We reported yesterday that the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) sued three students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) in U.S. District Court to prevent the students from giving a presentation that discloses flaws in MBTA’s electronic ticketing subway system.

The students had prepared the presentation for a class and were prepared to deliver their presentation at the Defcon conference. They had already distributed thousands of copies of it before the MBTA went to federal court and obtained a 10-day injunction to prevent their presentation at the conference.

The restraining order issued bars the students from disclosing any "program, information, software code, or command that would assist another in any material way to circumvent or otherwise attack the security of the Fare Media System."

While the MBTA, a Massachusetts State agency, indicated it was not abandoning its lawsuit or the injunction, a spokesman for the MBTA indicated, "The MBTA will reserve comment on the substance of the presentation until staff has had a sufficient period of time to thoroughly review the information, and meet with the students and their professor."

As the temporary restraining order was granted for such a short time, he MBTA must now decide whether to ask the Judge to extend it into a longer preliminary injunction. There is software code that pertains to the hacking that the students had planned to post on the MIT Web site but has not yet done so.