> “When you find a problem in the source code, it’s very difficult to explain the consequences of that problem to a judge or jury,” he told me. “It’s written in a foreign language, and the effects are hard to trace. We’re rarely able to say, ‘Aha, here’s this person’s breath test and here’s the problem that caused it to be wrong.’”
> Mr. Workman’s mind worked a lot like the computer systems into which he delved: He had a mental index of more than 15 years of legal battles and civic investigations into problems with breath-testing programs, and he knew exactly where to find the incendiary bits. When I dug into flawed test results in Washington, D.C., for example, he sent me a video recording of a police officer turned whistle-blower testifying at an oversight hearing.
> With Mr. Workman’s help, I traversed my giant pile of records and filed dozens of Freedom of Information Act requests to fill in blanks. For research on Massachusetts — where more than 36,000 breath tests had been ruled legally inadmissible — Mr. Workman gave me a login to a database he had created containing nearly every one of those tests.
(In fact, the headline, while completely accurate, can be misleading because an unnamed/anonymous source very often refers to a whistleblower or insider, which Mr. Workman is not)