Mike Lindell's “packet captures” are garbage data provided by serial con-man
washingtontimes.com
washingtontimes.com
> He said the scrolling text was likely meant to resemble what the packet captures would look like in the data set but were not actual packet captures, which are vital to prove the claims.
You gotta love these non-technical people who think that any code on a screen is basically the Matrix. It reminds me when I was building webpages in HTML in a coffee shop and a guy saw it and accused me of hacking.
When I would read my books or play a session she would get all harpy. It was evil and was going to turn me evil. This from the woman who thought it was OK to be Christian only on Sunday as long as she tithed her 10%.
Incidentally I was 'removed' (they asked my mom to please stop bringing the trouble-maker) from our church at like 11 y/o for asking questions no one could answer.
I had hoped to see the captures and disk images online somewhere to see what kind of analysis they did, as I've done reverse engineering of protocols, devices, software, and large systems throughout my career. While I'm not an elite reverse engineer who presents new methods of obfuscated malware reversing at conferences, it has fallen to me to do it professionally on and off for the last 20 years and there are certainly some thousands of people with at least my level of skill who could weigh in on it.
Demonstrating technical uncertainty to present and frame risks is a lower standard than reproducing an exploit chain. As they say, POC||GTFO. I don't know that their conference (symposium) has met that standard yet. There was a link to their conference being broadcast on rumble, and I watched some of it. What I saw wasn't as good as a defcon presentation, let alone with the technical clarity and polished execution of a good blackhat presentation, which their concerns would need to be at to get serious popular consideration.
My impression right now is that the 'cyber' aspect of this is really a vehicle for promoting the more serious and rigorous statistical case from a perhaps too colorful character named Dr. Douglas Frank (?), which if real, would be much more damning than technical voting machine vulnerabilities. Everyone knew a decade ago electronic voting was vulnerable. I commented multiple times here and to acquaintences involved in politics that electronic voting risks social unrest because it can be so easily discredited in a highly contested situation, and there is nothing surprising, unanticipated, or unforseeable about the consequences of using these machines. Elections that use them now have a foul smell about them. I don't think any technology evidence these people present will change any minds, mostly because minds are not generally changed by evidence, but I do think they will set a new bar for elections scrutiny that will require the integrity of elections to withstand forensic analysis.
Until we have signed and hashed disk images that can be compared to sealed hardware that has a verifiable chain of custody, the Chinese hacking narrative will be bluster. Whether the "election fortification," methods used in it were legal or will be tolerated in future ones, however, I think they may have made their point.
I'm not sure they're experts if they were expecting Mike Lindell to actually deliver on something.
If they could get away with that, might as well anyone should try to.
[1]: Some spurious web request logs probing for PHP vulnerabilities leading back to Russian IPs that literally everyone also would have in their logs (as I do for every website I've operated ever).
I've got my bonafides and I have no intention of doxxing myself. There's a lot of very clued in people on this board in lots of areas and nobody really owes you anything or needs to explain themselves. You can listen or not, it's up to you.
I don't think the evidence released is overwhelming, but it's much more than you've suggested.
[1] https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/bears-midst-intrusion-democ...
The fundamental premise of journalism as "writing the first draft of history" (in the best-faith interpretation) is that most significant things that happen are a confluence of conflicting claims, motivations, and understandings of circumstance and context. The work of the journalist is to piece those conflicts into a coherent essay such that a reader outside of the context of an event can piece together a mental model for actionable decisions relative to the event.
That's interesting. Can you elaborate on this?
It's also worth nothing that false claims made by important people are historically significant, but a paper that's trying to build a cohesive narrative but lacked the ability to outright quote something and call it false (for cultural reasons, stating the author's position on a quote is considered too aggressively opinionated for something published in the news section of a paper), would probably choose not to report the quotes.
I can't really tell if that is 100% true, but I think it might be. I think confirmation bias could be looked at through this lens. We have an internal story that makes sense to us, and we tend to give more weight to data that fits our internal story (narrative) and discard the rest.
I don't know really, I'm more thinking out loud here than trying to present The Truth.
I factually believe Lindell is a hustling liar, but just because that's true in general, doesn't mean that everything he says or presents is fabricated.
Part of a scheme to misrepresent? Almost assuredly, but however unlikely, it's possible he might have uncovered some legit China attempt to interfere in something, after all, we know they do that. So it's a matter of perspective and context.
A little bit of historical context is really important, but I think we need to be careful about it.
This article in particular is very confusing and poorly written sadly.
>“We were handed a turd,” he said. “And I had to take that turd and turn it into a diamond. And that’s what I think we did.”
That claim states that the data was terrible, but someone thinks they found something good in it.
>“So our team said, we’re not going to say that this is legitimate if we don’t have confidence in the information,” Mr. Merritt said on Wednesday, the second day of the symposium.
This makes it sound like nothing good was found.
>He had offered $5 million to any in-person attendee who can disprove his claims. The offer is no longer on the table, Mr. Merritt said.
This claims that the $5M is not on the table right now.
>Kurt Olsen, a lawyer on Mr. Lindell’s team said there were multiple sources of the data that Mr. Lindell claims to have, and did not confirm that Mr. Mongtomery was the source of the data. He also clarified that the $5 million challenge has not been canceled and that Mr. Merritt would not be privy to that information.
This claims that it is.
He's talking about the nature of communication, not about the actual underlying facts of whether the data is gibberish or not.
We know what happened in the election. We know roughly how well the vaccines are working and how safe they are. That's not the problem, the problem is how the information is presented, communicated, how clearly repudiated evidence can still be perpetuated as 'evidence'.
In particular, the OP's point about how there are contradicting statements in the article is really interesting: this should be common as there are a lot of disagreements in the real world, and yet, we don't really see a lot of that in most journalism which betrays the fact that it's likely a lot of journalists are actually advocating for an idea, and selecting the quotes necessary to make that case. Which is more common than not.
I have to admit personally being confused by the apparent duplicity of the quotes ... and it took me a minute to realize that this was actually valuable information, that we rarely see.
Merritt says it's off the table, but Kurt Olsen says it's still on the table and that "Mr. Merritt would not be privy to that information"
None of those claims contradict each other, the article is saying "This person said this, another said this" and is showing the absolute chaos and buffonery that Mike Lindell and "team" are doing.
>Merritt says it's off the table, but Kurt Olsen says it's still on the table and that "Mr. Merritt would not be privy to that information"
Those two claims contradict each other, but the paper is reporting them accurately. The fact that people are having so much trouble parsing this goes to show the extent to which we have become accustomed to newspaper editorialization. :-)
Apparently a Bios password was leaked and one of the voting machine was possibly imaged in a county in Colorado, before and after dominion post election update.
Press Conference https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ro00TQuTUcc&t=37s
Very few people know what actual cyber forensic data would look like, and any packet capture would be meaningless without a lot of context information about when, where, and how it was captured.
My favorite bit of propaganda leading up to the "pot dispensary putsch" of January 6th was the comical Qanon military LARPing in some of the Q drops. Shit like "testing alternate satellite route code (let cat walk on keyboard) trust the plan, Q". Meanwhile this junk is being posted on a shitty chan board with no cryptographic signature, because that's exactly how a real "Q-level" intelligence expert would communicate.
A real spy would never ever even use a PGP signature to authenticate their literally world saving information. They would also pre-announce their intent to take down a super-powerful global criminal cabal to make sure their adversaries knew ahead of time.
Absolutely hilarious nonsense for people who know nothing about computers, telecom, encryption, the military, or intelligence.
Con artists often deliberately make their con stupid and ridiculous to select for gullible marks. A con artist wants fools.
(I'm not taking about the current "audit" in Arizona, but the previous recounts there that were conducted by experienced people who didn't call themselves "Cyber Ninjas").
"They held the meeting in the clay soil below the building!"
Does this achieve any of that? No.
A lot of people had open minds about this whole situation, and I commend them. But it was obvious from the beginning this was going to go nowhere. It's the same with every conspiracy theory, someone claims to have proof but won't or can't show it for some reason. Whatever reason that is changes with the wind. The claim that the elections were hacked to give Biden the victory has now boiled down to con men conning other con men.
I find it hard to believe there's nothing when politicians are trying so hard to stop any audit and sites like Twitter are banning any discussion of election fraud. You dont censor when you are correct. You censor when you have something to hide.
I also find it hilarious that the left laughs at this when the majority of leftist activists sites run on shitty outdated wordpress installations cobbled together with random scripts.
But that's a far cry from saying that they were hacked... by China and Italy? And that you have proof, but then not provide any?
That's not political, that's just comical. It's clearly a conjob. I don't care whether you're pro or anti-trump, you've got to admit that Mike Lindell is a conman to make claims like this and have literally nothing to back it up.
I mean, that was proven. There's an entire wikipedia page dedicated to it [1].
I don't trust this Lindell guy, but I trust the press even less.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossfire_Hurricane_(FBI_inves...
The very first paragraph says that Trump wasn't under investigation. That was a central part of the conspiracy theory.
The other part of the conspiracy was that it was opened to dig up dirt on Trump. But the second paragraph contradicts that as well, saying it was opened because of public statements from George Papandopolous that the Trump team had dirt on Clinton, obtained from Russia.
In some sense, it would be hard to imagine that after making statements like that there wouldn't be an investigation opened. Just because an investigation happened, doesn't mean that it was political or malicious (which was the claim from Lindell).
The very wikipedia page that you linked goes over all of this, including the fact that the claims it was improper were investigated, and dismissed. You don't even have to read the whole thing, it's in the introduction.
That's not what the Washingtontimes wrote.
That's a lot of words that could be been summed up as 'the FBI spied on the Trump campaign.'
Was it legal, justified, moral? Those things are all debatable. I'm firmly on the side that a thin pretense such as 'foreign interference' is no justification for spying on a political campaign.
> including the fact that the claims it was improper were investigated, and dismissed.
What a surprise, the government found itself innocent. Unfathomable.
The OIG investigation found no support for Trump's claims that President Obama had ordered the wiretapping of Trump Tower.
I don't always trust the press either and some sources much less than others but nothing about how the article characterized Montgomery seems either incorrect, or even exaggerated, to me. He has a history of making sensational claims and then being unable to back them up with actual evidence.
Curious what the downvotes are disagreeing with here.
I think the opposite is true here, and that treating Lindell fairly means not giving credence to nonsense.
I don't know if what Lindell has presented is nonsense. To me the presentation has been so bad that it's been hard to focus at all on what is/isn't being presented. Some of the people involved also clearly have their own agendas which is concerning.
From what I understand from reading much of the reports, it seems primarily to be a rehashing of many of the things that have already been presented.
I see Lindell as passionate person and it doesn't seem he intends to grift, but I think this symposium was massively oversold and I would bet that many conservatives, Trump supporters, and even Lindell supporters agree.