[bediger4000]

It wasn't clear from the article, but I think this is fallout from something Lindell called "Cyber Symposium" in 2021. Lindell promised PCAPs to people, which as we know, are files with ethernet or WiFi frames in them, in a conventional format. Conservative-leaning infosec expert Robert "rsnake" Graham was in attendance and live tweeted it. Graham is something of a curmudgeon, and apparently independently wealthy, so he would almost certainly have been happy to find PCAP-formatted files that showed any contact with voting machines.

Graham did not find any such thing, and was disappointed that the Cyber Symposium was such a mess, and that he didn't get any PCAPs. So the winner of the challenge isn't alone in saying that the files provided were untainted by packet captures and had nothing to do with the 2020 election.

[im3w1l]

So I think I'm starting to get a theory of what happened. Lindell was duped by some guy that came forward to him with "proof" of election interference. However Lindell had a problem, he had no ability to personally verify the files, and everyone thought he was too much of a looney to bother taking his claims and files seriously. So he came up with a solution, namely to pay people to take his claims seriously. By making it into a contest, he wouldn't even have to pay up, since the files would undoubtedly (in his mind) turn out to be real.

Could this be it?

[robert-graham]

Hi. I'm Robert Graham. I'm not "rsnake", that is Robert Hansen.

I'm libertarian, not conservative leaning. I loathe and despise Trump. As a centrist, both polarized sides see me aligned with the opposing side.

The ~20 cyberexperts in attendance were invited due to their support of Republican causes. The two independnets were myself, invited through Lead Stories (a fact-checking firm) and Harri Hursti, invited through CNN. Lindell was so certain of himself that he invited his fact-checking adversaries CNN and LeadStories to come see for themselves. I'm a well known "pcaps" expert and a well-known centrist that doesn't have an ax to grind either way, so LeadStories sent me as their representatives. You'll find me debunking/confirming other fact stuff, like the AlphaBank-TrumpTower theory, or the Hunter-Laptop theory.

Lindell didn't give us pcaps. I think he honestly believed he had them. It's just that he's non-technical, and has no ability to judge whether somebody is technical enough to judge whether he has pcaps. He's also not very good at listening. It appears he surrounded himself with technical-looking people (like Phil Waldron) that assure him he had pcaps.

Lindell's claims are incredibly implausible. Election machines aren't on the Internet in the numbers Lindell claimed. But pcaps could answer questions. For example, the TTLs would show whether they were captured near the victim, near the attacker, or someplace in between (like an undersea cable). It's unbelievable they would show election hacking, but I was burning with curiosity about what they DID show.