Silence free speech or build a better moustrap?

Apropos of the MBTA's court order-enforced prior restraint gag order against MIT students, we now see see powerful credit card companies pressure the producers of Discovery Channel Mythbusters to not air programs they've developed that reveal similar security problems.

What happened to the responsibility of agencies like the MBTA to secure their own systems and VISA and MasterCard to issue secure, trustworthy products? When they can't, it is not they who suffer. Instead, our individual right of free speech does.

There is a name when government and big business are in each others pockets, and their interests not ours, are what sets he agenda. It is called fascism.

When our government can decide the free speech interests of individuals - researchers in this case - is less important than potential lost fares (with could be mitigated and which are the sole responsibility of the MBTA and the contracts they signed), when powerful business interests can dissuade the media from airing programs that reveal security defects that effect individuals in our society, something is very wrong.

Check out the first two minutes of this clip of Mythbusters' Adam Savage telling the folks at the HOPE hackercon about how the Discovery Channel was bullied by big credit-card companies out of airing a program about how crappy the security in RFID tags is.