Tesla tried to use a loophole in regulation of public insurance by propping up its own private closed-loop system. The loophole may be closing, however, as its angry customers blow up like a SpaceX launch, proving Tesla once again is doing public harm that should have been predicted.
…accusations are based on the companies’ ongoing systemic failures and willful unfair claims settlement practices including, but not limited to, the following alleged violations:
Egregious delays in responding to policyholder claims in all steps of the claims handling process, causing financial harm, out-of-pocket expenses, potential third-party liability exposure, and distress to policyholders
Unreasonable denials and delays in fully paying valid claims to consumers
Failure to conduct thorough, fair, and objective investigations of claims, thus denying consumers the insurance benefits they expect
Failure to advise policyholders of their rights to have their claims denials reviewed by the Department – a major consumer protection in California to make sure insurers are held accountable by their regulator
Undermining consumer protections again while actively screwing consumers again? After decades of watching Tesla somehow avoid criminal charges, will they ever face a proper accounting?
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth still won’t explain the intelligence behind ongoing illegal US strikes on civilian boats in international waters.
There’s a simple reason, which should be most apparent to students of international history: it turns out that these aren’t drug interdiction operations. Venezuelan ships are being attacked to disrupt Iran’s financial lifeline—and Israel’s fingerprints are all over extra-judicial strike orders.
Hegseth Won’t Share Certain Secrets
The Onion understands Pete’s tragicomedy status as the least capable or qualified military leader in history
Venezuela has become a critical node in an Iran-Hezbollah money laundering operation. Cocaine moves through Venezuela, Hezbollah-connected facilitators handle the financial infrastructure, cash gets laundered through the Middle East, and proceeds fund Hezbollah operations against Israel.
Venezuelan Vice President Tareck El Aissami has been accused of helping Hezbollah members enter Venezuela and managing drug proceeds that flow back to Iran. Multiple investigations document how this network generates billions while helping Iran circumvent sanctions.
It’s running 1,500 miles from Miami, and it’s keeping Hezbollah operational after Israeli strikes degraded their capabilities.
Russia is Very Worried
Russia just responded to American attacks on these ships with warnings of “far-reaching consequences“. Putin isn’t defending drug traffickers, and he certainly isn’t standing up for civilian rights against targeted military strikes. Russia has $4 billion in Venezuelan arms sales, military advisers on the ground, and oil infrastructure as collateral for regime loans.
Venezuela is Moscow’s foothold in the Western Hemisphere. And Moscow is almost out of runway in their invasion of Ukraine. Some intelligence analysts predict Russia is approaching state failure next year, bringing foreign lifelines and networks into focus. That is essential context for Trump’s latest war mongering:
“They’re not coming in by sea any more, so now we’ll have to start looking about the land because they’ll be forced to go by land,” he added in an apparent threat to strike Venezuela.
Consider that Venezuela is Russia’s ally Iran’s cash cow, which is directly feeding the Ukraine war. These strikes on boats don’t just disrupt drugs—they attack the financial pipeline keeping Hezbollah funded and Iran relevant despite sanctions.
Israeli Intel Directs American Missiles
The strikes’ intensity and illegality—bypassing law enforcement channels, refusing oversight, offensive operations in international waters—suggest Israeli intelligence being weaponized through US military force.
Israel has tracked Hezbollah’s Latin American networks since the 1994 AMIA bombing in Buenos Aires. The Trump administration’s designation of cartels as “foreign terrorist organizations” creates a framework allowing secret intelligence about Hezbollah financing to abruptly become targeting data for loud and proud American military strikes.
Hegseth can’t explain the intelligence because it would invite scrutiny of Israeli operational involvement in directing American force on foreign states. Secretary Rubio admitted the boats “could have been interdicted” through normal law enforcement. But interdiction means trials, evidence, due process, scrutiny.
This is 1960s assassination modeling dressed in 1970s drug war rhetoric, designed to destroy 1980s Iranian power and financial capabilities without current congressional authorization or public debate—in pusuit of immediate Israeli security interests.
The Looming Domestic Shadow
The framework being tested in Venezuelan waters transfers directly home. If the executive can designate “narco-terrorists” for extrajudicial killing based on secret intelligence about Iranian networks, the same framework applies to any group labeled “terrorists” domestically.
Trump has already designated Tren de Aragua as terrorists, invoked the Alien Enemies Act against migrants, deployed troops to cities, and effectively legalized racial profiling. The scaffolding is being built. The legal theories are being tested where oversight is minimal.
Phoenix Program started in Vietnam and came home to COINTELPRO. The infrastructure of targeted killings based on secret criteria always expands beyond its stated parameters.
Senator Frank Church displays the CIA poison dart gun at committee hearing with vice chairman John Tower on September 17, 1975 (Source: U.S. Capital via Levin Center, photo by Henry Griffin)
That’s what the Church Committee documented 50 years ago when establishing why democratic oversight requires transparency.
GOP “War on Drugs” Still Signals Race War
These boats maybe were carrying cocaine.
The people killed maybe were traffickers.
But they’re being killed primarily because they’re part of a financial network helping Iran fund resistance to Israeli power. That means the US military has become the enforcement arm of an Israeli agenda.
Russia understands this.
Iran understands this.
The only people kept in the dark are Americans, told a yarn about drugs while their military establishes how the unitary executive can again kill anyone, anywhere, based on secret reasons only a Dick or Donald can know.
Richard Nixon 1971 presidential campaign button
That precedent won’t stay in international waters. It never does. We know this from the Nixon years. History rhymes even when it doesn’t repeat exactly.
AI-accelerated Nazca survey nearly doubles the number of known figurative geoglyphs and sheds light on their purpose
Specifically, as I reflected on what Wittgenstein taught the world, there’s a deeper philosophical point being completely missed in this rapid rise of robotic fieldwork.
Archaeology now has a genuine epistemological crisis when drone surveillance (accelerated observation) generates category confusion between reading symbols and measuring phenomena.
The Paradox of Geoglyphs
When people write that there are no written records found with the geoglyphs, I have to say the geoglyphs ARE the form of writing and recording.
We’re looking at intentional symbolic communication. Yet researchers somehow treat them as physical artifacts to be analyzed rather than texts to be read.
Imagine a pile of bones arranged to say SOS and a team of robotic archaeologists saying “we found all the bones and recorded all the designs but there were no written records to explain what SOS stands for on this mountain top.”
Genius. They might be the ones making the unfortunate next pile of bones.
A Wittgensteinian Cat
Wittgenstein would say we don’t need the cat to write “cat” for the word “cat” to have meaning. Similarly, we don’t need the Nazca people to provide a written explanation for their geoglyph of a cat to be meaningful records of a cat.
What scientists have been doing in the past is going to be creating problems when it is turned up to drone levels of discovery speed. These researchers present interpretations as hypotheses because that’s been proper scientific method: present findings and let others verify them through independent analysis.
But here’s the new visible tension: fleeting symbolic interpretation of a huge static sign isn’t the same kind of claim as a repeatable empirical measurement.
“This compound has X molecular structure” needs lab verification.
“This stop sign means stop” has verification demonstrated through observable use, which is what is reported in the first place. So scientists need to stop, otherwise they are overthinking the sign to stop.
The paradox: all the sign interpreters are transient (each generation comes and goes, their readings shift), but these hidden geoglyphs of unknown meaning sat for 2000 years basically saying the same thing with a reasonable level of certainty: cat.
“Everything flows” thus meets a giant stone message that doesn’t flow at all, and simply needs to be interpreted. The tension is treating an interpretation as the unstable thing requiring verification, when actually the sign is the stable thing and has been communicating continuously. The instability is in observation, not the observed.
Right, Heraclitus? Maybe we should put this into Plato’s cave and take a survey.
The uncertainty isn’t about what the drones found. It’s epistemological uncertainty about whether successfully interpreting symbolic communication counts as knowledge. The researchers read the text but won’t claim they’ve read it, as they only claim to have a “compelling hypothesis” about what the text might mean.
This is treating interpretation as shadow rather than direct perception of meaning.
What They Actually Found
The researchers demonstrated:
Relief-type geoglyphs depicting humans, domesticated animals, and decapitated heads appear along walking trails (average 43m distance)
The two types differ systematically in scale, motifs, and spatial associations
From this they conclude relief-type geoglyphs were for “sharing information about human activities with individuals or small groups” while line-type were for “community ceremonial purposes.”
That’s reading. That’s interpretation. That’s understanding meaning through use.
Source: “AI-accelerated Nazca survey nearly doubles the number of known figurative geoglyphs and sheds light on their purpose.” Masato Sakai, Akihisa Sakurai, Siyuan Lu, and Marcus Freitag. Classification of geoglyphs and walking routes found on the Nazca Pampa. Walking routes are divided into winding trails and formal roads, while geoglyphs are divided into geometric and figurative. The geometric geoglyphs can further be divided into linear and areal, whereas the figurative geoglyphs can be divided into those produced in the line-type style and those in the relief-type style. This classification follows the one proposed by Lambers (3). With the help of AI, we were able to detect many new relief-type figurative geoglyphs. The improved inventory clarifies that line-type figurative geoglyphs are associated with the network of geometric geoglyphs and major roads (blue), whereas the relief-type figurative geoglyphs are associated with informal walking trails (green).
The Problem With Data Integrity Hypotheses
When you frame symbolic interpretation as scientific hypothesis requiring verification, you create an odd situation:
The geoglyphs were made to communicate. The researchers have understood what they communicate. But scientific protocol apparently requires framing a successful reading as tentative hypothesis about the success of reading.
It’s like finding a book, reading it, understanding it, then saying “I hypothesize an object with markings may have been for communication, pending verification by other researchers. Please read my book about what is a book.”
AI Archaeology Issues
The “intelligent” system found 303 new geoglyphs in six months with “certainty” nearly doubling the known examples. This should have meant interpretation became MORE certain by revealing clear patterns.
Instead, the scientific framing makes it sound like more data only equals more uncertainty and doubts:
“We found way more examples and must share expanded reading as only hypothesis pending distributed verification.”
The geoglyphs ARE the writing. The researchers CAN read them. Scientific protocol just won’t let them say so without the hedging generated by higher certainty in discovery methods.
Maybe that’s appropriate caution. Or maybe it’s overly STEM-centric, applying wrong epistemological frameworks to human symbolic communication in order to avoid signaling execution (while literally reading execution symbols).
Either way, I hope the next expedition doesn’t end up as bones spelling SOS while debating the meaning of north and south.
It’s counterintuitive and genuinely problematic: AI bringing better discovery methods paradoxically undermines the integrity of stating what is being discovered.
But let me dig deeper. A woman who had to flee authoritarian demands for ideological conformity spent decades documenting Nazca geoglyphs. She directly read and interpreted these ancient communications. We are in the shadow of “discovery” by a woman who spent her life freely expressing her views on ancient symbols in the desert, erecting liberal interpretations.
Don’t underestimate reasons Maria Reiche fled Nazism to do ground breaking analysis and confidently push discoveries, far away from home
Reiche did fieldwork the old fashioned way, walking the desert, measuring geoglyphs by hand, making interpretations based on embodied experience. She could say “this is a monkey” or “this represents a calendar” with confidence born from humanist engagement. She sought truth in a remote region of the world far away from her home country, which by 1933 made such simple acts of confident reporting illegal.
Modern AI archaeology thus operates as an interesting regression with imposed distance overhead, using imposed pattern recognition algorithms and learned statistical analysis. This means epistemological weakness creeps in that makes its researchers less willing to claim interpretive certainty, all the while its adherents are more willing to claim superiority over human analysis.
Both Wittgenstein and Reiche trusted direct observation and pattern recognition. Wittgenstein said look at how language is actually used. Reiche said look at how desert glyphs are actually used. Both had confidence in stating what was observable.
Modern AI archaeology automates observation to gather MORE data faster but ends up with LESS confidence in stating what it shows, which means intentionally withholding any reading beyond tentative hypothesis.
I’ve been reading through all the court docket materials in the Benavides case and here’s the simple conclusion that should be headline news:
STILL NO CRIMINAL CHARGES FOR TESLA AUTOPILOT CRIMES
Tesla is so much worse than Ford ever was, like unimaginably worse. The automotive industry arguably is being set back more than 100 years by Tesla levels of misconduct. We are seeing the level of evil in a company that used to be hard to imagine, given how we were supposed to all know how evil Ford truly was during his entire miserable racist life.
American autoworkers and their children in 1941 protest Ford’s relationship with Hitler. Source: Wayne State
It’s worse today because Tesla reveals ignorance of history, such that the American regulatory system is failing to stop ongoing documented criminal conduct.
The warnings about Ford obviously didn’t work regarding car safety, but also they failed to stop a Twitter purchase by Musk being a sad repeat of history.
…the Internet age has given Henry Ford’s anti-Semitic literature a powerful new life. Today, his legacy of hate flourishes on the websites and forums of white nationalists, racists and others who hate Jews.
A major social media network was promptly transformed into a swastika decorated megaphone for the same white nationalist ideology that Henry Ford championed a century earlier. The parallel isn’t metaphorical—it’s documented in both men’s hateful actions and their corporate misconduct. Musk uses his companies as weapons to attack the public. While Ford eventually faced criminal charges, so far Musk has not, despite evidence of conduct far, far worse than anything Ford was accused of. We are now forced to watch a growing pile of evidence about the ruthless crimes by yet another unregulated industrialized… “baron”.
And you will never guess the “good” reason for Tesla being so bad…
CORPORATE CONDUCT COMPARISON
Factor
Ford Pinto (1970s)
Tesla Autopilot (2019-2025)
Design defect known internally
YES
YES
Cost-benefit analysis favoring profits over lives
YES
YES
Deaths resulted from defect
YES
YES
CRIMINAL CHARGES
YES – Indiana 1978
NOT YET
Obstructed investigation / Destroyed evidence
NO
YES – Deleted crash data
Attacked safety critics publicly
NO
YES – Labeled critics “killers” to incite violence against them
Lied to law enforcement during investigation
NO
YES – Falsely claimed no data existed while deleting it to prevent discovery
Ongoing sales during known danger
LIMITED – Forced into recall and market shame
EXPANDED – More sales of defective features, stock price up on vague speculation about future features
Regulatory capture / Agency deference
NO – NHTSA acted
YES – NHTSA captured
Every engineering student learns the Pinto case as the cautionary tale: the Grush-Saunby memo calculating that 180 deaths were acceptable because fixes cost more than settlements.
That memo became Exhibit A in proving Ford’s knowledge and intent. But Ford never destroyed that memo. They kept their records.
Tesla went far, far further—they created the evidence, received it, then deleted it. If the Pinto memo demonstrated consciousness of guilt, Tesla’s data deletion demonstrates consciousness of criminality.
Ford Pinto: Passive, negligence – knew about defect, chose profits, but did not obstruct justice
Tesla Autopilot: Active, obstruction – destroyed evidence, lied to investigators, attacked truth-tellers
Key difference: Tesla crossed from civil negligence into criminal obstruction
Evidence: Crash data auto-uploaded before police arrived, Tesla deleted it, told cops they never had it despite it being part of the designed “urgent upload” function that Tesla’s own system documentation describes
Expert testimony: Tesla claimed “auto-delete” – expert said “auto delete doesn’t exist”
Jury verdict: $200,000,000 punitive damages = finding of gross negligence or intentional misconduct
Legal significance: This is the smoking gun that did not exist in the Pinto case
Bottom line: Tesla’s conduct is demonstrably worse than Ford’s because obstruction of justice is worse than negligence
The trial record, as a pile of PDFs, therefore reveals a systematic pattern of criminal conduct that goes far, far beyond the Ford Pinto’s infamous case of negligence.
When Naibel Benavides Leon was killed on April 29, 2019, Tesla’s vehicle systems automatically uploaded crash data to company servers before police even arrived at the scene—while “the dust was still in the air,” as plaintiffs’ counsel described it. Yet when law enforcement investigators requested this data, Tesla told them it didn’t exist.
But it did exist.
Tesla had it. And then, approximately two months after the crash, the company deleted it from their servers to destroy evidence of their negligence, rising to criminal obstruction.
Years later, forensic data extraction specialist Dr. Jason Lewis recovered the files from the vehicle’s onboard computer, proving Tesla had possessed the data all along. When confronted with this evidence at trial, Tesla falsely claimed the data had been “auto-deleted.” The dog-ate-my-homework legal team of Tesla failed to make their lies stick. Dr. Lewis testified under oath:
Auto delete doesn’t really exist. It’s not anything in the world I’m familiar with.
The crash data included what Tesla calls a “collision snapshot”—a zip file containing eight camera feeds, CAN bus data showing computer-to-computer communications, event data recorder information, and real-time data values. Tesla’s own system was designed to capture this evidence, upload it to their servers, and send a confirmation code back to the vehicle confirming receipt. The vehicle logs showed Tesla received this data at 9:47 PM on April 29, 2019—17 minutes after the crash and before law enforcement arrived.
Six weeks later, Tesla deleted all of it.
Musk intentionally creates a violent death threat narrative, inciting observers to envision him gruesomely killing Americans
This wasn’t a technical glitch. Tesla’s system logs show the successful upload, the server acknowledgment, and the manual deletion command much later – well after law enforcement requested the data. This was planned obstruction of justice by Tesla, documented in sworn testimony, with physical evidence proving the lie.
But the data destruction was just one thread in a larger pattern. Federal investigators at NHTSA conducted a comprehensive analysis comparing Tesla’s Autopilot system to every peer manufacturer. Their conclusion was damning: Tesla was an “outlier” with uniquely high crash rates. They identified what they called a “critical safety gap” in Tesla’s driver monitoring system and determined it would “definitely lead to more deaths.”
Think about that sentence.
Maybe this 2021 warning will help:
Tesla deaths compared to all other EVs shows the obvious problem. It’s about accountability for lies, all about the Tesla CEO who regularly lies. Source: tesladeaths.com
Or this one, for market context:
2024 Sales of Tesla in California dropped so far they almost fell off the chart versus other brands seeing huge growth.
A federal safety agency concluded that Tesla’s system had a critical defect that would cause more fatalities. They documented it. They issued reports. And then… Tesla kept selling the same system. Sales didn’t just continue—they aggressively and falsely marketed driverless as if carefree.
In other words, NHTSA had no comprehensive Autopilot investigations until August 2021, months after Trump left office. Years of delayed action ignored mounting crash reports, including the first two fatalities in 2016 (Brown in May, Gao in January) that should have triggered immediate scrutiny.
Source: Twitter
NHTSA did do a Brown investigation in 2016, by lazily showing up weeks late to a sanitized crash scene. They declared early there was no “defect trend” and acted like they had nothing more to say. Today nearly 60 people have been killed by Tesla since Brown’s case was prematurely closed by weak-kneed regulators.
Tesladeaths.com is based on local reporting and has 59 confirmed Autopilot deaths. It started reporting long before the 2021 changes at NHTSA allowed it to begin proper analysis.
Tesla’s leadership also was waging ruthless war on anyone outside the government who dared to speak publicly about safety concerns. When journalists reported on Autopilot crashes, they were told they were “killing people” by undermining public confidence in autonomous vehicles. In 2018, critics were labeled “incredibly irresponsible” for writing articles that “would lead people to believe that autonomy is less safe because people might actually turn it off, and then die.”
Source: My presentation at MindTheSec 2021
This is witness intimidation masquerading as corporate communications. It’s an attempt to silence truth-tellers by accusing them of the very harms the company was causing.
A jury saw through these Tesla tactics to avoid accountability for crimes. On August 1, 2025 a verdict found Tesla 33% responsible for Naibel Benavides Leon’s death and awarded $200 million in punitive damages. In legal terms, punitive damages of this magnitude require a finding of gross negligence or intentional misconduct. The jury was telling us something:
This wasn’t just a mistake. This was intentional.
Compare Tesla’s active harm to customers and those exposed to their defective cars to the Ford Pinto case that supposedly taught American industry a lesson about corporate accountability. Ford made a cold calculation that paying wrongful death settlements was cheaper than fixing a known defect. It was morally reprehensible. Criminal charges were filed in Indiana in 1978—the first time a corporation faced homicide charges for a product defect.
But Ford didn’t go so far as to destroy evidence. They didn’t lie to police investigators. They didn’t attack safety advocates. They didn’t continue expanding sales after federal regulators identified a “critical safety gap that would definitely lead to more deaths.”
Tesla did all of those things.
Under 18 USC § 1519 (obstruction of justice), destroying records “with the intent to impede, obstruct, or influence” an investigation carries up to 20 years imprisonment.
Under 18 USC § 1343 (wire fraud), transmitting false statements via electronic communication in furtherance of a scheme to defraud also carries up to 20 years.
Combined with a pattern of such conduct, this satisfies the predicate acts required for prosecution under RICO (18 USC § 1961-1968).
Despite Tesla obstruction attempts the evidence exists. The statutes exist.
All the basic elements are there: an ongoing organization, a pattern of racketeering activity, and systematic conduct affecting interstate commerce.
Only the prosecution is missing.
The big “NOT YET” in the criminal charges row is perhaps the most damning indictment of all. Not of Tesla—we have known what they are doing for a decade already—but of the regulatory system that’s supposed to prevent exactly this kind of corporate criminality. The elements for federal prosecution are present and clearly documented:
Corpus delicti: Naibel Benavides Leon is dead
Mens rea: Punitive damages require jury finding that defendant’s conduct was ‘so reckless or wanting in care that it constituted a conscious disregard or indifference to the life, safety or rights of persons’ – which the $200M award demonstrates
Actus reus: Data deleted, lies told to investigators (sworn testimony)
Pattern: NHTSA found fleet-wide “outlier” status, multiple crashes
Ongoing harm: System remains on roads, sales continue
In legal terms, this is a complete case. The absence of prosecution is not an evidence problem. It’s a political problem.
NHTSA, during a brief period of freedom from corruption of Trump, found the defect. They documented the pattern. They determined it would cause more deaths. And then they let Tesla keep selling it. No criminal referrals to the Department of Justice. No emergency recall mandates. No seizure of vehicles until safety systems were upgraded. Just… deference to the company that had lied to investigators and destroyed evidence.
This is regulatory capture at its most lethal. Elon Musk celebrates his white nationalist political campaigns to turn the White House into an African tin-pot dictatorship like where he grew up.
When a federal safety agency identifies a “critical safety gap” that will “definitely lead to more deaths,” and the response is to allow continued sales, we’re not talking about bureaucratic inefficiency. We’re talking about systemic failure that enables ongoing harm.
The Pinto case became a landmark because it represented a line: corporations could not knowingly sell deadly products just because the cost-benefit analysis favored profits. Criminal charges were filed. Public outrage forced change. The case became required reading in every engineering ethics course.
But the lesson didn’t stick. Or perhaps worse, it stuck only long enough for corporations to learn how to avoid the consequences. Don’t write down the cost-benefit memo. Delete the crash data. Attack the critics. Capture the regulators. And most importantly—never stop selling the lies to corrupt a market.
The complete trial record in Benavides v. Tesla should be mandatory law degree reading because it reveals something more disturbing than corporate negligence. It reveals a playbook for how modern tech companies can commit the same crimes as their Gilded Age predecessors while facing fewer consequences. Ford’s industrial barons prioritized profits over worker safety, captured regulators, and attacked reformers. A century later, Silicon Valley’s tech barons are following the same script with deadlier technology.
Every day without criminal charges is another day this system remains on public roads. Every day longer is evidence that corporate accountability has regressed to early 1900s standards. Every day of regulatory inaction is proof that the warnings about Ford—both the company and the man—didn’t work.
We are witnessing in real-time what happens when a corporation obstructs justice, destroys evidence, lies to investigators, attacks truth-tellers, and continues to profit and inflate share price from known deadly defects—all without criminal consequences.
This is not one company’s failure. This is systemic failure to stop one unusual company, measured in preventable deaths.
It reveals something fundamental: the regulatory and legal systems designed after the Pinto case to prevent exactly this conduct have been successfully neutralized. Not through legal challenge, but through political capture candidates. Tesla didn’t beat the system—they bought it to delete public safety systems that could hold them accountable (not to mention delete all the evidence while doing so). And until justice officials are able to file obvious criminal charges, American democracy is being killed by years of insufficient urgency at the federal level, if it isn’t already dead.
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
