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The Inside Story of the LA Traffic System Takeover

In 2006, a pair of LA traffic engineers hacked traffic lights to cause gridlock as part of a labor protest.

Recall that scene in The Italian Job when Michael Caine's character taps into the computer-controlled traffic system, unleashing a chaotic traffic jam that paralyzes the city of Turin? Well, other than it leading to a wonderful car chase, could this slice of fiction have been nearly half a century ahead of its hacking time?

In the debut episode of our three-part series titled "Phreaked Out," we took a retrospective look at one day in August of 2006, when two Los Angeles traffic engineers, Kartik Patel and Gabriel Murillo, were alleged to have remotely accessed the city's traffic control system and tampered with the light sequences at four main intersections of the city, as part of a labor union protest.

Although there was not much evidence of the attack, their disruptions were reported to have triggered a state of gridlock that lasted days. In 2009, Patel and Murillo copped to the crime, which stood as a reminder that the city of Los Angeles, like countless other metropolises, relies on a certain degree of computerized and internet-connected control systems that are vulnerable to exploitation.