The con is winding down [View all]

[brooklynite]

Washington Post

Imagine that someone handed you an envelope containing a lengthy document written in Portuguese. You have it translated and you learn that it’s a written confession from a criminal who is currently siphoning billions of dollars a day from millions of individual checking accounts. What do you do next?

Presumably, you call the local police or the FBI. You present them with the original document and the translation and let them take it from there. What you presumably do not do is promise for weeks on end that you have definitive proof that someone is stealing millions of dollars from bank accounts and that people need to fly to some remote location so that you can unveil that proof over the course of three days.

The gibberish above is one result of the latter process. Lindell, who has claimed for months and months that he had definitive proof that the 2020 presidential election was stolen by China, pledged to release that information at a “cyber symposium” that is underway in South Dakota. According to Lindell, someone captured Internet traffic in the days after the election that shows how votes were shifted away from Donald Trump and to President Biden. Instead of simply presenting this evidence to the public, he withheld it, offering $5 million to anyone who can prove that the information isn’t legitimate.

Rob Graham, a technologist and author, went to the summit to evaluate what Lindell claims to have. During a “breakout session,” he and others were provided with access to what Lindell’s team claims to have obtained. Graham shared what they were given — a collection of files that consists of 1) a list of computer internet-protocol addresses and 2) gibberish like that above. Well, technically they were given rich-text format files, some of which were inexplicably converted to hexadecimal encoding. Graham, an expert on Internet data, described the provided material as “a bunch of confusing stuff they can’t explain,” and said that those running the symposium pledged to hand over the “real” information Tuesday night or Wednesday. Meanwhile, Lindell’s live stream of the symposium — being watched by hundreds of thousands of people on one streaming feed — presses on, with the CEO mostly riffing on how toxic the media is. Promotions offer viewers codes for discounts at MyPillow, a useful bit of advertising given that Lindell’s conspiracy theories have cost his company placement in a number of retailers’ inventories.

Again, it’s been the case for months that Lindell has said his “cyber experts” saw proof of vote hacking in the captured packets of data. It would, presumably, be very easy for those experts to then stand up and quickly walk through what they found and what it means. But this has never happened. It’s never even been explained what such evidence would look like. Instead, Lindell’s relied on lengthy statistical presentations from a guy named Douglas Frank, presentations that are the functional equivalent of a kid reviewing a Jackson Pollock painting: they’re looking at something, to be sure, and picking out patterns and meaning where they can.