A letter of support for the students from a number of computer scientists

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

clipped from Steve Bellovin blog --
The MBTA versus (Student) Security Researchers
12 August 2008

As I'm sure many of you have heard, the MBTA (Massachusetts Bay  
Transportation Authority) has a very insecure fare payment system.  
Some students at MIT, working under the supervision of Ron Rivest —  
yes, that Ron Rivest, the "R" in RSA — found many flaws and planned a  
presentation at DEFCON on it. The MBTA sought and received an  
injunction barring the presentation, but not only were the slides  
already distributed, the MBTA's court filing included a confidential  
report prepared by the students with more details than were in the  
talk...

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is appealing the judge's order, and  
rightly so. Not only is this sort of prior restraint blatantly  
unconstitutional, it's bad public policy: we need this sort of  
security research to help us build better systems. I and a number of  
other computer scientists have signed a letter supporting the appeal.  
You can find the complete EFF web page on the case here.

djf --- Here's the letter:

http://www.eff.org/files/filenode/MBTA_v_Anderson/letter081208.pdf

The rest of the case files are here:
http://www.eff.org/cases/mbta-v-anderson




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