Dr. Frank's Supreme Court bombshells

On November 12th, Dr. Frank spoke with Pete Santilli and revealed some bombshells while discussing his preparatory work for the upcoming Supreme Court filing slated for the week of Thanksgiving.

In this interview on Pete Santilli's show published on Rumble November 12th, Dr. Frank made some eyebrow raising claims as he discussed the preparations for the upcoming Supreme Court case filings that he is assisting Lindell’s team in preparing.

I want to take a deeper dive into what might be implied by some of his comments, but to explain it properly, I need to give the non-techy followers of my posts a little primer and history lesson. As a bit of background: I was once involved as an expert witness in a cybercrime trial that took nine years to work its way through the courts. (We won.) At the time, I was the Executive Director for Information Technology for the 4th largest school district in California, and I built, managed, and trained a team of IT professionals who supported the district’s state-of-the-art data center and mission critical IT systems.

Dr. Frank made many hair-raising claims during his interview, but among them, these three: (1) that Mike Lindell’s mysterious “PCAPS” exist and are credible, (2) that they reflect captured data from more than 3,000 county voting systems across the U.S., and (3) that Lindell and team—as they were briefing States Attorney’s General to get them on board the Supreme Court cases Lindell and team have been preparing—offered as proof certain computer passwords that had been captured to get their attention and prove authenticity. We can only presume that these passwords were to the voting systems in question, but that’s a detail we don’t need for now to explore these claims.

Let’s start with “PCAPS”. That acronym stands for “Packet Captures”, and loosely describes the data output one would expect to obtain using a variety of software tools like WireShark, Ethereal, and Microsoft NetMon, among many others (these three are ones that I have personally used in the past.)

Packet capture software has been around for decades. To put it as simply as possible, if you connect a computer running this kind of “detective” software to a network that is being used by any number of other computers to “talk” to each other, the packet capture software can “record” every bit of every conversation sent in binary form—100%—that crosses the link between the computers being surveilled. This is an enormous amount of data, by the way, which is one reason to be wary of the claims being made about the PCAPs. Because an enormous amount of data per surveilled system x 3,000 systems = a metric you-know-what-ton of digital data.

This packet capture “sleuthing” software is typically used for troubleshooting purposes, as it can provide a network engineer a “trace” to see exactly what data was being sent back and forth in order to find and resolve software bugs; but it can also be used for a wide variety of forensic purposes (and unfortunately, also a wide variety of nefarious purposes.) Sometimes the output of packet capture programs is used to provide evidence in court cases. However, to be admissible certain things have to have been done to properly preserve the evidence.

One thing to note at this point, however, is the sheer scale of this operation. In order to effectively “surveil” more than 3,000 computers across all US counties, one would have to have done “packet captures” on all of them simultaneously and with timestamp correlated data being properly retained; this is NOT a trivial task and there are few entities in the world that could pull it off (a) successfully and (b) covertly at that scale. Which is one reason to be somewhat skeptical that the PCAPs are genuine.

Months ago, when the claim was first made prior to Lindell’s Cyber Symposium in Sioux Falls South Dakota that PCAPS from thousands of counties existed, my antennae shot up, because I was very familiar with PCAPs. I knew that if this were actually true, and if the data from the PCAP tools were captured and stored in a particular way (a detail I’ll save for some other post) then the proof of election interference it could potentially offer would be as ironclad as one could ever hope for. I also quickly realized that if it were true, certain sophisticated agencies, or at least the tools they possess, might have to have been involved, somehow.

In the weeks before the Symposium event, I spent time educating my friend Brian Cates about the nerdy technical details, because he was planning to attend the Cyber Symposium and write about it. I wanted to arm him with some things to look for and questions to ask to find out if they really had what they claimed they had. I admire Brian’s writing and had long been a fan of his SpyGate and Russia Collusion Hoax work. If there was a big story to break here, I wanted Brian to be positioned to understand the technical details well enough to make headway.

As the Cyber Symposium took place, things did not go as we had expected; the credibility of the “PCAPS” fell into doubt, and as you can read about elsewhere, other twists and turns took place during and after the event that prevented us from knowing whether there was any actual substance to the PCAP data. Among the key questions that remained unanswered: If the PCAPS were genuine, WHO captured them, and how?

How exactly did they fall into the hands of Mike Lindell, of all people? Who were the mysterious and shadowy people mentioned during Lindell’s videos leading up to the Symposium? Were these shadowy characters part of the team(s) involved with the PCAP capture? Some of the names (Montgomery) caused many of us significant skepticism, given reports of his past involvement in what were portrayed to be shady and potentially deceptive operations with bold claims being made for which the public was never able to obtain any hard proof (or disproof, to be fair.)

As the weeks passed after the Symposium concluded, I reigned in my hopes and consigned myself to the likely conclusion that the PCAPs were not what was claimed and might in fact have been faked by bad actors in order to purposefully mislead Lindell and team. I had been hoping to actually see the raw data myself, because I would quickly be able to reach a conclusion about their potential authenticity; but that never came to pass. So I put it out of mind, and dejectedly forgot about it. In fact, I had even asked Brian Cates at one point to forward my details to Colonel Waldron as an offer of technical assistance. But nothing ever came of that.

Dr. Frank’s comments during the recent Rumble video with Pete Santilli have now revived my interest in this “PCAP” topic, primarily because I heard some new details that are intriguing. Let’s unpack one of Frank’s claims—that passwords were captured—and discuss what this implies.

First, let’s take a brief detour and talk about the history of passwords and the Internet.

In order to keep certain content on the Internet private and secure, we have long used the concept of “usernames and passwords” to control access. You have to be able to type in both of these into some boxes on a web page, and if you have the correct combination, you’re granted access to whatever private page you were aiming for.

In the early days, when you typed USERNAME and PASSWORD (I’m using these uppercase words as placeholders just for the purposes of explanation) into a box on a web page and clicked “Login”, your computer would create a set of “packets” to send to the destination server containing these values. If I happened to be covertly running a PCAP tool on the same network that your computer was on that moment in time, I could actually capture those data packets, and with a trivial amount of work, see the words USERNAME and PASSWORD revealed in the data of the packet captures. And voila, I now have your login credentials.

This obviously isn’t very secure, and of course many Bad Guys(TM) s took advantage of this sort of weak security and did Bad Things(TM) as a result. So to counteract this, it then became common practice to “encrypt” the USERNAME and PASSWORD using software technology similar to the SSL system that protects your credit card and shopping information (SSL is used whenever you see a web address that has HTTPS:// at the front.)

In this case, if I were running PCAP software and captured your login details, I would see packets with gibberish in place of USERNAME and PASSWORD, and unless I could crack or steal the SSL certificate that was used to encrypt them, I wouldn’t be able to see them revealed. This was a much better situation for securing passwords than the “plaintext” old-school way, but it still wasn’t foolproof.

A new evolution that is still in use today took things one step further: now, instead of your computer sending USERNAME and PASSWORD (whether encrypted or not) over the network to the server—to let it compare against what it had stored to decide whether to allow you access or not—your computer now only sends “proof of knowledge” data.

In a sense, your computer is saying “I know the username and password for this person; here is an encrypted message with some secret details that proves I know the username and password—without me having to actually reveal them to you, the server.” In this new process, the server just validates the “proof message”, without ever having received the actual USERNAME and PASSWORD on the network.

In this new system, both your computer and the server have the USERNAME and PASSWORD on their ends, and both can confirm they are correct, without either of them sending the actual data to the other. (Actually, in one even newer scenario, even the server itself doesn’t store the password—it only stores details that allow it to validate the proof message. The password itself never leaves your computer in this case.)

OK, so armed with this information about passwords, we can now go back to Dr. Frank’s claims: that Lindell’s team showed various States Attorney’s General that they were visiting actual passwords from what are presumed to have been compromised election systems (but we don’t know for sure that’s what the passwords were for.)

Given what I know about PCAPS and encryption methods for login information, my first conclusion is “capturing and revealing passwords via PCAPs isn’t supposed to be possible.” The reason: using modern login technologies, passwords were never even sent across the network in the first place! (unless the companies writing the software for the election systems were using ridiculously outdated login technology, in which case—fire them all. Now. But I digress.)

When we now add another claim made by Dr. Frank in that video, things get even more interesting. He implies that there was some kind of “security” software created and offered by CISA to help secure the election systems in 2020; and that this “anti-malware” software provided by a government agency was itself the weakness exploited by the bad guys to break into the election systems!

This is a very bold claim; if it proves to be true (I don’t know if it is, or isn’t), then it obliterates whatever trust remains in government cybersecurity, given also the large scale Solarwinds hack from last year (which, for all we know, may still be connected to the election system hacking.)

Frank also hints, indirectly, that the Good Guys(TM) relied on some of these same flaws (supposedly introduced by the CISA “security” software—that was intended to “protect” the election system computers—to do the “packet captures” on the compromised election servers) to catch the Bad Guys(TM). If I understood him correctly, anyway.

In a sense, that would imply, via analogy, that the Good Guys(TM) secretly “broke into the house before the robbers showed up and then recorded the robbers breaking in themselves to steal the diamonds.” If this hypothesized scenario is true, then this might account for the claimed capturing of the passwords; because that capturing process would have to have been done ON THE SERVERS themselves, somehow. But it also opens up a whole new can of worms that I shudder to think about.

So my interest in all of this has been revived based on Dr. Franks revelations, and I’m looking forward to how this all unfolds in the coming weeks as they team approaches the Supreme Court.

In conclusion: (1) Does Lindell actually have legitimate PCAP data files? (2) were they handled in a way that makes them forensically admissible, e.g., with hashes? (3) WHO actually captured these files on more than 3,000 county systems, and HOW? (4) Did CISA actually supply flawed “security software” to these counties? If this claim is true, what other government systems were made vulnerable by similar software, and where? Who, for instance, was behind this week’s hacking of the FBI email system? What was the point of the odd email message that the hackers sent out on behalf of the DHS?

It’s going to be a spicy Thanksgiving, one way or another. I pray that Lindell and team have what they need to make their case successful. But after its done, I hope we will all learn more of the details of the WHO and HOW, because there will need to be a lot of cybersecurity revamping done to make sure this can never, ever, happen again.