Mythbusters RFID hacking episode canned by credit card company lawyers

September 2, 2008 – 8:48 am

Although it’s no secret that RFID is easily hacked (see: train passes, passports, credit cards, one billion other cards, etc.) it’s still not necessarily common knowledge, and it sounds like the major credit card companies want to keep it that way — according to Adam Savage, Mythbusters was all set to do a show exposing the weak security behind most RFID implementations but was shut down by lawyers from “American Express, Visa, Discover, and everybody else… [who] absolutely made it really clear to Discovery that they were not going to air this episode.” Since Discovery is an ad-supported channel, it’s not surprising that it backed down, but we’d say that the credit card industry would be far better served spending money on actually improving security rather than lawyering up and trying to keep consumers in the dark. Video after the break.