News

EFF to Appeal Court Order Halting Subway Hacker Talk

The Electronic Frontier Foundation plans to appeal a court order halting a Defcon talk about security problems with Boston-area transit smartcards

By Robert McMillan, IDG News Service (San Francisco Bureau)

August 11, 2008 — CSO —

The Electronic Frontier Foundation plans to appeal a U.S. District Court order imposing a temporary injunction on a Defcon presentation that would have detailed flaws in the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority electronic ticketing system.

"The court ultimately came to a very, very wrong conclusion," EFF senior staff attorney Kurt Opsahl said during an EFF discussion at Defcon a few hours after Judge Douglas Woodlock of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts issued a court order halting the planned talk about the transit-system security flaws.

The MBTA filed a lawsuit Friday seeking to stop three Massachusetts Institute of Technology students from giving the talk. The lawsuit also names MIT as a defendant. The Boston-area transportation authority argued that the presentation would cause "significant damage to the MBTA's transit system," according to an online posting of the lawsuit.

MIT students Zack Anderson, Russell "RJ" Ryan and Alessandro Chiesa had been scheduled to talk about "The Anatomy of a Subway Hack: Breaking Crypto RFIDs & Magstripes of Ticketing Systems" at the Defcon conference Sunday. They received an "A" grade on the project in an MIT class, Opsahl said.

"The first notice that the MBTA provided that they were going to the court was after they had gone to the court," Opsahl said at the EFF session. The judge cited a computer intrusion statute in issuing the order, he said.

"The statute on its face appears to be discussing sending code programs or similar type of information to a computer and does not appear to contemplate somebody who is giving a talk to humans," Opsahl said. "Nevertheless, the court disagreed with that interpretation."

The court order seems to say that a magnetic strip on a paper card or a smartcard counts as a computer and the EFF disagrees with that interpretation, he said.

The temporary restraining order "reflects the court's view that they believe that the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority was likely to succeed on the merits -- we think that's actually not the case," Opsahl said.

Some of the material in the students' talk regarding security problems with the MBTA's electronic ticketing system had been previously reported in the Boston Globe and Boston Herald newspapers, Opsahl said.

"Courts have found that the First Amendment covers these things," Opsahl said. "We believe that this is a protected speech activity. When you discuss security issues, if you are telling the truth, that is something that should be protected."

Though the students are barred by court order from providing information that would have helped others circumvent the talk, their presentation slides had already been included in a conference CD given to Defcon attendees. The MBTA itself put some details in the public record, by filing a confidential assessment of its security system with the court.