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Comment by jxcole | Hacker News Reader

I find this one the most worrying:

"In 2008, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) obtained a temporary restraining order to prevent a talk at DEFCON by three MIT students who had uncovered physical and logical security holes in MBTA infrastructure."

I mean, the IOS guy worked for IOS, so he was divulging information that Cisco paid him to obtain. HBGary paid Aaron Barr to research anonymous, so they have a case for him doing the same thing. However, what kind of case could MBTA possibly have against some kids who found problems with their infrastructure? I fail how to see how such an injunction was anything but unconstitutional.

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However, what kind of case could MBTA possibly have against some kids who found problems with their infrastructure?

The flaws they found allowed them to obtain, according to their talk's description, "free subway rides for life", which would deprive MBTA of an unknown amount of revenue which was rightfully theirs. They wouldn't disclose the vulnerability when MBTA approached them, although they changed the description of the talk to no longer imply they would explain how to get free rides.

You can read the MBTA complaint yourself: http://www.universalhub.com/images/2008/mbtamit.pdf

Really? I thumbed through the complaint (thanks for the link), but I'm still really disturbed by this. It's presumably illegal to help yourself to free subway rides. The law protects the MBTA. How is it a crime to talk about how it could be done? The talk wouldn't deprive the MBTA of any revenue.. the application of information in the talk by third parties committing illegal acts would. It's akin to giving a talk on lock-picking, no?

Here is the presentation: http://tech.mit.edu/V128/N30/subway/Defcon_Presentation.pdf

I don't think it had to do with the constitutionality of the issue for the MIT hackers, but more the practical issues that arise from them sharing with the public security loopholes before they were fixed.

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