Massachusetts tries to silence whistleblowing hackers

THE MASSACHUSETTS Bay Transportation Authority has won an injunction against three MIT hackers who were about to tell a security conference about holes in the security of its automated fare system.

A federal judge ordered three college students to cancel a Sunday presentation at Defcon conference in Las Vegas. The complaint claimed students offered to show others how to use the hacks before giving the transit system a chance to fix the flaws.

The Electronics Frontier Foundation, which is representing MIT students Zack Anderson, RJ Ryan and Alessandro Chiesa, plans to fight the order.

The presentation was distributed to attendees on CDs on Thursday, before the conference officially began and the transit system filed suit and was shoved onto the web.

It seems that the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority had good reason to want to silence the three.

Electronic copies of the 87-slide presentation circulating on the world wide wibble mock the Authority's transit system's physical security. The conference was supposed to see photographs of unlocked doors, turnstile control boxes and exposed computer monitors at subway stations.

But what miffed the MBTA was that the presentation would teach attendees how to generate fare cards, reverse engineer magnetic stripes on cards and hack radio frequency identification (RFID) cards.

One slide says: "And this is very illegal! So the following material is for educational use only." µ

L'Inq
AP