Freedom of Speech: Prior Restraint - DefCon Case

After looking at this week's PowerPoint presentation, I came across the topic of "Prior Restraint" and was curious to find out a little bit more about some recent cases regarding this topic. In my search I found an interesting case involving press conference at a DefCon hacker conference. The case revolves around an issue that resulted due to a ruling made by a federal judge - the ruling granted a temporary restraining order to hald a scheduled conference talk about security vulnerabilites.


FEDERAL JUDGE IN DEFCON CASE EQUATES SPEECH WITH HACKING --

LAS VEGAS -- Lawyers with the Electronic Frontier Foundation said a federal judge who granted a temporary restraining order on Saturday to halt a scheduled conference talk about security vulnerabilities came to "a very, very wrong conclusion." They said the judge's order constituted illegal prior restraint, which violated the speakers' First Amendment right to discuss important and legitimate academic research.

"When you discuss security issues, if you are telling the truth, that should be something protected at the core of the First Amendment," said Kurt Opsahl, senior staff attorney for the non-profit EFF, who was at DefCon to participate in an annual ask-the-EFF panel and to launch the organization's Coders Rights Project. "If you are truthfully telling the world about a dangerous situation, and (it is) a situation which is dangerous not because the security researcher exposes the vulnerability (but) because the person who made the product . . . made the vulnerability, (then) this should be core speech."

Opsahl was speaking at a press conference at the DefCon hacker conference in Las Vegas on Saturday after District Judge Douglas Woodlock of the U.S. District Court in Massachusetts granted a temporary restraining order requested by the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority.

The MBTA sought to bar three students enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology -- Zack Anderson, R.J. Ryan and Alessandro Chiesa -- from presenting a talk at DefCon about vulnerabilities in magnetic stripe tickets and RFID cards that are used in the MBTA's payment system. The MBTA feared that the students planned to teach the audience how to fraudulently add credit to a payment ticket or card in order to ride the transit system for free.
Opsahl said the judge, in making his decision, misinterpreted a part of the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act that refers to computer intruders or hackers. Such a person is described in part in the statute as someone who "knowingly causes the transmission of a program, information, code, or command to a computer or computer system."

Opsahl says the judge, during the hearing, likened the students' conference presentation to transmitting code to a computer.
"The statute on its face appears to be discussing sending code or similar types of information to a computer," Opsahl said. "It does not appear to contemplate somebody who is giving a talk to humans. Nevertheless, the court . . . believed that the act of giving a presentation to a group of humans was covered by the computer fraud, computer intrusion statute. We believe this is wrong."

EFF staff attorney Marcia Hoffman told reporters that the decision set a very dangerous precedent.

You can read the article that discusses the case in detail and also listen to recordings from the hearing at: http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/08/eff-to-appeal-r.html.