14 DAY TRIAL // Adam Savage, co-host of the popular show “The MythBusters,” has disclosed at a hacking conference that The Discovery Channel was legally pressured into canceling one of the show's episodes. He claims that the episode, which was going to tackle the security and reliability of the RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) technology, was canceled after pressure from credit card companies.
Savage dropped the news during the latest Hackers on Planet Earth conference. He explained that, given the reports of RFID-related hacking incidents going around the Internet, they came up with the idea of further exploring it in one of their episodes. Consequently, they were planning to test the vulnerability and reliability of the RFID technology and devices. So they went ahead and sought technical advice from professionals.
For their research, Adam explained, the show's production team set up a conference call with RFID-pioneer company Texas Instruments. However, Texas Instruments did not attend the conference alone. According to Savage, it also “invited” the chief legal counsel for American Express, Visa, Discover - basically all the major credit card companies.
“Texas Instruments comes on along with chief legal counsel for American Express, Visa, Discover, and everybody else... They [the MythBusters' production staff] 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,” he explained.
Texas Instruments refuted these accusations through the voice of spokeswoman Cindy Huff, who told CNET that “To move the process along, Texas Instruments coordinated a conversation with Smart Card Alliance (SCA) who invited MasterCard and Visa, on contactless payments to help MythBusters get the right information. Of the handful of people on the call, there were mostly product managers and only one contactless payment company's legal counsel member.” She pointed out that MythBusters got all the information they needed, and that they were not pressured into taking the decision not to pursue the subject.
“Technical questions were asked and answered and we were to wait for MythBusters to let us know when they were planning on showing the segment. A few weeks later, Texas Instruments was told by MythBusters that the storyline had changed and they were pursuing a different angle which did not require our help,” said Ms. Huff. Indeed, an episode on RFID aired at the beginning of the year and it did not tackle the security issues.
Later on, Savage changed his story too, but whoever is right about this is less relevant for the general picture. The truth remains that there have been numerous reports and demonstrations about hacking RFID-based devices, and the use of this technology in credit cards and passports makes it a very serious problem, as someone at the conference indirectly pointed out in his reply to Savage, after he finished telling the story – “Well, you do have about 3,000 people in the room who aren't under such legal arrangements.”
Here is a video with Adam Savage telling the story at the HOPE conference: