Election conspiracist Mike Lindell must pay $5M to expert who proved him wrong

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/04/election-conspiracist-mike-lindell-must-pay-5m-to-expert-who-proved-him-wrong/

by goodwink • 3 years ago

26 14 3 years ago

arstechnica.com

paulpauper• 3 years ago

Audience capture and sunk costs creates an incentive to be more extreme, to dig in even when proven wrong. He messed up big time.

bediger40002• 3 years ago

Lindell has plenty of chances to turn back, to renounce falsehoods and embrace truths. But he insisted on being an Argument from Authority personified. If anyone deserves to be penalized, Mike Lindell does.

AnimalMuppet• 3 years ago

In arbitration. Now he's saying he'll take it to court. Depending on how the arbitration clause was written, he may not find that easy to do. If he does take it to court, well, IANAL, but I doubt he'll find it easy to get the arbitrator's decision overturned.

Past that, he could either refuse to pay, or declare bankruptcy. Both have legal downsides; both also rather strongly damage his public image. (Of course, if he cared about his public image, he would have gotten off this road a long time ago...)

Kon-Peki• 3 years ago

In arbitration. Now he's saying he'll take it to court.

Meh. That’s what they all say.

im3w1l3• 3 years ago

I read the article but I feel like I didn't get it. What was the point of this contest? Why were they given some random files that they struggled to even open?

bediger40002• 3 years ago

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.

im3w1l3• 3 years ago

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-graham3• 3 years ago

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.

ridiculous_fish• 3 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35642772

goodSteveramos• 3 years ago

The cExtractor tool being provided to contest participants after the contest didn't help Lindell in the panel's view because "the data at issue is the data provided to contestants as part of the Contest, not some data in hundreds of files informally provided later."

thats like saying a zip file must not contain any data because it didnt come with a copy of the unzip program.

the underlying arguments for this judgement are just as nonsensical as the contest

im3w1l3• 3 years ago

What is cExtractor anyway? I'm not able to find anything that fits. Just https://github.com/JustCallMeSimon26/CExtractor

robert-graham3• 3 years ago

It was a program written by Dennis Montgomery in dot-net/C++ provided to Mike Lindell along with the .bin files that Montgomery claims to contain pcaps.

It simply scans files looking for strings, and outputs those strings.

Montgomery's code is incomprehesible and weird, so I wrote my own extract program in C. https://github.com/robertdavidgraham/blxtract

commoner• 3 years ago

No, even when the files are processed through cExtractor, the resulting data would not be considered "election data". The arbitration ruling looks sound to me.

One of the contest judges testified that the binary data would yield a spreadsheet similar to the other one analyzed during the contest. But "without column headings, we have already concluded that such a spreadsheet does not meet the definition of election data," the panel wrote.

robert-graham3• 3 years ago

Hi. I was at the Cybersymposium. The cExtractor tool was provided to us during the Cybersymposium, not after. A lot more files were provided than this person claims to have received.

I don't understand the panel's reasoning either. Nobody knows all that these .bin files contain. There's no evidence they are from the 2020 election, but no evidence they aren't. I didn't enter the contest because I thought the rule were rigged, that nobody could prove what these files don't contain.

They look like either randomly generated or encrypted data, within which ever couple megabytes a line of text has been inserted. The line of text is ROT3, which may be what Dr. Frank refers to as a "test" to see if people know what they are doing.

Election conspiracist Mike Lindell must pay $5M to expert who proved him wrong

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