4 Clear Crimes We Had to Allow Because No One Made Them Illegal

4 Stealing an Airplane

In 1926, William McBoyle was running an airport in Illinois. He sent an employee, A.J. Lacey, to a nearby airplane manufacturer, which was simply named “United States Aircraft Corporation” because these were simpler times. The kid’s mission: to sneak aboard one of their planes and fly it out of there, landing it at McBoyle’s airport. He managed this fairly easily. 

McBoyle rubbed off the stolen plane’s serial number and doodled on his own. He made some money operating this aircraft over the next few months, sending it all over the country. Then, when he got word that the law was investigating him, he sent Lacey to fly a similar airplane to where the stolen plane was now stationed (Oklahoma) to pull a switcheroo and cover up the their tracks. Lacey didn’t make it to Oklahoma. He crashed the plane he was flying, and McBoyle soon found himself arrested.

He faced federal charges, thanks to the interstate nature of his crime. The authorities booked him for knowingly transporting a stolen motor vehicle. But he appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, arguing that an airplane wasn’t a vehicle. The court sided with him. While the law’s definition of “vehicle” arguably did apply to planes (it included any “self-propelled vehicle not designed for running on rails”), they bought his argument that most people would consider “vehicle” to mean only stuff that travels over land.

So, next time you get arrested for stealing an airplane, just cite McBoyle v. United States. And if anyone says later laws render that ruling irrelevant, flee from them, using your airplane. 

3 Hacking

The very first cyberattack came before the internet — and before digital communications, period. It happened in 1834, and the system being attacked was a telegraph network. Not a telegraph wire: It was a telegraph system that was transmitted by semaphore from one tower to another. Picture those beacons in Lord of the Rings sending a message between mountaintops, but instead of a ping, semaphore could send coded text. 

In France, this telegraph network was the fastest way to send info from Paris to Bordeaux. And back then, just as now, the people who wanted info fastest were investors. If you knew the bond market in Paris was up today, before anyone else did, you could buy a bunch of bonds in Bordeaux and profit once the news arrived and prices rose. 

Two brothers named François and Joseph Blanc infiltrated the telegraph network to nab that news before anyone else. They got a confederate working in a telegraph office, and this guy inserted a character in the morning’s broadcast to indicate which way the market was going. Then this guy would insert another character that basically meant “backspace,” so when the Bordeaux office decoded it, they omitted the inserted character. But the Blanc bros were able to see the whole message, including the added character, by looking at the nearest semaphore tower through binoculars. 

After two years of trading using this info, the Blancs got caught and were arrested. But the courts weren’t able to make any charges stick. The brothers weren’t inside trading exactly, since they were using information that was publicly available in Paris but just hadn’t reached the public in Bordeaux. What they were really guilty of was a man-in-the-middle attack on a data network — an idea that didn’t even exist previously. 

2 Modern Hacking

Okay, so no one had hacking laws back in 1834. But if we fast-forward to the year 2000 — a time when the internet very much existed, a world that had just finished dealing with the Y2K bug — surely everyone had hacking laws in place by then, right?

If you answered “right,” let’s refer you to the ILOVEYOU virus, which infected 10 million computers in May of that year. People received email messages with the subject “ILOVEYOU” and a request to open an attachment. The attachment ran a script that stole your login details and also sent itself to everyone in your contacts list. The culprit turned out to be Onel de Guzman, a computer science student in the Philippines, but the Philippines had no laws against writing malware. The virus caused an estimated $10 billion in damage worldwide, and we know who was responsible, but the guy went free.

In the years immediately following ILOVEYOU, people became more savvy about viruses, and far fewer people would open a sketchy attachment like that. But in the decades after that, the “never open attachments” advice has been largely forgotten, and we bet the youngest generation would gladly open such a message — if it ever reached them. It probably wouldn’t reach them, though, since email clients are much better at killing such messages nowadays.

Before making the virus, by the way, de Guzman had written about the idea in a formal college thesis. The goal, he claimed, was for a poor country like the Philippines to access the internet connections of richer countries, where access is cheaper. “This is illegal,” wrote the professor, rejecting the proposal. Just like every teacher who ever criticized you, the professor was wrong. 

1 Serving Dick

In May 2012, in a Tokyo bar named Asagaya Loft, 66 people gathered for an unusual meal. Most of them were eating crocodile meat, but these diners were really there to witness the more exotic meal eaten by five guests of honor. These five were eating slices of the amputated penis of their host, Mao Sugiyama. Each five paid ¥20,000, or about $300 in today’s money. The penis was sauteed with mushrooms and parsley. 

Sugiyama hadn’t removed his penis for any medical reason. He had removed it for this specific occasion. He’d posted pictures of the organ online (promising that it was disease-free) and then solicited bids to dine on the rare dish. 

Police missed the initial posting but responded to accounts of the banquet. Surely, the diners had committed a crime against Sugiyama. Or Sugiyama had committed a crime against the diners. Or they’d together committed a crime against us all. But no charge applied to what had happened. 

This hadn’t been an assault. Tokyo had no law against cannibalism. They tried booking Sugiyama for indecent exposure, but that doesn’t cover when the people seeing your penis are consenting customers. And though Japan has laws and some kinds of sex work, there’s no law against paying to look at a penis, and there’s certainly no law against paying to eat one. 

Police tried to charge Sugiyama, and he essentially replied, “You can go eat a dick.” 

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