There are many controversial topics in computing such as network neutrality, industrial espionage and hundreds of other generic topics that would easily bring any good information technologist's blood to a rolling boil.Whenever one thinks of controversy when associated with computing, inevitably the thought of network security comes up. Network security professionals are their own niche' of people within the field of computing. They have their own rules, guidelines, and even their own ways of behaving in public. The security community was recently uncharacteristically divided by a story that challenged the code of ethics that so many network security professionals ascribe themselves to.
Three MIT undergraduates concocted a scheme to hack Boston's transit payment system, the Charlie Card (no relation). The students managed to reprogram the cards to increase their credit balance, thus allowing them to ride the subway for free.The undergraduates exploited dozens of security vulnerabilities in order to gain access to free subway and train rides, and wrote an academic paper based upon their exploits. The paper covered several in-depth topics that included the code of how they reverse engineered the card's data, how they accessed the RFID chip that is embedded inside of each card, as well as the commonsensical security procedures that were either not in-place or being adhered to. If the story had ended there, I would undoubtedly be lacking of a topic for this paper, luckily for me however- the fear of anything that one doesn't understand drives prosecutions and court cases in the united states of america. The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority filed suit to keep the undergraduates from publishing their paper, contending that by explaining how they compromised the systems- they were breaking federal computer crime transmission laws and requested a restraining order preventing the students from distributing or disclosing any "program, information, software...