Las Vegas (NV) - The Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority has been granted a temporary restraining order against three MIT hackers who were scheduled to give a Defcon talk. Zack Anderson, RJ Ryan and Alessandro Chiesa were scheduled for a Sunday talk about hacking the Boston subway card in order to get free rides, obviously the Transit Authority doesn’t want this information made public, but in getting the TRO, the authority’s attorneys have ineptly released much more information than perhaps they originally intended.

Anderson replicated a Transit Authority badge

There’s a saying at Defcon that the best way to spread information is to get hit with a restraining order. Freedom of information is a big deal here and anything suppressing that is met with extreme resistance. But in this case, the attendees really don’t have to do too much work because the Transit Authority placed the talk slides into the addendum of the temporary restraining order request and everything is now in public record. Furthermore, the slides are in the official Defcon CD - something which more than 5000 people have right now. So you have a classic case of the horse is already out of the barn.