MBTA vs MIT Students

A lot has already been written about this subject so I'll try not to repeat it.

My only real bone on contention with the decision by the Judge to grant the TRO. A little background is in order, the TRO motion was filed on Aug 8th and granted on Aug 9th. The students in this case were set to present on Aug 10th. All seems okay right? Here's my bone of contention: Defcon pre-registration began on Aug 7th about noon.

Why is this important? For those that have never attended Defcon, when you pay your fee, you get this year's badge, a schedule, and a CD containing: most of the presentations slides, some music samples, some art work, some of the tools/source code being released, and some other tidbits.

This year, the Defcon folks ordered about 8,000 badges and they ran out of them! That means Defcon had over 8,000 people in attendance this year, WOW, but I digress. (NOTE this figure is probably very conservative since I saw plenty of folks walking around with paper badges, and this figure doesn't include Goons, staff, press, and vendors.) While there was a slight hick-up with the badges (yes besides them not having enough for every one, and some bugs in the code), there was no shortage of CDs.

This year's Black Hat Briefings attendance is estimated to have been around 4 to 5 thousand people all of whom received free tickets to Defcon. Even assuming only people from Black Hat took advantage of pre-registration and only half of which did so. This would mean that on Thursday Aug 7th about 2.5 thousand people (me included), pre-registered at Defcon and received CDs. Lets say that half to three fourths of the rest of the Defcon attendees registered on the 8th.(about 2.75 to 4.125 thousand people) Adding these two figures together you have probably a very conservative estimate of the number of people who received a Defcon CD by midnight Aug 8th. This would mean that: before the motion was even filed about 2.5 thousand people had Defcon offical CDs and about 5.25 to 6.625 thousand people had them before the Judge ruled in the case. (Note this doesn't take into account all the copies being made and sent out to friends, colleagues, etc.)

Why is all this important information and just where am I going this with this line of thinking you ask? I'll tell you: As mentioned previously the Decfcon CDs contain most of presentation slides, and a quick look at the CD by even the average noob/computer user, 5th grader, etc, that the slides from the MIT students WERE one of the presentations included. So, before the TRO motion was brought the court about 2.5 thousand people already had most of the information the MBTA sought to suppress and about 5.25 to 6.625 people had it, before the Judge was able to rule.

To summarize: before any TRO motion was filed, about 2.5 thousand of the very people the MBTA didn't want to have the information contained in the MIT students slides, had it and about 5.25 to 6.625 thousand people had it before the Judge OK'ed the suppression.

Talk about trying to close the barn door after the horses have been already escaped.
(We won't even get into the rapid speed these slides would have been copied, sent out, and posted to as many people/web sites as possible, by pretty much every Defcon attendee, once word got out that someone was trying to suppress the information).

Till next time.

Ish