Mythbusters Gagged: Companies Kill Episode Exposing RFID Flaws
Found on Consumerist on Saturday, 30 August 2008
Credit card companies successfully nixed a Mythbusters segment exposing RFID's security flaws, according to Arbiter of Truth and Mythbusters co-host, Adam Savage.
They were way, way outgunned and they absolutely made it really clear to Discovery that they were not going to air this episode talking about how hackable this stuff was, and Discovery backed way down being a large corporation that depends upon the revenue of the advertisers. Now it's on Discovery's radar and they won't let us go near it.
One can only hope that this episode will leak onto the Internet. After all, "security by obscurity" is no real security at all; and amonst all possible targets, credit card companies should be especially interested in secure products. The how-to hacks are obviously known already; but instead of fixing them, companies try to gag those who want to make this public.