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CC Companies Scotch Mythbusters Show On RFID Security
mathfeel passes along a video in which Mythbusters co-host Adam Savage recounts how credit card companies lawyered up to make sure the Discovery channel never, ever airs a segment on the flaws in RFID security. "Texas Instruments comes on [a scheduled conference call] along with chief legal counsel for American Express, Visa, Discover, and everybody else... They [Mythbusters producers] were way, way outgunned and they [lawyers] absolutely made it really clear to Discovery that they were not going to air this episode talking about how hackable this stuff was, and Discovery backed way down being a large corporation that depends upon the revenue of the advertisers. Now it's on Discovery's radar and they won't let us go near it."
...you can fake it and you can break it.
And here I was thinking security by obscurity was bad enough.
Security by legality is just an embarrassment - "don't tell people it's breakable or we'll sue you" - the main reason being that now people know that companies are actively suppressing the story, they'll want to know more.
Smoke, meet fire...
Well, it worked for this dude.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it