EFF to appeal court order halting subway hacker talk

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.

[ Related reading: Court halts subway hacker talk ]

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.

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