It’s hard for me to characterize the MBTA’s most recent insanity: Are they in denial about their security problems? Or are they so disconnected from reality that they think they can hide their security problems? Let’s explore the question.<\/p>\n
First, a review of recent events: Three MIT students study the MBTA’s security and prepare a presentation to DEFCON 16. (Their advisor is Professor Ron Rivest, the “R” in RSA<\/a>.) Dr. Rivest contacts the MBTA about the research. The students, the professor, and the MBTA have a meeting. Later that week the MBTA seeks an injunction in federal court to prevent them from delivering the presentation. The injunction is granted<\/a> and the presentation is canceled. The presentation is filed as a part of the request for injunction, making it a public record. The presentation had also already been distributed on a disc to all of the DEFCON attendees. The article is readily available<\/a> on MIT’s student newspaper website, The Tech<\/a>.<\/p>\n Did you click the article<\/a>? You should. It’s a big file, almost 5 megs, but it’s chock full of great pictures and clear explanations.<\/p>\n So, let’s review option 1, that the MBTA is in denial that there are security problems:<\/p>\n And option two, that the MBTA thought they could simply hide the problems?<\/p>\n I guess there is always option three, which is just incompetence. There’s an argument to be made here.<\/p>\n It doesn’t really matter which explanation is the right one.\u00c2\u00a0 The presentation speaks for itself.\u00c2\u00a0 The MBTA is a security disaster.<\/p>\n A final note: As a former editor of The Tech, I’m proud of their role in this.\u00c2\u00a0 Good for them for publishing the research.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It’s hard for me to characterize the MBTA’s most recent insanity: Are they in denial about their security problems? Or are they so disconnected from reality that they think they can hide their security problems? Let’s explore the question. First, a review of recent events: Three MIT students study the MBTA’s security and prepare a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,15,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-398","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mbta","category-mit","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dandunn.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dandunn.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dandunn.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dandunn.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dandunn.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=398"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dandunn.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dandunn.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=398"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dandunn.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=398"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dandunn.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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