Mike Lindell’s cyber symposium was ‘garbage,’ says expert who attended
- Mike Lindell’s “cyber symposium” was supposed to reveal new information about voter fraud.
- But multiple cyber experts who attended the event said it didn’t.
- One hailed it as a waste of time, while another said it was “a big fat nothing.”
MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell’s 72-hour “cyber symposium” failed to produce legitimate evidence of voter fraud, cyber experts who attended the event said.
Lindell said he would reveal new information proving that China helped Joe Biden to “steal” the 2020 election from former President Donald Trump at the event in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
Lindell claimed he had 37 terabytes of information related to voter fraud that he would reveal. He said he’d give $5 million to any cyber expert, politician, or reporter who could refute the data, provided they attend the event in person.
Lindell’s claims were meritless, according to Rob Graham, a cyber expert who attended the symposium. “He gave us experts NOTHING today, except random garbage that wastes our time,” Graham tweeted Wednesday.
He added: “All day Mike Lindell has been on stage saying the cyber experts are happily working on packet captures. We are not. We haven’t been given the packet captures we were promised.”
Packet captures are intercepted network data obtained by other hackers. Lindell claimed the packet captures from the November 2020 election could be unencrypted to reveal evidence of voter fraud.
Harri Hursti, another attendee and election security expert, doubled down on criticism towards the event. He told The Washington Post that Lindell’s symposium was “a big fat nothing and a distraction,” adding that, “they have fed us with garbage just to control the narrative.”
Cyber expert Josh Merritt, who said he was hired by Lindell to study data for the event, told The Washington Times that the data his team had access to wasn’t enough to prove that China hacked the election.
—Zachary Petrizzo (@ZTPetrizzo) August 12, 2021
On day two, the crowd “wasn’t having it” and mostly left as a result, tweeted Zachary Petrizzo, a Salon reporter who also attended.
A staunch ally of Trump, Lindell has been a superspreader of conspiracy theories about the election being “stolen,” despite no evidence of voter fraud.
This led to Lindell being sued by voting-machine company Dominion for $1.3 billion for saying it “switched” votes from Trump to Biden. Retailers have pulled MyPillow’s products, and Lindell said he’d received death threats.
The pundit’s relationship with conservative cable outlet, Fox News, similarly soured after the network refused to air advertisements promoting Lindell’s symposium.
Some of Trump’s most influential supporters attended the event. These included conspiracy theorists Ronald Watkins and Steve Bannon, as well as the son of Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro.
While Bannon is pro-Trump, Salon reported that he, too, was skeptical about Lindell’s claims, stating that he needed to see additional evidence.
One expert in cyber security and technology told the outlet that even if Lindell’s data claims were correct, he could face legal charges. “You can’t just pull this kind of information from a remote, you have to have a physical device sitting there that is providing this information,” the expert said.
The expert said the only way Lindell could have accumulated the kind of data he claims about voter fraud is by inserting a physical device that can “watch information that is going in and out of a network,” which is wiretapping and a breach of federal law.
Lindell did not respond to the specific concerns raised by the expert, Salon reported.
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