Interview With MIT Subway Hacker Zack Anderson

longacre writes "In his most extensive interview since the DefCon controversy emerged, MIT subway hacker Zack Anderson talks with Popular Mechanics about what's wrong with the Charlie Card, what happened at DefCon, and what it's like to tango with the FBI and the MBTA. The interview comes on the heels of Tuesday's court ruling denying motions by the MBTA to issue a preliminary injunction aimed at keeping the students quiet for a further five months."

Comments

The FBI's role

[MikeRT]

The FBI's role should have been to offer him and his buddies a lab, security clearance and a plush job to do this kind of work for them. Seriously, these are the kind of guys that the cops want working for them because every security hole in the infrastructure they find helps the cops do their job--and these guys are smart and educated enough to help the vendor fix the problem.

Re:no, not really

[Hoplite3]

Yes, the old fire in the theater line... That's from the Holmes ruling in the Schenck case. Schenck was posting fliers bashing the draft for WWI and got swept up and jailed by the police. Holmes wrote for the Supreme Court majority that such speech was equivalent to shouting fire in a theater and Schenck (continued) his time in jail.

Remember kids: every time someone uses this line to define the limits on free speech, they are hearkening back to rulings that undercut the very purpose of the 1st amendment.

Re:the more I read about this....

[MRe_nl]

the more it just seems someone at MBTA mistook their (MIT's)vulnerabilities rapport for the
scheduled Defcon talk that Friday and panicked.
quote/
"The FBI agent said, basically, this is not going to be an investigation. We don't have anything here. Don't worry about it.

So we told them we'd provide them a vulnerability report, going over what we found, and also methods that could fix these problems, and they said we could get that to them within two weeks. We had actually planned on getting it to them within the week, before business hours ended on Friday, so they'd have this in their hands before we gave the talk. We felt this was a courtesy we should give them.

This report was not going over what we were speaking about at DefCon, that wasn't the point. Some other people at MBTA have claimed that it was, but the point of the report was to go over the vulnerabilities, and go over ways that they could fix them. That's what we provided them, and we got it to them that Friday."
end quote/

and that's where it went wrong I think.
Had that report arrived monday nothing might have happened.