Things just blew up badly and very publicly for Mike Lindell, the My Pillow guy. This week he has been holding a three day "Cyber Symposium" in South Dakota. The world being what it is, the whole thing was live streamed. And that meant that all the good parts leaked.
It was Lindell's show, so he was on stage the whole time. The first catastrophe he suffered was when he received a message while he was on stage. The message said that he had just lost a round in a big lawsuit he is involved in. But that wasn't the worst of it. To understand that you have to know what the high point of the event was supposed to be.
For some time now Lindell has been bragging that he has 37 Terabytes of data. It was encrypted, presumably for security reasons. But, when decrypted, the data would provide definitive and incontrovertible proof that the evil Dr. Fu Manchu, well actually the Chinese Government, had successfully engineered an elaborate, cleaver, and successful scheme to fix the election. Yes! Trump was the real winner.
Along with the 37 Terabytes of data (see - I told you it was elaborate - 37 Terabytes worth of elaborate), Lindell had been provided with the tools necessary to decrypt every single byte of it. And the decrypted data would reveal all. And it would reveal so much detail that the existence of plot it laid bare would be unassailable.
Before the seminar started he had turned all this over to his crack "Red Team" of crypto and computer experts. They were going to reveal all at the end of the seminar. And, they did reveal all. It was just not what Lindell expected.
Had things gone as Lindell expected, and had the revelation lived up to the hype, then the results would have been earthshattering. To understand just how earthshattering this kind of revelation can be, I turn to an actual historical event, the so called Zimmermann Telegram.
During World War I a German official named Zimmermann sent a telegram to the German embassy in Mexico City. In the telegram he directed the Ambassador to offer Mexico control over parts of the U.S., and other concessions. All Mexico had to do was to enter the War on the side of the Germans.
Should the contents of the telegram become public knowledge in the U.S., the damage to the German cause would have been enormous. So, the Germans encrypted the telegram using their most secure diplomatic cypher.
The contents of the telegram were protected by presumably unbreakable encryption. It was further protected by sending it via a route that would deny the British access to the message, even in its encrypted form. It turns out however, the the British had cracked the code. And they had secretly managed to tap the underwater telegraph cable the Germans were using.
The British successfully intercepted the telegram and decrypted it. So, they knew what the Germans were up to. But the British were already at War with the Germans, so that alone didn't hurt the German cause very much. What would hurt Germany badly would be to get the contents of the telegram into the hands of U.S. officials.
This was a long time ago. At the time, the U.S. was a neutral and generally liked to stay out of wars. As a good neutral, the U.S. did not tap into telegraph cables, underwater or otherwise. Nor did they have any significant cryptographic capability. They just didn't think that those sorts of things constituted proper civilized behavior.
The British needed to find a way to get the decrypted telegram into the hands of U.S. officials. And they needed to do it without unduly upsetting U.S. officials. They also needed a way to prove to the U.S. that the telegram was legitimate, and finally that they had not altered the contents. That looked to be a tall order.
The British finally settled on a complicated plan that they were confident would meet all of their objectives. The first step was to get an obviously legitimate copy of the encrypted version of the telegram into U.S. hands. That required a deft touch.
From a practical point of view, the task was easy. The telegram had gone from Berlin to New York, and then on to Mexico City. At the time telegraph companies kept copies of all overseas telegrams. So, there was an obviously legitimate copy of the telegram sitting in the New York office of the telegraph company the Germans had used. (The British had cut all of the telegraph lines belonging to the German government by now.)
It took some very deft diplomacy, but the British convinced the U.S. to ask the appropriate telegraph company for a copy of the telegram in question. The company honored the request. Perhaps the fact that the telegram was encrypted soothed the conscience of both government and company officials. The result, however, was to put an obviously legitimate copy of the encrypted telegram into the hands of the U.S. government. That took care of the first step.
Then a British cryptographic expert taught an American official how to decrypt it. This resulted in a "plain text" version of the telegram that had been produced by an America. Sure, the British had provided the procedure. But the American did the actual decoding.. It was in German, but finding someone in New York who could translate German into English was easy.
But it was still possible that the British were pulling off some kind of ruse. Maybe the telegram, when properly decrypted, produced an entirely different message. Fortunately, there are tests that could be performed. A simple example is based on the game show, Wheel of Fortune.
You know the "RSTLNE" business associated with the final puzzle. It turns out that R, S, T, L, and N are the most common consonants found in English words. E is the most common vowel. There are tables that list the popularity of every letter in the alphabet for English. There is a similar tables for German. (The differences are small but significant.) The decrypted message was subjected to frequency table analysis. It passed. It also passed other, similar tests. The decrypted message was legitimate.
And the message eventually ended up being printed by the newspapers of the time. At that point the Germans owned up to the fact that the telegram was legitimate. The Zimmermann telegram turned out to be the last straw.
Other events like the sinking of the unarmed passenger ship Lusitania, had predisposed the U.S. to favor the British by this time. In any case, shortly after the telegram was published in the papers, the U.S. entered World War I on the British side. Whatever side the U.S. entered the war on, was likely to be victorious. So, the impact of the Zimmermann telegram was earthshaking.
And, if Lindell had provided incontrovertible evidence that the Chinese had engaged in a massive and successful campaign to flip the 2020 election results from Trump to Biden, the result would also have been similarly earthshaking. But, in Lindell's case, things did not go the same way they did in the Zimmermann example.
Remember the complicated and careful plan the British used to establish the legitimacy of the text of the telegram? Lindell did the opposite. He would not disclose where the 37 Terabytes had come from. To thoughtful people that was a red flag. If it came from a credible and reliable source, why hide it?
If the data was legitimate, then U.S. intelligence services should have picked at least some of it up. But they didn't. Remember, at the time Trump was still President. If a U.S. intelligence agency had picked something up, intelligence officials would have rushed to appraise the White House. The White House, in turn, would have blasted the information into every communications channel imaginable.
Then there are various private security firms and companies like Microsoft. Many of them monitor Chinese activity for suspicious behavior. If they had seen something they would have said something. Many had previously made pronouncements about what the Chinese were up to. They would have had no reason to keep quiet about something like this. Yet none of them reported anything.
And, thanks to the reporting of the Washington Times, a right wing newspaper not to be confused with the Washington Post, we know where the data trove came from. It came from Dennis Montgomery. Montgomery is a known fraudster with a long track record of repeatedly running this kind of scam.
What kind of scam? He sells an "encrypted file" to someone. He promised that, if decrypted, it includes bombshell revelations, exactly the kind of bombshell revelations the purchaser is most interested in uncovering. Once he has the money, he provides the decryption instructions. They don't work.
He has perpetrated this hoax on the British, the French, even the CIA during the George W. Bush administration. If you Google "Dennis Montgomery", which I did, links to all this pop up immediately. So, on the one hand you have the British going to elaborate lengths to give U.S. officials justifiable confidence that the message is real. And on the other hand, you have Lindell buying a bunch of implausible material from a known fraudster.
And, by now, you know what happens next. Lindell's Red Team was unable to decrypt the data into anything useful. His head crypto expert was Josh "Spyder" Merritt. Merritt is a well known enabler in right wing circles. He bills himself as an IT consultant, but his resume is sparse, especially when it comes to crypto expertise. He failed to complete the introductory course the Army runs its Military Intelligence trainees through, for instance.
But even for a true believer like Merritt (he worked at one time for Sidney Powell, a lawyer who is in trouble for pushing baseless claims in court filings in support of various pro-Trump legal actions), couldn't get anything useful out of the mishmash he had been asked to analyze. Quoting him, "we were handed a turd".
So there you have it. On the one hand you have the careful and thorough work done by the British that resulted in drawing the U.S. into World War I on the British side. On the other hand you have Mike Lindell and his turd. His accusation would have been equally credible had Lindell claimed that it was the perfidious Dr. Fu Manchu rather than the Chinese government that was behind his ridiculous plot. Not surprisingly, Lindell's "revelation" has changed nothing. It hasn't even discredited him in the eyes of Trump loyalists.
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