ACM TechNews

Judge Refuses to Lift Gag Order on MIT Students in Boston Subway-Hack Case

Computerworld (08/14/08) Vijayan, Jaikumar

A trio of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) students discovered several security vulnerabilities in the electronic ticketing system used by Boston's mass transit authority, but they are not allowed to publicly discuss these vulnerabilities because of a temporary restraining order that U.S. District Judge George O'Toole refused to lift at the latest hearing on Aug. 14. The gag order will remain in effect until at least Aug. 19, when O'Toole is scheduled to hold another hearing on the case. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) says O'Toole asked the students to submit a copy of a class paper in which they detailed the vulnerabilities, along with copies of the programming code that they included in a planned presentation to demonstrate how the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority's (MBTA's) e-ticketing system could be hacked. The gag order was granted when the MBTA filed suit to prevent the disclosure of the vulnerabilities, arguing that it was forced to seek court intercession because neither MIT nor the students had provided it with sufficient information to evaluate the vulnerabilities that were about to be publicly revealed at the Defcon hacker convention. The EFF filed a motion in court requesting that O'Toole lift the order, contending that it constitutes a violation of the students' First Amendment rights as well as a prior restraint on free speech. The decision to issue the restraining order was sharply criticized by Carnegie Mellon University professor David Farber, who says he found the move especially deplorable in view of the fact that the students' paper was vetted by MIT professor Ron Rivest.

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