Summary: Lindell's WiFi Monitor
I wrote up a more technical article on this, so I thought I’d write just a summary for the press looking for a quote.
It appears the person who created this is Dennis Montgomery, the conman who was behind Lindell’s “Absolute Proof” propaganda film that claim to have proof (in the form of “pcaps”) that Chinese hackers flipped votes in the 2020 presidential election. Lindell promised to release those “pcaps”, but never has.
Any device can be a WiFi monitor, including your phone or laptop. This specific device appears to be hard designed to be as light as possible to fly on drones. It wouldn’t make sense to use this device if it weren’t on drones, because other hardware would be better at monitoring WiFi (like a laptop).
It’s another scam. Even if election devices were connected to the Internet, this WiFi monitoring is unlikely to detect it. It can only do so under narrow circumstances, such as if they use an unencrypted network.
It will find lots of unexplained anomalies. Poling places are just rooms in existing buildings, like libraries, that are full of WiFi networks and devices. These networks often have strange devices that behave inexplicably. If you’ve never experience exactly that sort of WiFi-connected water-heater before, you’ll see behavior that you can’t explain — which conspiracy-theorists will explain as behavior of Chinese hackers. (Anything can be explained by being caused by unknown hackers).
What’s likely going to happen is that in the 2024 elections, Lindell volunteers will upload a lot of things that look suspiciously like Internet connected election computers, but with no proof. The faithful will then champion this as proof, while rational people will reject it.
It can be proven if true. If it’s an unencrypted WiFi network with hardware IDs owned by Dominion Voting Systems, and we have the “pcaps” of the traffic, we can confirm that yes it is a voting computer connected to the Internet. We should be ready to accept such proof if provided. But it’s unlikely.
I intend this short summary for the press. I think somebody with qualifications need to point out that it’s a scam. For those in the press who wants to cite me: “Robert Graham is a long time expert in cybersecurity, who presented his first WiFi monitoring tools at DefCon almost 20 years ago”.