The real strategy with PII and China

Pursuing Gregg Phillips because his team found Personally Identifiable Information on an unsecured MongoDB server in China isn't the DOJ's goal. Stopping him from identifying Mules and handlers is.

On Saturday, August 13, Gregg Phillips and Catherine Englebrecht of True the Vote held an event in Arizona called “the Pit.” One of the shocking details they shared in the afternoon session was the fact that Gregg’s team had discovered, on an unsecured mongoDB server in China, personal data belonging to 1.8 Million U.S. poll workers.

Shockingly, after trying to give the dataset and the facts to the FBI so that they might pursue the culprits and companies who misconfigured the server—and were responsible for the spill—so as to help protect US workers from being harmed or exploited by the CCP—the FBI allegedly instead tried to turn things around and blame Gregg for accessing the unsecured data. According to what was revealed at the Pit, they went after Gregg, not the person or company who was responsible for placing that data on an unsecured server in the first place.

I wrote about the incident in more detail in this article about MongoDB.

As I reflect over what may really be going on here, my attention is drawn to the 2000 Mules movie which was released in May. In this movie, Gregg Phillips showed how cell phone “ping” data sets—which can be purchased from a whole spectrum of Geolocation data providers—can be used to perform “pattern of life” analysis on “anonymized” cell phone holders. Anonymized means that the identity of the cell phone holder is not (directly) present in the ping data.

Gregg and his team successfully used this ping data — trillions of data points of it — to establish patterns of life for people who were purposefully visiting multiple ballot drop boxes in certain key cities on election night 2020. Paired with security camera footage, Gregg was able to clearly show that ballot traffickers, so-called “Mules”, were stuffing ballot boxes at all hours on the night of the election all across certain swing state cities.

That said, because of the fact that the cell phone “pings” he obtained were anonymous, they couldn’t readily be mapped to a specific person or phone number.

Details such as phone number, address and date of birth are considered “Personally Identifiable Information”, and their use outside of the contexts for which they are collected and intended to be used is against the law.

It occurred to me that the Personally Identifiable Information, or PII, that was discovered in the data spill in China might be linkable in some way to the anonymized cell phone pings that Gregg was using in 2000 Mules. That would allow prosecutors to more easily press charges against the Mules and handlers who were involved in trafficking, because their identities would be more or less unmasked.

One wonders: is this perhaps the real reason the FBI and DOJ want to crack down on Gregg for discovering the data spill in China? To hamstring him from getting to the truth? Were some of the same poll workers whose data appeared on that server—also involved as ballot trafficking mules? It is certainly plausible.

One would think our U.S. Investigatory services would be interested in pursuing ballot traffickers, no? To stop election fraud?

It sure seems that the opposite is the case: there appears to be a concerted effort at Nelsonian Knowledge with respect to ballot fraud.

Gregg and his team shouldn’t be the focus of attention on this data spill. The focus should be squarely placed on those who misconfigured the server—and allowed it to be placed in China! — in the first place. They are the ones liable and responsible.