Three Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) students were allowed to talk freely about the Boston transit system's inadequacies due to a federal judge’s decision on Tuesday. The youngsters discovered some security flaws in the authority's ticketing system.

The students are: Zack Anderson, R.J. Ryan and Alessandro Chiesa, and they are represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EEF), a San Francisco organization that advocates for civil rights in the high-tech world. They were not present at the Tuesday’s 90 minute hearing.

But EFF legal director Cindy Cohn, successfully defended the boys. "This will set an example that will ultimately leave us all less secure," she claimed. She also brought First Amendment into discussion and underlined the fact that the students are mere victims in this story.

They were planning to present the details of their discovery at the Defcon hacker conference, but another judge imposed a 10-day restraining order against them on Aug. 9, the day before their scheduled presentation

The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority attorney Ieuan-Gael Mahoney asked U.S. District Judge George O'Toole Jr. to impose a five-month injunction in order to stop the students from revealing anything that had to do with the flaws in the system’s security whatsoever.

The three had another attempt to reveal their finding by posting it on the Internet and thus teach others how to take advantage of it. According to the Associated Press their slogan was: "Want free subway rides for life?"

Much of the students' research was already revealed in presentations and published at a Las Vegas computer-security conference earlier this month.