The bits of PillowCon I caught streaming had some examples of this phenomenon. Techies w/ no background in election systems poked around drive images & fussed over log files seemingly deleted during a software update & a batch file that seems to suspend security restrictions.
Can you make those things fit a conspiracy narrative? Sure. Are they actually suspicious or abnormal? Were they interpreting those things correctly? Presumably you’d want to ask someone who knows what “normal” looks like.
Instead the MO seemed to be: “I don’t understand what this is. I can tell a story where it’s explained by something nefarious. Therefore it’s evidence of something nefarious."
I can think of fairly banal potential explanations for both of those things, but of course, I don’t really know either. Without context you’re telling a just-so story that fits your expectations, and apt to confuse your first explanation for the only possible one.

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More from @normative

13 Aug
So, uh… this sure looks an AWFUL lot like a Mesa County, CO official helped conspiracy theorists steal data from Colorado’s election systems in order to give them to Mike Lindell to hunt for phantom evidence of “rigging”. cpr.org/2021/08/12/inv…
Like, this is an extremely specific reply that implies she knows exactly how the data was exfiltrated. Peters then hung around while a notorous QAnon crank poked around in a hard drive from Colorado’s election network on livestream.
Peters apparently “ordered her staff to turn off the video surveillance that is meant to monitor the voting machines a week before the breach, and that it was only recently turned back on.”
Read 11 tweets
12 Aug
You guys I’m not sure this judge takes PillowGuy entirely seriously.
Read 4 tweets
12 Aug
You will be shocked to learn that PillowGuy’s “Absolute Proof” doesn’t exist, according to his own cybersecurity experts. The promised “pcaps” don’t exist; they had garbage data provided by a notorious serial scam artist. Who could have predicted? washingtontimes.com/news/2021/aug/…
The source of the garbage data that doesn’t actually contain pcaps is Dennis Montgomery, whose career for the past two decades has consisted of running one elaborate fraud after another. npr.org/templates/stor…
Note that Lindell’s cyber expert, now repudiating his claims, is Josh Merritt, aka Spyder, an IT consultant falsely presented as a military intelligence expert in Sidney Powell’s lawsuits, and author of a comically inept dream logic affidavit claiming OTHER bogus fraud evidence.
Read 11 tweets
11 Aug
Here’s an interesting case study of how “do your own research” misinfo works. Last month, CDC announced that at the end of 2021 it would withdraw its request for Emergency Use Authorizarion of a PCR test for COVID. cdc.gov/csels/dls/locs…
The CDC announcement included this:
“CDC encourages laboratories to consider adoption of a multiplexed method that can facilitate detection and differentiation of SARS-CoV-2 and influenza viruses.”
Fox News published this astonishingly misleading story reporting on the CDC announcement with little explanation, but juxtaposed it with references to declining flu reports in 2020. foxnews.com/health/cdc-lab…
Read 14 tweets
10 Aug
Because I like exterminating any residual shreds of faith in humanity, I looked through the overwhelmingly hostile comments on a YouTube video by a doctor debunking some covid misinformation tonight. I noticed an interesting parallel to some “election theft” disinfo.
Here’s what I note in both cases: The cranks typically have the superficial trappings of real science. Links to journal articles on the one hand, or on the other, impressively hackery looking hex dumps & spreadsheets full of IP addresses. “See, I’m giving you the evidence…”
Now in both cases, this evidence is absolutely useless to the target audience. They have neither the training nor the context to evaluate the quality or relevance of technical articles in medical journals—or even to understand what the article is claiming in many cases.
Read 16 tweets
6 Aug
50 years into the era of personal computing, the idea that all computers should come preloaded with spyware had only really been seriously entertained by authoritarian regimes like North Korea. Apparently now it’s going mainstream. cato.org/blog/apples-ip…
I’m curious how far they’ve thought out the legal end of this. A government (ours or an uglier one) approaches Apple with a court order saying “here’s a list of hash values we want you to add to the scan list you’re pushing out”. Can they refuse? Or even tell anyone?
This isn’t really a “slippery slope” — it’s a single heavily greased step. You need one order with a gag attached saying “you’re required to add this list of hashes” & your carefully crafted child protection system becomes an all-purpose population-scale search tool.
Read 9 tweets

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