How A Fortune 500 Company Suppressed Our Research Through Legal Threats

ABSTRACT: When we took on a consulting project to audit an alcohol breath testing machine for a group of DUI attorneys, we never expected that a Fortune 500 company would threaten legal action to suppress our results. We also didn’t expect that the attorneys who engaged us would run for cover, and that we’d be left entirely on our own. However, that’s exactly what happened, and it effectively put our company out of business. Through this experience, we learned first-hand that what happens in the legal system often has little to do with justice, and also that the legal system can be an effective weapon against the public interest.Of course, we also learned a lot about the inner workings of alcohol breath testing machines, some of which we absolutely can’t talk about, but a lot of which is public. We hope to inspire hackers to build on this foundation of public data and shed more light on what is known about machines that can–in a very real sense–control your life.

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