I hear about that balls guy, it reminds me of the SAO Abridged series. who would willingly chose that name irl?
It does seem rather irrational. If, as reported, the hacker seriously does have a "fear of retribution", considering he might be expected to know a little bit about the Internet, you might imagine he would have avoided making a connection to an X username, as you say. Using a VPN to hide your location, for example, if the person who wants to find you is orders of magnitudes wealthier than the owners of any VPN company is likely to be, seems rather naïve. And was he posting from the same account, sans VPN, back when he was a Tesla fan, and before Musk bought Twitter? All rather odd!
[deleted]
Only if the person accused of it is a Democrat. If they're Republican, it's just a "process crime".
The article was rather long and I only skimmed it, but I thought I had read about this before. I seem to recall something about data being recovered from a chip in the car, and that Tesla said they didn't have the data, but then it was discovered that they did, and that all this contributed to the size of the damages awarded. Other than interviewing the purported extractor of the data from the chip, is there actually anything new here? Genuine question, and genuinely, forgive me if I have missed something. Thanks in advance!
Right-wing online discourse is led by a guy who named himself after cat shit.
That can't be good.
Never. Especially now that Elon has given up on the "America Party" as is fully on board for the Republicans in 2026 and 2028.
I love this for Musk
The courts digital forensic team found it after Tesla said they didn’t have it. Their court response, “We made a mistake”. Why the punitive damages were so high. Tesla lied the whole time.
Yes. That's what's new.
Straight out of idiocracy
Just that they found the guy who worked out how to get the data off the chip? Do we learn anything from that? I find it completely unsurprising that there are people who can find files stored on chips. I still am wondering whether I have missed something.
We get to hear from the guy who got the chip. He had a lot to say imo. I recommend reading the article.
Great article: >Inside a Starbucks near the Miami airport, the plaintiffs’ attorneys watched as greentheonly fired up his ThinkPad computer and plugged in a flash drive containing a forensic copy of the Autopilot unit’s contents. Within minutes, he found key data that was marked for deletion — along with confirmation that Tesla had received the collision snapshot within moments of the crash — proving the critical information should have actually been accessible all along. ... >Meanwhile, several pending lawsuits against Tesla related to fatal and serious crashes are expected to go to trial in the next few years. Schreiber — the plaintiffs’ attorney in the Miami case — is expecting to face the same defense team this fall in California for another Autopilot-related case involving the death of a 15-year-old boy. With fresh confidence gathered from his recent verdict, Schreiber said he has “every intention” of asking the next jury he faces for a verdict “north of a billion dollars.” >“The facts are a stubborn thing,” Schreiber said.
"Process Accident"
you do realize that when one does things for various court-related things, a bunch of paperwork needs to be signed and such, right? This is besides the fact that I had my big opsec oops early in 2017 and since then Tesla knows who I am am fully well ;)
> Amusingly, that hacker was once one of the biggest Tesla shills on the face of the planet you might need to reexamine your memory I suspect.
If not for pesky protective orders I might have been able to say somewhat more. But as is we have to wait until the actual transcripts are published to see what was allowed to be published by the courts.
Disciplined. I have too much anger to be that good.
The DOJ is busy with stupid xenophobic witch hunts
I have heard jail is an unpleasant place ;)
The insidious part of this story is that this isn't a one-off event. Tesla intentionally pre-programmed their vehicles to automatically gather vehicle and crash data including video, bundle it, send it to the Tesla mothership, and when it gets receipt confirmation, delete the data from the vehicle computer. After that, when they were being asked if this data existed and could be retrieved, they obfuscated because the data proved that Tesla was partially culpable in the death of an innocent third-party. Someone should go to prison for this.
It is more like a hacker commissioned by the victim‘s family got this data while drinking a coffee at Starbucks
I still can't believe the bullshit that came from their lawyers, saying that they thought the airbag deployment data package would exculpate Tesla. If they honestly believe that, then I got more training in product liability as part of a BS in engineering than these clowns did in law school.
Oh wow. Did not know that.
Why the protective order? Was it for Tesla "trade secrets"? Or just for keeping the court proceedings confidential?
Nope. I remember you well.
Worse. Tesla's lawyer told the police homicide investigator that they didn’t need a subpoena to obtain the vehicle data, just a letter, and he told the investigator what to request in the letter. When Tesla received the letter, Tesla responded with infotainment system data detailing Bluetooth call activity.
Well, yeah... you don't get hired as a lawyer for Tesla by demonstrating outstanding ethics.
Well, Tesla sclaimed a lot of trade secrets with the data but also so people could not talk ahead of the case I imagine. My understanding this is really common. Looks like a bunch of data is getting published and some already published, but before we fully know what was - I don't want to risk it. Also the nice thign about written transcripts is it's possible to point at spots with precise wording instead of using faulty human memory ;)
Ok. I'll file your case in that "human memory is fallible" folder ;)
Yeah, having written technical reports for an expert witness, I'm familiar with evidence and testimony getting sealed. I was just curious about whether Tesla was trying to claim trade secrets to avoid having to produce evidence.
I don't remember them claiming trade secrets as a reason for not producing evidence. Mostly it was "oh we are telling you all this super secret stuff that if it were to get out would hurt us so much because of competitors gettign to know how we really operate" and then they'd produce stuff that I tweeted about years ago and assumed was pretty much public knowledge ;)
And I’ll file yours in “cult members have selective memories.”
This statement seems troublesome: > Moments later, court records show, the data was just as automatically “unlinked” from the 2019 Tesla Model S at the scene, meaning the local copy was marked for deletion, a standard practice for Teslas in such incidents, according to court testimony. Car knows it was in a crash while Autopilot was running bad enough to send all recordings to Tesla, data was confirmed it was received, and then standard procedure is to erase the local copy? How is that not intentional evidence tampering? After a crash where the airbags are deployed, it seems unnecessary to delete data to make room since the car is immobilized and presumably getting sent to impound. The fact that Tesla wasn't compelled to produce the info off the physical car also says they're obfuscating it.
he got a little revenue from DOD buying his cyber trucks for target practice. just delays the inevitable of further decline. i'd consider TSLA to not even be a meme stock, now it's a joke stock.
That's my understanding too, I wonder if it is largely down to the technology literacy of the police and courts as to why they are getting away with it
The judge in the trial already ruled that Tesla didn't do it intentionally but did force them to compensate the plaintiffs for the cost of hiring the hacker who found the data on the chip.
An outcome of this incident that I would like to see is Tesla having to change their programming so it **does not** delete such data from the car and it **does** allow all data to be freely given to crash investigators without delay and access issues. Does anyone know if anything like this has been done?
Wow, I think Greentheonly has posted on this board before.
I am shocked. SHOCKED! Well not that shocked.
I discussed this with people and apparently Tesla cannot be forced to do it, they can handle this data however they like. And yes NHTSA investigators complained to me years ago that it's so annoying you cannot get plain text data out of the vehicles freely anymore. The only data you can get is the superminimal EDR stuff (edr.tesla.com) that has no video and very limited data wrt acceleration/speed and steering/pedals input pretty much.
I misread that as Princess Accident. Imagine if Princess Diana had been in a Model S on “Full” Self Drive
Some could say this is truly a plot twist
They ruled they couldn't prove it b/c they claimed they deleted it to preserve space on the vehicle. That's absolutely counterintuitive. Once the airbag is popped, the car is effectively done for. It should preserve the data for crash investigations or it shouldn't be recording at all. You don't get it both ways. If they're still doing that almost 8 years later, they're absolutely obstructing.
I didn't say whether it was or wasn't obstruction, just that the judge in this case already ruled on the matter. I'm sure the defense attorney will use this data storage practice in his other case against Tesla.
Is this a different crash from the 2019 Florida one?
Thanks for staying on top of this
On this board… in this thread…
I'm gonna get low marks for how observant I am.
Full points for self awareness, though.
Glad there is an awareness of this. Are there others like yourself who can also dig into the code? It's great that you're helping. At least NHTSA investigators are doing something, shame that Tesla is conducting themselves this way.
There's dutch forensics institute (or whatever the actual name is), I worked with them some in the past and they are very capable. I am sure there are other people and the car in use here is the simplest of them all, you can bring the autopilot from it to pretty much any cellphone repair place and they'd be able to get the data out.
Cool. Good to know!
Greentheonly has been putting out YouTube videos about Tesla software for years. He's not trying to hide.
This news will surely send the stock up 3%! Call!
No bias here lol.
He’s just a horrible human being that thinks no rules apply to him.
It's completely ridiculous that the NHTSA hasn't set up a regulatory environment that requires a third party data recorder with a known standard interface in with these systems. Being completely reliant on manufacturers for tooling and that they'll act in good faith in these situations when they have a clear conflict of interest is both unnecessary and ridiculous. IIRC a lot of crash reporting requirements for these vehicles are also essentially voluntary too and that predates the Trump administration. Regulators literally don't have the data they need to make policy or analyze the safety and failure mechanisms for these systems for no particularly good reason other than that the industry, and Tesla specifically, have lobbied heavily against it.
Even outside of the EDR - just see the circus of self reported adas-related crashes, sigh. But in the end at one of the security conferences where we discussed various hypothetical hacking of and tampering with voting machines, the lead guy told us pretty much verbatim that: - If you need more than one person to carry out the attack - that's now a conspiracy, don't bother wasting your time on such scenarios, it's now FBI's job. And it looked like it had merit for a time, but I guess conspiracies do happen as well and could even be covered up at least for some time.
What was that Fallout Boy song?? Sugar we are going..which direction?
Ooooh THAT data. Ya we had that. We thought you were talking about something else.
Yeah I feel like that's a super weak argument and more a matter of scale than anything. Coordinating 3-4 people to do something isn't that hard and is done all the time and there's just way too many counter examples. I mean organized crime clearly exists. Convicing a engineer who might have a few million in restricted shares to delete a file to avoid financial liability doesn't seem like a huge stretch to me personally. I mean you have that and what else maybe some legal scrub team member who's literally paid to do this in some Ed Norton in Fight Club style capacity and perhaps the technician assuming they knew what they were doing and weren't relying on some internal tooling that could be remotely flagged to say the unit was corrupted. Someone could always whistleblow or turn, but it's not like we're talking about keeping the Manhattan Project under wraps in a lot of these scenarios either.
Coordinating people initially is not hard, the hard part is to keep them silent afterwards is my understanding of it. > Someone could always whistleblow or turn, but it's not like we're talking about keeping the Manhattan Project under wraps in a lot of these scenarios either yes, but on the other hand because the stakes are this much lower it's this much easier for people to talk? Which makes the whole Tesla field tech testimony that was working the car computers at the service center when police brought the stuff in that much more strange
> yes, but on the other hand because the stakes are this much lower it's this much easier for people to talk? I don't know that there's much incentive to in all honesty, especially if there's some level of ideological and ethical agreement involved. Someone would need to feel pretty strongly that something very wrong happened in all this and I think it wouldn't be too hard to find someone who took Tesla's position that it's ultimately the driver's fault for failing to supervise the product. Regarding the tech I'd have to see their testimony and what was asked of them. At that point this was all organized in conjunction with Tesla's attorneys after the crash had happened and things had been unlinked. I'd want to hear what their process was (something I have to imagine would have been asked). Also I'd want to know how much communication they had from Tesla's lawyers and any superiors regarding this specific request. Did he just plug it into a computer, run some proprietary tooling which said it couldn't find the records and call it a day or actually attempt some kind of forensic data recovery? Etc. I don't know how much you personally can discuss but I could see someone who might just focus on wiping drives, installing software and flashing firmware not really diving in to the file system to the degree a data recovery specialist would. If they were using proprietary tooling from Tesla for the whole operation it would have almost certainly phoned home to the mothership and if they were really doing record purges all bets are off about what it would report in spite of whatever data might have existed locally.
> Did he just plug it into a computer, run some proprietary tooling which said it couldn't find the records and call it a day or actually attempt some kind of forensic data recovery? Most of that is in the testimony, but I am not sure if it's public yet and what parts of it would be public if not. I tied to google around and cannot find anything definitive even though at least some of the right testimony is out there because I see some facts from it referenced in the articles. They claimed they never plugged and powered on the autopilot computer at all which was not true because inside the autopilot computer we can see it was powered and some data (automatically) deleted. I see some of it is referenced in Item #3 in https://electrek.co/2025/08/04/tesla-withheld-data-lied-misdirected-police-plaintiffs-avoid-blame-autopilot-crash/ but I have trouble finding where that was scraped from, in the testimony he describes his job role and prior experience with this sort of data extraction (none) and the amount of training he got to carry out the task
Bingo!
Thanks for the link. I think the documents are up on plainsite here: https://www.plainsite.org/dockets/4jjpwqq1c/florida-southern-district-court/neima-benavides-personal-representative-of-the-estate-of-naibel-benavides-leon-deceased-v-tes/ I guess I've got something to read through this weekend now lol. Sounds like the tech did very little in terms of trying to actually recovering the data from that Electrek article and was relying on whatever features and tooling the Model S has available to view data on the system. I don't how good the service mode features are on the S, but that doesn't sound remotely thorough to me. I guess it could be incompetence but given the numerous other examples of bad faith demonstrated in the case I'd lean towards the whole thing being performative with there never being any real intention to recover any usable data. I honestly don't know how the court didn't end up charging several people with perjury in all this in all honesty. Doing that might get the tech to flip real quickly. Great work on all this too, they certainly found the perfect person to pull on that one loose thread until Tesla's entire defense unraveled.
Sounds like every mentally present person on the globe should loudly indicate to their governments that locking away such data when it exiats should be grounds for import bans.
Just another vindication of my "never ever buy tesla cars" stance from the day they patched the ABS module over the air when the model 3 had braking issues.
aha, thanks! Lots of interesting reding esp. in that document with attachments. Immediately see some lies in print https://www.plainsite.org/dockets/download.html?id=356117113&a=6&z=eddc7279 (document 6) page 25 - the sdcard and ap data is claimed to be encrypted and therefore hard to access when it's not.
So basically tesla will upload itself the recording after a FSD crash and delete the local copy. So you really need a 3rd party camera that Tesla cant remotely delete.
I thought it was the other way around?
Says Tesla_406.
Shocking
How do you know Musk is lying? His lips are moving.
I worry about things like Defcon's car hacking village contests closing zero days and helping to lock the cars down even further. Has that happened? Have the cars been getting harder to reveal their secrets?
Yes. But not only that, there are also bug bounties by manufactures, pwn2own and so on. All that leads to better security of course which is great for normal people for the most part. But it also locks the product more getting in the way of repairs and such. This is why robust right to repair laws are important I guess.
Tesla lies
So you’re saying Tesla lied? (Again)
I’m guessing all roads lead to fElon Musk when it’s this spurious? Or will some asshat help pump the stock price and deflect with a new piece of bling?
Love it
To the moon! #bullish
Bullshit! We know better.
And nothing happens.
Falsifying and deleting court evidence should really carry jail time and/or sanctions.
Musk?
save poor opressed muskie lmao
Elon Musk deserves going to jail hundreds of times.
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