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August 15, 2008, 11:37 AM ET
MIT Students Are Ordered to Reveal How They Hacked the Boston Subway
First, they were told to be quiet. Now, they are being ordered to squeal. Zack Anderson, Alessandro Chiesa, and R.J. Ryan, three MIT students, were ordered yesterday by a U.S. District Court judge to turn over a paper they wrote for a class in which they described how to hack the Boston subway system. Last week another judge stopped the students from presenting their results at Defcon 16, a hacker’s convention in Las Vegas, the Boston Globe reports.
The trio exploited some vulnerabilities in the computer-chip and magnetic-strip systems used to pay fares on the Boston subway and showed how to get a free ride, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is providing a lawyer for the students. The students and the EFF say the work was done to show the flaws in the system so they could be fixed before a malicious attacker used them. (The paper got an “A” in an MIT computer-science class, the EFF says.) But the Boston transit system sued to stop the students from talking about the research at Defcon, citing a federal law against computer crime. Their argument was that simply talking about the code publicly was illegal transmission of a computer program intended to do harm, and a judge issued a restraining order.
The students, and their EFF lawyer, argue that the trio’s First Amendment rights are being violated and that this is a clear case of prior restraint. They also note that most of the information about the security flaw is already publicly available.
Yesterday a judge ordered the students to turn over the paper and related documents so he could determine whether the students had really broken a law or whether their rights to free speech were being infringed upon. The court set a hearing on the matter for next Tuesday. —Josh Fischman
Categories: Legal-Troubles
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