This 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.
I 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.
There'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.
Let'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.
For sure, that's why it's also healthy to have a broad and diversified news media covering important issues. It's also why I worry about the centralization and collapse of local journalism; it's the boots on the ground who are best able to contextualize a story when it goes from local to national.
History shows us that sometimes the real story was entirely inaccessible to the culture of the time; even diverse editorializing could still hide facts nobody thought were relevant.
A hypothesis: We are all narrative building, all of the time. It's what humans do.
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.
That's nice, and rational, but 'Narratives' I believe are more often than not misleading and are used to contextualize towards advocacy instead of journalism.
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.
Can you provide examples? I just see this as an example of Gish gallop creating a situation were multiple claims are put forward and it is hard to counter them all at the same time.
The article contains many contradicting claims from separate people, spanning the spectrum. It is reporting on basically everything the author could get, which is confusing but reflects well on the idea of journalism. I will reproduce a couple examples but there are more.
>“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.
They published hex dumps of RTF files of IP address lists, and a corpus of "lorem ipsum"-style Chinese text scraped from ad copy. You can see it on Github. There is no reason any of us need to take this seriously, or to be at all skeptical of news stories about how it's a scam.
I think you're possibly misinterpreting it - the news article is unequivocally clear about what its sources are saying, the sources are the ones who are contradicting each other. We are so used to newspaper editorialization / tunnel vision that to see two disagreeing sources on the same page is surprising.
Observing that the people being quoted don't have a straight story between them is hardly litigation, it's a fairly pertinent indicator of the epistemic state of those involved. A newspaper intent on presenting a cohesive narrative and not confusing the reader would have paved over the contradictions, destroying this valuable signal by only printing quotes that agreed with each other. That's my point, that the author is doing something valuable, that may appear on the surface to be "bad writing," if judged the way we judge fiction, but is in fact good reporting.
I don't read it that way. Read back to your first comment on the thread. You've depicted a live debate about whether Lindell has any evidence for his conspiracy theory. We have the data he released. The debate, to whatever extent it existed originally, is no longer live.
I think you're misunderstanding the point the OP is making.
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.
For the $5M, it looks like that is showing how much disconnect there is between members of the same "Team"
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. :-)
What? This is an article from a right leaning news provider that backs up every claim that it makes with a named source including some from within the team appointed by Lindell.
The article's claims are all that someone said something, which are indeed backed up with names - but the things they're quoting do not line up with each other, because the situation they are reporting on is not exactly being arranged forthrightly by all participants.
These 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.
I 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.
I 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).
Their evidence consisted of more than web server logs. I personally don't think their claims matched their evidence but they did provide details about the exploits found, corroborated by the FBI. The primary implant found on the DNC network had been linked by multiple other security companies to other hacks that were almost definitely carried out by Russia-affiliated hackers. These links have been well-documented and have supporting links in the Wikipedia article.
I'm much more in-the-know and connected to real world whitehats and blackhats than not just your average person but also your average infosec person. It's complete bullshit.
No not at all. Unlike CrowdStrike, I'm not trying to convince anyone of anything. You can believe me or not and I don't care.
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.
This would be more credible if you hadn't tried to present a technical argument about Crowdstrike's analysis that was trivially refuted in a 2-line reply.
It doesn't matter -- we're in a post truth era where political affiliation matters more than facts and every side will circle the wagons with their own. Evidence has become less credible than who is supplying it and why.
Thanks though, I just won a $100 bet with the guy next to me that you'd be making a reply in this thread and here we are.
That 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.
Calvinball. 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.
I for one would love to get my hands on whatever they offer. If it's actual packet data, that's gravy, maybe I can find something interesting. If it's /dev/random, that's also hilarious.
You're missing the fact there was a $5 million bounty to disapprove the claims. Some cyber security experts were probably hoping for an easy pay day. They probably were foolish to think he'd actually pay though. Con artists never pay when they make these big "prove me wrong" bets.
These 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.
Besides, 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").
The 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.
You are misinformed. The previous recounts were not conducted the way you describe, and it does not take months to count up the paper ballots from one county, unless perhaps if you have no experience at all with ever conducting or auditing an election and you waste time investigating ridiculous theories, like looking for bamboo.
This 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.
The 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.
If you're saying we shouldn't even trust this conservative outlet's reporting, could you please provide some examples of where you think he is treated fairly?
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.
> 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.
I have had people react negatively to be attending "hackathons." They think I am a criminal. MLH is also blocked by some internet gateway software for being "criminal."
My 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.
Maybe 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.
I 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.
Yeah, 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.
The politicization of this issue has done a lot of damage to the legitimate debate surrounding the security of closed-source privately designed and never-pentested voting machines.
I think anyone in the DefCon Voting Machine Hacking village would agree that voting machines can be hacked...
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.
> 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.
If 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?
That 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.
> 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.
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.
They 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.
Biden 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.
I 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.
Different states had different rules for when absentee ballots could be counted. Pennsylvania's Republican state legislature mandated that votes not be counted until in-person e-day voting began. Florida, on the other hand, was allowed to start counting absentee ballots 22 days in advance. And 2020 was not an ordinary election; it took place in the middle of a pandemic, which radically increased the amount of absentee voting. This stuff is all pretty straightforward, but it's easy to leave details out and make it sound less so.
> Hope 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.
Pulling off the fraud is the simple part, keeping it covered up for this long is the difficult to believe part. In order to do so, significant portions of the legal system, many officials related to elections, and politicians from both sides of the isle having diametrically opposed interest in the results would have to conspire to do so and I just don't buy that.
> I just don't understand you 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.
Of course, that's why elections have the protections in place that they do. They certainly aren't perfect but it isn't like it's all based on the honor system.
> 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.
Sigh, there are a ton of reasons this could happen. The most obvious is that those states weren't allowed to count mail-in ballots early and had a lot of mail in ballots due to the pandemic convincing states to make them more accessible than ever.
This is not what proof looks like, it's what the "pyramids were built by aliens" nonsense looks like. Ask a lot of questions, provide no answers, only implications.
Doesn't it stand to reason that almost every new election has the highest votes in history due to growing populations?
Obama held the record previously with least counties won. This is not surprising because it's widely known that urban voters are largely blue and rural voters are mostly red. And urban counties are growing very fast, and red counties are suffering from population attrition, so this is going to occur even more in the future.
>Also don't forget, Biden was losing 5 key states, until somehow overnight the mail-in ballot rate reversed overnight.
This only matters to people who treat the counting of the ballots as some kind of race. It's not; the winner is set as soon as the polls close and the last valid ballot is accepted. The process of observation is incidental. Recounts were performed, audits were performed, left wing and right wing members validated the results.
And don't toss that 40% number in with your conspiracy theories to make them sound legitimate. You are doing a disservice to the Americans in that 40% who don't trust elections because they are DISENFRANCHISED.
> The stacking of improbabilities is a head scratcher.
"This study applies Benford’s law to detect anomalies in county-level vote data for the 2020 US presidential election. Most prominent distribution violations are observed with Republican vote counts in blue states, all vote counts in states won by the Democratic candidate, and Democratic vote counts in swing states. Distributions are anomalous in swing states won by the Democratic nominee and not anomalous in swing states won by the Republican nominee. The results are robust to two-digit analysis, Monte Carlo simulations of p-values, broad or narrow swing state definitions, and when compared to distributions observed in 2008, 2012, and 2016 elections." - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3728626
This 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
Is 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.
There'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.
This 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.
If 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):
116 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 182 ms ] threadThe 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. :-)
"They held the meeting in the clay soil below the building!"
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.
Thanks though, I just won a $100 bet with the guy next to me that you'd be making a reply in this thread and here we are.
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...
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").
https://twitter.com/ErrataRob/status/1425175121963089920
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.
> 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Pulling off the fraud is the simple part, keeping it covered up for this long is the difficult to believe part. In order to do so, significant portions of the legal system, many officials related to elections, and politicians from both sides of the isle having diametrically opposed interest in the results would have to conspire to do so and I just don't buy that.
> I just don't understand you 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.
Of course, that's why elections have the protections in place that they do. They certainly aren't perfect but it isn't like it's all based on the honor system.
> 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.
Sigh, there are a ton of reasons this could happen. The most obvious is that those states weren't allowed to count mail-in ballots early and had a lot of mail in ballots due to the pandemic convincing states to make them more accessible than ever.
This is not what proof looks like, it's what the "pyramids were built by aliens" nonsense looks like. Ask a lot of questions, provide no answers, only implications.
Obama held the record previously with least counties won. This is not surprising because it's widely known that urban voters are largely blue and rural voters are mostly red. And urban counties are growing very fast, and red counties are suffering from population attrition, so this is going to occur even more in the future.
>Also don't forget, Biden was losing 5 key states, until somehow overnight the mail-in ballot rate reversed overnight.
This only matters to people who treat the counting of the ballots as some kind of race. It's not; the winner is set as soon as the polls close and the last valid ballot is accepted. The process of observation is incidental. Recounts were performed, audits were performed, left wing and right wing members validated the results.
And don't toss that 40% number in with your conspiracy theories to make them sound legitimate. You are doing a disservice to the Americans in that 40% who don't trust elections because they are DISENFRANCHISED.
"This study applies Benford’s law to detect anomalies in county-level vote data for the 2020 US presidential election. Most prominent distribution violations are observed with Republican vote counts in blue states, all vote counts in states won by the Democratic candidate, and Democratic vote counts in swing states. Distributions are anomalous in swing states won by the Democratic nominee and not anomalous in swing states won by the Republican nominee. The results are robust to two-digit analysis, Monte Carlo simulations of p-values, broad or narrow swing state definitions, and when compared to distributions observed in 2008, 2012, and 2016 elections." - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3728626
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.
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://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.