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Short abstract

In 2022 a group of cybersecurity researchers found that trains produced by Polish company Newag cease to function due to wireless and wired mechanism hardcoded by the producer. This paper is a discourse analysis on the case when cybersecurity research attempts to take stance in public sphere.

Long abstract

The paper analyses discourse enveloped in Newag Impuls controversy in Poland from 2022 to 2025. Using cybersecurity research materials, institutional documents and public communications of company and politicians, the paper will show what happens when cybersecurity research is reported seriously as a civic engagement in a public sphere.

Regulatory agencies were purposefully avoiding taking a public stance and risking conflict with a politically connected company. Neither side of the political conflict in Poland was interested in pursuing investigations, so the cybersecurity researchers briefed two Prime Minister cabinets, at least 5 state intelligence and/or regulatory agencies and 2 parliamentary committees. What was the result was not the disapproval of their claims, but a civic lawsuits engaged by the company as strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPPs).

Thesis of the paper are simple: reverse engineering is an interface work not only because it shows alignments between various wireless and wired systems, but because has a capacity to show misalignments and unresolved conflicts within systems interoperable by conflicting actors, such as the conflict between producer of the train and the railroad maintenance yard, which won the bid for post-purchase service.

Implications shown in the paper clearly demonstrate that the recent call for protection for ethical cybersecurity research (Rampášek, M., Andraško, J., Sokol, P., & Hamulak, O. 2026), not only as an issue of new form of technological practice, but also in terms of new theories of the public sphere and freedom for scientific inquires done by citizens.