Thread by @normative

Out of sheer masochism just looked at the latest PillowGuy video “proving” election rigging, and it’s even cringier and more incoherent than I’d expected. Among other things, it seems almost certain Lindell himself is getting conned.

I don’t have much pity—never was there a more willing victim—but it’s comically apparent from the video that a bunch of dudes decided they could bill a rich moron for months of “cyber forensics” work & feed him nonsense, because he wouldn’t know enough to be able to tell.

Assuming Lindell isn’t in on it partly because if he were, he would have come up with something a LITTLE more superficially plausible looking. This is the kind of half-assed thing you throw together when you’re certain the mark doesn’t know anything.

One of his “hackers” is in the video with his face blurred, and you can tell the dude didn’t think he’d have to do this. He was gonna cash his check and be done with it; now he’s on tape feebly echoing Lindell’s pitch and wondering about his legal liability.

“Some of this is in Chinese so, you know, when you translate it you just want to make sure, as you’ve asked us to do, that you double, triple, quadruple validate…” In other words, this is what they told him they were billing for while they played Xbox.

“Because we’re dealing with other languages we, uh, validated the validation that was validated.” An actual sentence that I swear to God is spoken in this video.

So hacker Bob, how do we know this isn’t just a random list of IP addresses you dropped in a spreadsheet?

Mumble mumble hash values?

Yeah. Of the million questions anyone with no technical background but a lick of common sense might ask, the one Lindell manages is “how do we know any of this data is authentic?” and he takes a pure nonsense answer.

https://twitter.com/jaydeflix/status/1400847441339969540

In half-hearted defense of this gullibility: Real explanations of how cryptographic authentication works probably also sound like hand-wavy magic to most people. You can do all sorts of stuff it seems like you shouldn’t be able to do.