In the summer of 2021, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell held his “Cyber Symposium” where he very publicly offered a $5 million reward to anyone who could disprove that his vast horde of “election data” contained evidence of Chinese hacking. Unfortunately for Lindell, someone did exactly that.
Despite only three days to sift through the mountain of data, software forensics expert Bob Zeidman effectively proved that there was no evidence of hacking. Lindell responded by going radio silent and refusing to pay the reward until Zeidman took him to court and won in an arbitration hearing.
Now, Zeidman has revealed how his methods to debunking Lindell’s “data,” which turned out to be very easy to do after Zeidman realized that all of it was “gibberish.” It was just word processor documents packed with random numbers and characters.
Via Politico:
My eureka moment had arrived. While everyone else was looking at the sky, I had found the golden ticket on the ground; while they were trying to find packet data in the files, the truth was that it wasn’t packet data at all. I said something out loud like, “I’m going to take this back to my hotel room and work on it there,” to no one in particular. I quietly and deliberately packed up my laptop and strolled out of the room and out of the venue. On the way back to the hotel, I called my wife. “Start thinking about what you want to do with 5 million dollars,” I told her.
After writing up his report, Zeidman said that Lindell threw a curveball and that’s when Ziedman realized the game the MyPillow CEO was playing. He was going to slowly dole out more “data” to keep anyone from winning. However, this approach blew up in Lindell’s face when Ziedman found something even more telling in the new batch:
On the third and final day of the symposium, an idea hit me. I decided to scan the file modification dates for all of the latest files we’d been given and, lo and behold, most of the dates were August 2021, right before the symposium.
In other words, the data were obviously modified right before we examined them. They could not possibly accurately represent data from the November 2020 election.
At that point, it was game over for Lindell. When the MyPillow CEO tried to avoid honoring the terms of the contest, Zeidman got an attorney and successfully defeated Lindell again. Lindell is appealing the arbitration ruling, but the only way he can win is if he somehow proves the arbitrators were “corrupt.” Good luck with that.
(Via Politico)