this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2023
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
Lindell, the My Pillow CEO who helped finance Donald Trump's baseless election protests, "demonstrated" the technology at an event he hosted in Missouri this week (see video).
Lindell said the gadget, which he calls a "WMD" for "Wireless Monitoring Device," detects nearby Wi-Fi networks and MAC addresses.
A Daily Beast article said Lindell's plan might violate Louisiana state laws on criminal trespassing and the use of unmanned aircraft to conduct surveillance.
It's not clear why a router connecting to the Internet would be evidence of election fraud, but Lindell provided that as an example multiple times.
The WMD will put that to the test by detecting and reporting in real time Wi-Fi connections in county and state election offices.
DePerno is facing criminal charges for an alleged attempt to illegally access and tamper with voting machines.
The original article contains 666 words, the summary contains 136 words. Saved 80%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
If I've learned anything about system intended to be secure, it's that you want as many hastily-assembled wireless-enabled devices loitering around them and definitely won't just be an excuse to try and bust in through whichever vulnerabilities the Russian GRU and Chinese MSS have discovered or engineered. Not saying this significantly increases the attack surface over what may already be exposed but no need to add these devices into the mix.
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Satanic plot detected.
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Is this supposed to see which devices are connecting to the wifi, or the WiFi networks themselves?
It seems to say that it would report any wifi devices MAC address, which would include the devices connecting to the network and the routers providing the network.
But you'll have no idea what they are. They could be anything from a router, to a smart light bulb, to a thermostat, to a security camera, to a cell phone, etc.
I'm sure plenty of polling places will "light up the alarm" - what polling place doesn't have some wifi network for SOMETHING? And some people will have cellphones trying to connect to that network etc.
I don't know specifics about voting machines, but from a security perspective, their network connections should 100% all be hard wired. Wireless just adds more security holes. They should be hard wired and wifi sniffers will never touch that.
So either you get no alarm and it could still be hardwired to the internet, or the alarm goes off and you don't know if it's the voting machine or Billy Joe's iPhone trying to connect to the voting centers open wifi network.
The whole thing is entirely pointless.
It's just dumb people playing on the fears of other dumb people.
Imagine you had no idea what an IP/MAC address or SSID was.
Then imagine Fox News start reporting that Mr Pillow's WMDs have found countless instances of voter fraud, show a big list of MAC addresses.
You'll easily have a large number of people convinced they've seen indisputable proof of voter fraud all over the country