Man tagged by speed camera buys police department’s expiring domain

If you’ve been tagged with a ticket going through what completely looks like a yellow light on that stupid printout they will eventually send you, you totally understand how frustrating red light camera and speed camera tickets can be.

So you might appreciate what Brian McCrary, a “computer network designer” from Tennessee, did after he was ticketed and fined $90 by Bluff City, Tennessee’s Police Department for speeding. McCrary, who lives in nearby Gray, Tennessee, used his superior internet skills to punk the Bluff City Police, buying their domain out from under them when he learned it was going to expire in late May. McCrary then replaced the existing Bluff City PD site with anti-speed camera links. Burn!

McCrary commented on the pwnage to USA Today:

“It’s kind of surprising that they’d just let it lapse like that,” says Brian McCrary of Gray, Tenn., who grabbed the domain name http://www.bluffcitypd.com after going to the site and noticing that it was to expire in late May.

He uses the website to post links about speed cameras — and people who don’t like them.

Bluff City Police say that the person who was in charge of the site’s renewal was out of the office, leading to its eventual expiration:

Bluff City Police Chief David Nelson tells the newspaper that he doesn’t know much about computers and left the site in the hands of a officer who has been out on medical leave.

That officer apparently didn’t see the e-mails from the hosting company warning that the domain name was expiring.

Nelson says the city is working on a new website with a different hosting company. He says the site’s expiration was kind of his fault:

“It just slipped my mind,” Nelson said, adding that he knows little about computers and the more technical aspects of running a website. “If you open up a website and let it go down, somebody can buy it – I did not know that.”