Wired: Boston Court’s Meddling With ’Full Disclosure’ Is Unwelcome

Planet Google presents :: In eerily similar cases in the Netherlands and the United States, courts have recently grappled with the computer-security norm of "full disclosure," asking whether researchers should be permitted to disclose details of a fare-card vulnerability that allows people to ride the subway for free. The "Oyster card" used on the London Tube was at issue in the Dutch case, and a similar fare card used on the Boston "T" was the center of the U.S. case. The Dutch court got it right, and the American court, in Boston, got it wrong from the start -- despite facing an open-and-shut case of First Amendment prior restraint. The U.S. court has since seen the error of its ways -- but the damage is done. The MIT security researchers who were prepared to discuss their Boston findings at the DefCon security conference were prevented from giving their talk. The ethics of full disclosure are intimately familiar to those of us in the computer-securi...