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Mike Lindell's “packet captures” are garbage data provided by serial con-man
- lanevorockz 5y agoAfter so much fake news published by mainstream newspapers, it's worth being skeptical. I still remember the few months they covered the YellowGate
- linuxftw 5y ago> He has been behind several other high-profile conspiracy theories, including allegations that U.S. security agencies wiretapped Trump Tower while Mr. Trump was running for president in 2016. 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_investigation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossfire_Hurricane_(FBI_inves...
- wedn3sday 5y agoIf I recall correctly, isnt this the episode where the trump staffer got drunk at a bar and was bragging to an Australian diplomat about all the illegal shit they were doing? And then the Australian went to the FBI, and now the staffer is in prison because of said illegal shit? Or was that another time?
- linuxftw 5y agoI'm not familiar with this specific story, but the FBI did spy on the Trump campaign, it's not a 'conspiracy theory.'
- Falandafa2021 5y agoAll according to Clinton foundation donor no conflict of interest there...
- ggggtez 5y agoThat only counts as a "hit" if you ignore everything in the conspiracy that was wrong. 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.
- linuxftw 5y ago> The very first paragraph says that Trump wasn't under investigation. That was a central part of the conspiracy theory. 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.
- pionar 5y agoThis is poorly worded on the Times' part. The conspiracy is that Obama ordered it, or that it was politically motivated.
- smhenderson 5y agoThe article you link to literally says 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.
- whatshisface 5y agoThis article is a soup of crisscrossing claims and motives, but after thinking that, I realize that's what the news is actually like, and whenever it appears otherwise, it's because of narrative-building.
- InitialLastName 5y agoI would argue that narrative-building isn't necessarily wrong or insidious, as that's how some people understand their relationship to the world around them. 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.
- whatshisface 5y agoThere's also a place for journalists who leave the assembly to the critical-thinking reader and future historians, knowing that if they tried too much analysis, it would leave a permanent imprint on the record and potentially frustrate later work.
- otterley 5y ago> if they tried too much analysis, it would leave a permanent imprint on the record and potentially frustrate later work. That's interesting. Can you elaborate on this?
- whatshisface 5y agoLet's say contemporary journalists are considering three separate stories that could tie together the facts, with each story tying together a random subset, about half of the facts each. If the journalists decide on one story, and ignore the half that it doesn't tie together as irrelevant, a large number of things that could actually be important would go unrecorded - if they were wrong to focus on that one story out of the ones they were considering, which may not even have included the real trend driving it all. 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.
- encryptluks2 5y agoThese are the same people who create elaborate PizzaGate, QAnon, Wayfair, McAfee, etc conspiracies. They are in the business of creating conspiracies not cause they can ever prove them in court, at least not without a truly inept and likely corrupt judge, but because they attract certain types of people into their cult so they will hopefully have more mentally unwell seditionist show up next time.
- MattGaiser 5y agoThe conspiracy in the basement of a pizza parlor without a basement.
- dariusj18 5y agoTBF, if you wanted your secret meetings to remain secret, doing them in a place that supposedly doesn't exist is not a bad move.
- edly 5y agoIt's the perfect crime, how will they ever report it?
- MattGaiser 5y agoEven if it is reported, who will believe it? "They held the meeting in the clay soil below the building!"
- fl0wenol 5y agoAnd so they can sell you herbal supplements to keep your mind sharp.
- encryptluks2 5y agoI don't personally even think there is anything inherently bad about herbal supplements, many of them are avidly researched and proven to have value. The issue is the supplements they (right-wing grifters) sell are usually far less safe than what you'd actually get if you bought them through a general retailer and they make unreasonable claims about the results from the supplements.
- cryptoz 5y agoFrom TFA: "Several cyber experts at the symposium became frustrated late into the first day with not being provided with packet captures." I'm not sure they're experts if they were expecting Mike Lindell to actually deliver on something.
- busterarm 5y agoI mean, CrowdStrike are supposedly experts and their "proof" of Russian involvement in the DNC hack was complete bullshit[1], except "trust us, guys, we promise." Their president even had to testify in Congress to that effect admitting so. 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).
- jlmorton 5y agoThat is a tiny fraction of the stated evidence. Notably, there was specific known malware installed on DNC computers communicating with IP addresses in Russia. 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-democratic-national-committee/ https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/bears-midst-intrusion-democ...
- busterarm 5y agoTheir evidence was completely inconclusive of anything and they stated so in front of Congress.
- tptacek 5y agoCalvinball. That wasn't your argument; it was that the evidence was "Some spurious web request logs probing for PHP vulnerabilities leading back to Russian IPs that literally everyone also would have in their logs". Turns out, no.
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- api 5y agoThese claims don't need to be credible. They're propaganda and theater to fire up the base, not something intended to stand up in court or convince anyone who knows what they're talking about. 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.
- dvogel 5y agoObviously the packet captures would have included a tag line like "mess with the best, die like the rest."
- not2b 5y agoBesides, any packet captures are irrelevant. The swing states, for the most part, were using machine-countable paper ballots. There were manual recounts in Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. These recounts agreed with the original counts to within a tiny fraction of a percent, way too small a difference to affect the election outcome. Had the machines been hacked, the recounts would have exposed it. (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").
- dukeofdoom 5y agoThe way "Cyber Ninjas" was doing of actually counting each paper ballot. Which is not what the previous hand recounts were doing. Be careful with the definitions, because for all we know the previous hand recounts were just summing up batch totals written on the pallets. They couldn't be much more than that since it took them days to come up with. Whereas an actual hand recount of one county by Cyber Ninjas is taking months.
- debacle 5y agoThis article is a factoid filled hit piece. Not defending Lindell, but I would encourage people to find better coverage of this event. Finding unbiased coverage is likely impossible, but try to find at least a few you regard highly and read through the mess.
- xrd 5y agoI read it, and that wasn't my takeaway.
- strictnein 5y agoThere's no "better" or "unbiased" coverage because the whole thing is a scam.
- TechBro8615 5y agoI've been enjoying Rob Graham's Twitter threads on this sideshow.
- matthavener 5y agoSame, especially him revealing a "dump" as an RTF encoded CSV of IP addresses https://twitter.com/ErrataRob/status/1425175121963089920 https://twitter.com/ErrataRob/status/1425175121963089920
- fl0wenol 5y agoFrom a Chinese web crawler...
- sillyquiet 5y agoThe Washington Times is hardly a bastion of anti-Trumpism; just the opposite. As a matter of fact, most (non-conspiracy theory-subscribing) conservative outlets, including social media forum-goers are labelling Lindell and his nonsense as embarrassing garbage in general. Curious what the downvotes are disagreeing with here.
- majormajor 5y ago
- legitster 5y ago> Cybersecurity expert J. Kirk Wiebe, a former senior National Security Agency analyst and whistleblower, also said Mr. Lindell did not have the actual data sets. > 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.
- xrd 5y agoI wish someone could do a family tree and see if their parents and grandparents were the ones accusing D&D players of being satanists.
- whatshisface 5y agoThe 80s was only 40 years ago, you would not need a family tree for that. Also, the final Harry Potter book came out in 2007.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- rbanffy 5y agoIt’d probably find out their parents and grandparents are the same people. And uncles too, most likely.
- effingwewt 5y agoMy own mother did this, to me! I remember those stories vaguely I think one went full-on-nuts and every news station in the country was all of a sudden calling D&D 'satanic game' or some such garbage. 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.
- tedunangst 5y agoMaybe if they had released the data sooner instead of waiting for a conference bombshell, the expert who provided the data would still be in a pre stroke condition and able to explain it. Amazing how the deadline needs to get pushed back right at the very latest moment.
- bluehacker 5y agoI watched most of the event over the past few days. Mostly fluff. However, there were some actual interesting things uncovered, like decades old iis software runnning and logs that clearly showed some sort of network activity on and around election day. 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.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- bluehacker 5y agoYes, I come put once in awhile to attempt a reasonable discussion on HN only to be downvoted and disappointed.
- Ajedi32 5y agoYeah, no evidence of "election hacking" as far as I've seen, but it's still pretty ridiculous that these voting machines have a NIC attached to them at all, let alone that they're running web servers on them.
- bluehacker 5y agoThe day after the election, I scanned the voting website in my state for dead people. I found almost 5000 in my state alone. These are people that received a ballot and sent it in the next day. I was told this was 'fake news'. Things like this arent discussed, are censored, and I never got an answer from anyone as to how this happened. Its why I've decided to live a laws optional life.
- turminal 5y agoMajority of the internet runs on shitty outdated WordPress installations cobbled together with random scripts.
- paulpauper 5y agoIsn't mypillow a legit business, election fraud claims notwithstanding
- whatshisface 5y agoThe fact that MyPillow is indeed a pillow company does add some humor to the whole story. Pillows, of all things. :-)
- barbazoo 5y agoWhat's the point of linking every instance of his name as well as his pronouns to "https://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/mike-lindell/ https://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/mike-lindell/", is that some kind of SEO trick?
- meigwilym 5y agoI've seen this on a number of news sites. I assume they're trying to increase their scores of topic pages for searches of individuals.
- an1sotropy 5y agoYou know the jig is up when even the Washington Times says that it's a fraud.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- motohagiography 5y agoThey should release hashed and signed files and disk images as torrents. It's that easy. 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.
- dukeofdoom 5y agoBiden recorder the most votes in history, while winning the fewest counties. 12 million vote increase over Obama with 300+ fewer counties. Must be wildly more popular. Yet was losing the nomination of his own party. Can't 10k views on youtube, but somehow more black people turned out to vote for him in Detroit than Obama. Also don't forget, Biden was losing 5 key states, until somehow overnight the mail-in ballot rate reversed overnight. The rate difference between in person and mail in ballots was not seen in others. The stacking of improbabilities is a head scratcher. I, like 40%+ of Americans have doubts about this Election.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y agoI do not. Biden was running against one of the most controversial presidents in US history, during a crisis he was thought to be handling poorly, and with widespread mail-in and early voting making voting more convenient than ever. A large voter turnout is not surprising, and neither is the result. Additionally, election fraud on this scale would require a massive conspiracy of people from multiple economic classes, political ideologies, government branches, and specialities. It is incredibly difficult to imagine that working.
- dukeofdoom 5y agoHope you know that there have been proven massive election frauds in other countries, which would require conspiracies of the kind you think don't exist. I just don't understand your trust. People cheat at anything competitive. If play any competitive organized sport, you'll quickly realize that playing the ref is part of the game. The pressure to win must be so much more than when there are billions on the line. Florida a huge state was able to deliver results on time. Yet the biggest democratic counties, in the key states took days. And had massive reversals in overnight counts. And only they show this rate of reversal. Places like Detroit are notoriously corrupt. The former mayor Kirkpatrick received a 28 year sentence after running the mayor office like his own for profit business for years. Lots of people kept quiet and went along. There's also this article, which is like OJ Simpsons book. "If I did it". These people couldn't help but gloat. "The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election" https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/ https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/
- was8309 5y agoThis is for those here that think 'fact checkers' are a bad idea. You don't want a fact checker to deliver your opinion of hard questions, like 'is there life after death', but we need fact checkers because some people are on the fence over whether the earth is flat. this is cut and dried. you can argue fine points, but for people who aren't sure, a fact check report that condenses everything that is known and summarizes as 'scam' would be helpful to alot of people. I'd love to see a argdown platform for this stuff
- excalibur 5y agoDoes Mike Lindell know anybody who isn't a serial con-man?
- edly 5y agoIs there a conversation that needs to be had around the security of voting machines? Yes. Is America's electoral system fundamentally flawed? Yes. Should election machines be audited and held to the highest possible standard of information security? Yes. 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.
- jollybean 5y agoThere's no evidence that the voting machines or that voting is fundamentally broken. It's probably not that hard to fake a single vote, but it's exceedingly difficult to fake them in bulk, in a systematic manner.
- vernie 5y agoI hope all these charlatans bleed him dry.
- dukeofdoom 5y agoThis is the biggest thing that came out of the conference. 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ro00TQuTUcc&t=37s
- once-in-a-while 5y agoIf you REALLY want to see the fraud exposed, just read through this summary (lazy HN people will -- of course -- refuse to do that "hard work" of actually reading the whole thing): https://electionfraud20.org/in-detail/cyber-symposium-mike-lindell/ https://electionfraud20.org/in-detail/cyber-symposium-mike-l... BTW, Trump will be back in 2021. Can't wait for the HN outcry when this will finally happen. We Won.