The author thought that Lindell was sending everyone on a wild goose chase with irrelevant data, and Lindell couldn’t defend against that claim in arbitration.
> his witnesses gave conflicting answers to critical questions like “What exactly was in the data you provided to the experts and how was it related to the November 2020 U.S. presidential election?”
(As to “his lawyers must have really screwed up”, given what I know about Lindell, my priors on that are high)
Why didn't the defence get an expert in to show how easy it is to change dates? Why not demonstrate copying the data to a new file and saving it, hence modifying the date? Or even re-saving it and having the software automatically change the modification date due to some hidden encoding or formatting setting?
Since when does a modification date count for anything!? There are countless reasons why it might not line up, both nefarious and perfectly innocent. And even if nefarious, it doesn't disprove the claims or invalidate the data, it only proves that the competition is rigged.
Which since they were created just before the competition, apparently wasn't possible.
Even if someone did all you said and accidentally changed the file modification date, you should have some original data source with an earlier file modification date.
The idea that someone would set up some kind of hacker convention and offer a reward for hundreds of experts to parse through random fake data that they intentionally created sounds beyond insane. It's just not believable. If that's where we're at, I might as well believe the majority of conspiracy theories which are less far-fetched than this one.
Isn't that obvious? Create enough smoke to make people believe there's a fire.
That’s not how proof works. The burden of proof is on Lindell to prove his claims true, not Zeidman or the public to disprove some unsubstantiated claims like this.
Lindell produces files from somewhere (unspecified) of some (unspecified) nature and without explanation makes a claim that they show evidence of crime X.
The goal in this situation cannot be to prove that there is no data here related to crime X. That would be equivalent to proving that a seemingly random string of bits cannot possibly encode a secret message.
The goal is to show that it is implausible that the files could represent evidence of crime X, given the circumstances in which the data was encountered. Not only did the author accomplish this, but the real telling point is that, with five million dollars at stake, Lindell could produce no substantial rebuttal from any of those 50 other hackers, nor any other expert who could say words to the effect that “this is PCAP data even though it is in a format never before associated with PCAPs” or “the reason the data appears to be recently created is [plausible explanation X]”
I have a hard time believing that the 40-50 other software forensics experts didn't recognise ASCII in hex, or bother converting these files even if they didn't.
If I understand correctly, he only analysed a tiny proportion of the data. Junk or not, it doesn't disprove that the remaining majority held key evidence.
He "determined that nothing in the file was related to the 2020 presidential election". What is "determined" here?
It sounds like this was more of a gaming of the system than it was a forensic investigation. There must be an awful lot missing here.