I Won $5M from the MyPillow Guy and Saved Democracy

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/05/26/my-pillow-mike-lindell-investigation-00097903

by Svip • 3 years ago

45 17 3 years ago

spacebacon• 3 years ago

Bring your brooms because it’s a mess. Zack Galifianakis transforms character Marty Huggins to play pillow mogul Mike Lindell in The Campaign 2.

akudha• 3 years ago

People like Cruz, Graham know precisely what they are doing, they aren’t dumb. This MyPillow guy though - he seems genuinely crazy and dumb. It is kinda sad to see him rant and rave on Faux

HaroldBolt78• 3 years ago

This sounds terribly amateurish, and even unfair.

I have a hard time believing that the 40-50 other software forensics experts didn't recognise ASCII in hex, or bother converting these files even if they didn't.

If I understand correctly, he only analysed a tiny proportion of the data. Junk or not, it doesn't disprove that the remaining majority held key evidence.

He "determined that nothing in the file was related to the 2020 presidential election". What is "determined" here?

It sounds like this was more of a gaming of the system than it was a forensic investigation. There must be an awful lot missing here.

Edit:

Having read the full report now, I am of the opinion that this was a(n attempted) fraudulent competition by a wealthy moron, exploited by an unscrupulous parasite with the good fortune of misleading arbitrators into a skewed perception of the competition terms that guaranteed his success. Both of them acted disgracefully; this should have been a criminal matter dealing with the fraud, and the other hack shouldn't have a dime to show for it.

carlmr2• 3 years ago

All the files were modified post election. The files he did check where all just meaningless lists of IP addresses in RTF documents.

jongjong• 3 years ago

How can you say that a list of IP addresses is meaningless without investigating who was behind them? There can be a lot of information there.

The idea that someone would set up some kind of hacker convention and offer a reward for hundreds of experts to parse through gigabytes of random fake data that they intentionally created sounds beyond insane. What is the motive for that? I didn't even hear about this convention, so it can't be a PR stunt...

It's just not believable. If that's where we're at, we might as well believe the majority of conspiracy theories which are less far-fetched than this.

paulgb• 3 years ago

As I read it, his forensics was unsophisticated (who trusts file modified dates on files that have clearly been copied?), but his analysis was enough to give him the confidence to call Lindell’s bluff, which none of the others did.

The author thought that Lindell was sending everyone on a wild goose chase with irrelevant data, and Lindell couldn’t defend against that claim in arbitration.

tehwebguy• 3 years ago

This is practically the best possible outcome actually: a scammer loses $5M for staging a fraudulent contest.

SkyMarshal2• 3 years ago

Junk or not, it doesn't disprove that the remaining majority held key evidence.

That’s not how proof works. The burden of proof is on Lindell to prove his claims true, not Zeidman or the public to disprove some unsubstantiated claims like this.

satisfice• 3 years ago

This isn’t steganography, man.

Lindell produces files from somewhere (unspecified) of some (unspecified) nature and without explanation makes a claim that they show evidence of crime X.

The goal in this situation cannot be to prove that there is no data here related to crime X. That would be equivalent to proving that a seemingly random string of bits cannot possibly encode a secret message.

The goal is to show that it is implausible that the files could represent evidence of crime X, given the circumstances in which the data was encountered. Not only did the author accomplish this, but the real telling point is that, with five million dollars at stake, Lindell could produce no substantial rebuttal from any of those 50 other hackers, nor any other expert who could say words to the effect that “this is PCAP data even though it is in a format never before associated with PCAPs” or “the reason the data appears to be recently created is [plausible explanation X]”

camdenlock2• 3 years ago

After all, I invented the field of software forensics

Stopped there

primitivesuave• 3 years ago

The case document is especially interesting: https://www.washingtonpost.com/documents/a68b42f4-d5dc-4ff9-...

camdenlock2• 3 years ago

Thank you for sharing this. Much more interesting than the arrogant slop published in Politico by this Zeidman character.

jaclaz• 3 years ago

In his words:

After all, I invented the field of software forensics, the science of analyzing software source code for intellectual property infringement or theft.

he invented the field, like Mark Twain, he is modest, not everywhere, but in spots.

Though, to be fair, this sentence in the actual report is great:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35643126

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35643431

monero-xmr• 3 years ago

The most obvious avenues for election fraud are around the edges. Check out Ballot Harvesting

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballot_collection

This lead to a fraud conviction and a subsequent special election in North Carolina https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/30/us/mccrae-dowless-indictm...

Here is a list of real convictions:

https://www.congress.gov/116/meeting/house/108824/documents/...

You must realize that a criminal conviction through the slow cogs of justice likely means the problem is 100x larger.

But all that said, Trump still lost and there isn’t a widespread coverup. I’m merely pointing out that election fraud does happen and we could do better as a society to make that less possible if we really tried.

babelthuap• 3 years ago

Mike Lindell got duped by whoever gave him the data but in reality he duped himself by not hiring this guy to QA it. On the other hand, he did end up hiring him by default by placing the bet so...meh.

If it were me I would have pursued the proprietary software for the machines which should not be proprietary. It's counting votes. Nothing special about that software. It should be available for anyone to look at. It's impossible to claim there was no voter fraud without seeing that software. I believed Bill Clinton as a kid right up until the point the blue dress was made public. After that nobody believed Bill.

SkyMarshal2• 3 years ago

Why is this flagged? Is it just b/c the forensics performed here were relatively simplistic?

I Won $5M from the MyPillow Guy and Saved Democracy

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