The Iowa Standard spoke with about eight cyber experts at Mike Lindell’s Cyber Symposium. We want to detail the accounts given to us by a few of them. This is from an interview we conducted with Bob Zeidman. Zeidman is an engineering consultant and, according to his bio on The Epoch Times, he is the creator of the field of software forensics. I was able to have a handful of great conversations with Zeidman. In 2016 Zeidman was not Donald Trump’s biggest fan. But even in 2016, when he wasn’t necessarily sold on Trump as President, he publicly declared he was voting for him over Hillary Clinton. And it seems through his writings that he warmed to Trump from 2016-20. Media and legislators were not allowed in the cyber data rooms — only experts. So, The Iowa Standard is presenting the accounts of multiple experts to offer different perspectives on what the experts thought of the information presented at the symposium.
For starters, Zeidman said he wanted to find proof of election fraud that could be used as a smoking gun to show President Donald J. Trump was the real winner of the 2020 presidential election. Most, if not all, of the cyber experts at the conference, shared that sentiment.
But ultimately, the smoking gun never appeared.
“There’s nothing here that we can use to verify or to dispute,” he said. “It seems like nobody looked at any data until a few days ago. Even the people on stage who say there was fraud, when you talk to them in person, they hadn’t looked at anything until a few days ago — maybe a week ago. I’m concerned that people are making statements where, if they haven’t looked at the data, I wouldn’t make those statements.”
On Tuesday, the first day of the conference, Zeidman called his wife and told her they just made $5 million.
“I could verify that everything they showed us (Tuesday) — and everybody knew it, but I found a little bit more information — it’s like we didn’t know what these things were. Digging a little deeper, I found information that confirmed these were not data about the votes for the election or packets or anything like that,” Zeidman said. “I spent yesterday writing up a formal report that I was going to submit (Wednesday), but I came in (Wednesday) and found out they’ve now dumped gigabytes worth of stuff that could be network data, it could be about the election — but now we’ve got only 24 hours to examine it. It’s an impossible task.”
Nobody as of Wednesday had seen anything they know is from the election.
“For one thing, there’s no chain of custody. So this could be manufactured data. I mean, I hope it’s not,” Zeidman said. “But I wouldn’t go to court with it because the first question is where did you get this data. I say somebody gave it to me. Where’d it come from? I don’t know. Or somebody told me. That’s not good enough for court.”
Zeidman said he “absolutely” arrived at the symposium wanting to get to a certain result. But he was frustrated at the lack of forensics experts during the panel discussions.
“They’ve had a couple of them who have used very careful language — alleged, to the best of my knowledge, assuming this came from where I’m told it came from — and even there they haven’t really determined everything,” Zeidman said. “But there’s a lot of people up there, I’m looking up their backgrounds and they don’t have forensics backgrounds, some people don’t have engineering backgrounds. I don’t know how they can get up there. They’re just people who saw stuff or heard things. I don’t know why you’d invite a bunch of experts to a conference where I could read what they’ve heard. You know, I’ve heard the same things. But they’re presenting it like their experts and they’re not.”
Zeidman said the consensus among the experts is at best they’ll find something fishy, but they will not be able to prove the election was a fraud.
“It’s virtually impossible,” he said. “They could potentially prove that the data is wrong when they search through it and find something. Or they could prove that something fishy happened if the data is correct, but something fishy is again not admissible in court. So what I’ve learned is, I thought Mike had already done an analysis that showed something and he hasn’t. I think a lot of people want the results to be true so some people are making it true. And I think my biggest takeaway, unfortunately, is if there was this kind of fraud, if China hacked into the systems or anybody hacked in, um, this is going to hurt the cause not help it because everyone is going to jump on this as I’m supporting a conspiracy theory.”
Entering the conference, Zeidman believed he’d be given all the answers. But on Wednesday afternoon, he said it’s likely people will leave with more questions than they had at the beginning.
The experts, he said, are very dedicated.
“I kind of burnt out,” he said. “They’re pouring through this stuff. They don’t want to find — well, except for the $5 million prize, I think that’s in the back of everyone’s head — everyone in there wants to show that there was fraud, but with the data we’ve got, the only thing that you could realistically show is that this data is wrong. It is not real data. You can’t show fraud because we don’t have enough information about it.”
He said much of what was presented is speculation.
“I’m afraid this conference may hurt that because there are going to be people on the fence who say, ‘Oh, this is just a bunch of Republican nonsense’ and then they’ll see something here and they’ll say that’s just nonsense,” Zeidman said. “We do need to have checks and balances, we do need to do a better job on the electronic voting, we do need to protect from hacking — absolutely — but this isn’t doing it.”
Zeidman said the experts hired by the GOP should’ve found this stuff.
“I don’t know why they didn’t, but nobody is explaining that,” he said. “And my calls to them as a fellow forensic expert go unanswered. Now, maybe they don’t have to talk to me, but they should explain to someone. There are so many problems and discrepancies in the work that they’re doing, they should explain to the press the mistake they made or what’s the reason behind some odd result. And they just say here’s the result, it’s obvious, they don’t talk to anybody about what happened.”
Zeidman believes the focus should be on all the human elements of fraud rather than the machines. He said it is a real possibility that China is doing the hacking, but attacking Dominion right away was unwise.
“When I deal with people I think are guilty, which I do a lot, I don’t go to them and say you’re guilty — that doesn’t help,” he said. “You go to them and say, ‘Help me understand how this happened.’ They could’ve gone to Dominion and said if China hacked in, how would they do it? Let’s work together to figure it out. And then if they refused, they could say Dominion isn’t helping us. But they just started out attacking Dominion.”
Zeidman reiterated that if China is doing it, it’d be different — and it’s possible. But if someone was doing it in the country, he believes someone would come out and admit it if the right incentive was offered.
Dominion’s code has been audited multiple times, he said. Under a court order, experts found things that are not conclusive and didn’t find fraud — although they found problems.
“The thing is, Dominion is going to put up a fight because this is their whole business,” he said. “But, the way to do it I think is not the way it’s been done. Not coming out attacking them unless — you wait until you have proof, I mean real proof that something went wrong.”
He said Dominion is “fighting for its life” and will fight with “everything they’ve got.”
Personally, Zeidman feels if there is fraud — and there’s a good chance there was — it is on the human level.
“We’ve got to get rid of the ballot harvesting, we’ve got to — I hate absentee ballots even though I’ve been doing them myself for years — we’ve got to have Voter ID laws,” he said. “The Republicans have been pretty fair, but Democrats hate this stuff when they’re losing — they love it when they’re winning. Somehow we’ve got to get maybe moderates to come together and say for the future of our country we need to get rid of all possible fraud. And if that includes an audit of Dominion’s machines, if we had a bipartisan agreement to that, then I think that would happen. But, you know again, I think this kind of symposium unfortunately I think is giving Democrats ammunition to say this is all a fantasy.”
The voting machines are hackable, but Zeidman said there’s so much effort and risk in getting caught — and everything is hackable.
“But it’s always the human error that causes the problem,” he said. “Somebody connects when they’re not supposed to or somebody presses a setting they’re not supposed to or somebody is induced into creating fake results. So, I think you’ve got to get the people aspect. Certainly, you need to improve the technology.”
Zeidman said it could be done on the internet, but there would be a trace left if people are looking for it.
“I could be convinced that some people aren’t looking for it because Biden and the Democrats won the election, so they definitely don’t want to look for fraud,” he said. “But I think at some point, you could convince Republicans and Democrats to come together. I think there must be a way to convince them to do it to make everybody feel better about the election.”
Zeidman said the potential is there to hack into 3,000 machines over the internet. He added he’s confused about claims the machines are not or cannot be connected to the internet.
“I was hoping to get a better explanation,” he said. “I think they’re supposed to be connected at certain times and disconnected at other times. And to me, that’s a human issue. I’m sure a lot of people didn’t disconnect them when they were supposed to. That can be checked. If everyone is willing to cooperate, that could be checked. But the problem is people are not cooperating and again I think this, unfortunately, doesn’t help.”
