Intro To Cyber Sniffing, What To Expect From Mike Lindell: Packet Captures And Weird Dominion Testimony

Mike Lindell, the CEO of My Pillow, is having a Cyber Symposium to expose what he is calling provable election fraud in the 2020 Presidential election. Lindell’s concerns about faulty tabulations from the ballots come from his mistrust of the machines, which he claims were connected to the internet during the election, and somehow changed votes from President Trump to Democrat Joe Biden.

Key Point #1: The makers of Dominion machines, through the company’s CEO, insist that the voter tabulations are not connected to the internet. On Steve Bannon’s Podcast, Mike Lindell made a seemingly random, but good point that “all of the data goes through the internet at some point, because how does it get to the media?”

Watch what Lindell told Bannon about what to expect at the Cyber Symposium:

How Lindell has explained the machines and his cyber expert’s investigations thus far has been through movies and commentary by himself and other experts on his site Frankspeech.com, however, many people are still confused, waiting for his August event when he says he is going to uncover proof for everything he has been talking about since January. But it will take cyber experts to explain it.

Lindell has offered a 5 Million reward for any cyber expert who attends his event and proves him wrong.

2020 Election Integrity: National – Mike Lindell – August Cyber Symposium, Sioux Falls, SD

Invited politician, media & computer scientist guests offered a chance to "debunk" 37 terabytes of nationwide packet-capture election manipulation data & split a $5M bounty if they do. pic.twitter.com/fn93SmbcCx

— Rasmussen Reports (@Rasmussen_Poll) July 21, 2021

Lindell has faced fierce resistance for the event and his findings, mostly from Democrats and their media, which is curious.   In the past, even high-level Democrat lawmakers have gone to the ‘well of the US Congress’ and made statements that voting machines are not trustworthy. Now they those same people are trying to discredit Lindell for making the same claims.

For years voters, both Republicans and Democrats have worried about machines flipping votes and messing up elections, so Lindell’s South Dakota Cyber event will be the ‘Mack Daddy’ of all conspiracy busters- one way or the other.

HOW WILL HE DO IT?

“I am going to prove President Trump won with something called Packet Captures, and I want everyone to look that up,” Lindell has told multiple news and media people.

Ok. Here. I looked it up.

Key Point #2: “A packet analyzer or packet sniffer is a computer program or computer hardware such as a packet capture appliance that can intercept and log traffic that passes over a computer network or part of a network. Packet capture is the process of intercepting and logging traffic,” according to Wikipedia.

Here is an example of what a simple search of “packet capture” turns up on Twitter:

5 Days online workshop organized by Dept of Computer Sc and Technology,@NITAgartalaoffi held w.e.f. 26-30 Julyon Cryptography & Cyber Security.Shri Binoy Das, STO delivered expertise lecture on ‘Packet Capture using Wireshark & Scanning Techniques using Nmap’ from NIELIT Agartala pic.twitter.com/dElcxsMpcw

— NIELIT Agartala (@AGT_NIELIT) July 30, 2021

So Lindell could be on to something! Packet captures is something cyber-security experts talk about. It is a real thing.

WERE VOTING MACHINES AVOIDING SNIFFERS?

Not this kind of packet sniffing… no.  This is actually a real thing and a serious topic that is discussed among people. According to cyber experts, talking about Cyber Sniffing is common- so keep reading.

Trying out different packet sniffers. pic.twitter.com/kL7WSKDQyq

— Len take 8 (@allthepaper) September 5, 2017

There are packet sniffers so the question is- are there machines programmed to avoid packet sniffers?

Add now for some added Intrigue before the Lindell Cyber show, a cyber expert Whistleblower emerges:

“Update: Multiple sources now reporting the existence of a whistleblower inside Dominion providing video evidence conflicting with statements about internet connectivity made under oath by CEO John Poulos. No statement on this from them or Arizona officials yet. Developing,” Rasmuessen reports wrote. 

Update: Multiple sources now reporting the existence of a whistleblower inside Dominion providing video evidence conflicting with statements about internet connectivity made under oath by CEO John Poulos. No statement on this from them or Arizona officials yet. Developing. https://t.co/T6YzVpCaQh pic.twitter.com/PXOc8bcfg8

— Rasmussen Reports (@Rasmussen_Poll) August 3, 2021

Then a video clip emerged from an alleged whistleblower showing Poulos giving testimony, and screenshots of computers. What he says about the machines being online and who has the passwords to the machines is key.

“An election system is supposed to be a closed system so there should be no connectivity at all. They are not designed to be connected to the internet or any other outside system with a connection with any external connectivity device,” Poulos said in the video below, during an earlier investigation into the odd actions around the 2020 Presidential election.

WHAT IS GOING ON?

“C0d3Monkee vid. Made some adjustm3nts to bypass Alg0s and avoid sniffers. Please distribute as broadly as possible. Make your own adjustments if possible” one poster reported on Twitter. 

Notice people are talking about the company avoiding packet sniffers. Noteworthy.

C0d3Monkee vid. Made some adjustm3nts to bypass Alg0s and avoid sniffers. Please distribute as broadly as possible. Make your own adjustments if possible 🙏 pic.twitter.com/aJtK2wRlpN

— RealEyes1776 (@RE_1776) August 3, 2021

Just bookmark that video.

Back to Packet Captures 

According to tech gods at Red Hat, this is from 2019:  Sniffer basics

More Linux resources

So first things first: What do we mean when we say “packet sniffer?” A packet sniffer is simply a piece of software that allows you to capture packets on your network. Tcpdump and Wireshark are examples of packet sniffers. Tcpdump provides a CLI packet sniffer, and Wireshark provides a feature-rich GUI for sniffing and analyzing packets.

By default, tcpdump operates in promiscuous mode. This simply means that all packets reaching a host will be sent to tcpdump for inspection. This setting even includes traffic that was not destined for the specific host that you are capturing on, such as broadcast and multicast traffic. Of course, tcpdump isn’t some magical piece of software: It can only capture those packets that somehow reach one of the physical interfaces on your machine.

(IS THIS WHAT LINDELL IS TALKING ABOUT?)

Installing tcpdump is simple. It’s available in the standard package repositories on your Red Hat system, and you can install it by name:

 # yum install -y tcpdump

Common packet sniffing scenarios

Capturing all of the traffic coming into your machine may sound conceptually cool, but it also sounds fairly low level for many of the activities that we perform in our day-to-day work as sysadmins. So, when would you use a packet capturing tool? I typically turn to a packet sniffer when I’m troubleshooting a network application issue and I’ve exhausted all other options. Often, I have already performed basic network troubleshooting and reviewed any application log files, but I still can’t get to the bottom of an issue. At this point, breaking out a packet sniffer to observe the actual data being sent on the wire can be instructive.

Another great use case for a packet sniffer is pedagogical. Watching the packets involved in an application exchange can go a long way toward improving your understanding of the underlying protocols. For example, it can be invaluable to observe the full packet flow of a recursive DNS query when trying to understand how DNS works.

Performing basic packet captures

The best way to learn is by just diving in, so let’s get started with some basic packet captures. First, let’s try out tcpdump without any special options. Note that you’ll need to be the superuser to perform packet captures (technically, you can run it from a regular account with special capabilities, but it’s usually easier to run it as root). Use Ctrl+C, or send a SIGTERM to the tcpdump process ID (PID) to stop the capture.

WHAT WILL HAPPEN AT THE BIG EVENT?

Lindell’s Cyber Symposium involves high level cyber technology that most of us don’t understand or even know existed.  It is unclear what he will uncover for us at his cyber symposium, but we will get a better understanding of how the machines work that dominate our elections. Sniffers and packets are obviously a focal point, in understanding what happened, but will the public understand it?

One thing is clear, that we need to return to paper ballots.  Machines were used to safe time and human capital, and we have thousands of people involved 6 months later, and up to 50% of Americans are not sure that the election was fair.

Bottom line: Years of mystery and concerns could be settled in the mind of the American voter that the machine tabulations are a huge mess, if nothing else.

Further reading:

Over Half Of American Voters Believe Cheating Happened In 2020 Election And Want It Fixed

Kari Donovan

Kari is an ex-Community Organizer who writes about Voter Engagement, Cultural Marxism and Campaigns. She has been a grassroots volunteer with the GOP, on and off for 18 years. She is a Homeschool Mom in North Carolina and loves Photojournalism and Citizen Journalism. @Saorsa1776