Los Angeles County prosecutors allege "Chinese contractors" had "superadministration" access to “astounding” amounts of data in what is "probably the largest data breach in United States history.”

Eugene Yu, the CEO of Michigan-based election software company Konnech, was criminally charged for allegedly storing Los Angeles election worker data on Chinese servers.

Los Angeles County prosecutor Eric Neff alleges that the amount of data involved in the breach was “astounding,” adding that “this is probably the largest data breach in United States history.”

The prosecutor’s complaint reads:

“Based on evidence recovered from a search warrant executed October 4, 2022, the District Attorney’s Office discovered that Konnech employees known and unknown sent personal identifying information of Los Angeles County election workers to third-party software developers who assisted with creating and fixing Konnech's internal ‘PollChief’ software.”

The complaint claims that Luis Nabergoi, a Konnech project manager overseeing the Los Angeles contract, wrote in a Chinese-owned messaging app that "any employee for Chinese contractors working on PollChief software had 'superadministration' privileges for all PollChief clients."

Sam Faddis, retired CIA operations officer and renowned national security author, wrote in his Substack:

“An individual with super administration access to a system can do effectively anything inside that system. He or she can delete data, steal data, alter data, change programming, etc.

Perhaps most importantly, that individual can cover his or her tracks, because they can potentially also access and alter all security protocols and programs.

So, Konnech, which has numerous questionable ties to Chinese entities was allowed to punch a hole into our election systems, and then Konnech was allowed to grant that same level of access to unknown “contractors” in China.”

I began investigating Konnech on August 13, 2022, after Catherine Engelbrecht of TrueTheVote and Gregg Phillips of OPSEC shared the story of their 15-month involvement with what was characterized to them as a “counter-intelligence operation” with the Federal Bureau of Investigation into Konnech that had gone bad.

When the Bureau turned against Engelbrecht and Phillips, the pair sought out researchers with whom they could share what they knew.

Weeks later a federal court judge granted Konnech a restraining order against Engelbrecht and Phillips, forcing them into an unprecedented legal battle.

Their silencing makes it all the more important that we continue to speak out about the now substantiated subversion of America’s elections.

KaneokaTheGreat, 18 Oct 22

https://kanekoa.substack.com/p/konnechs-shocking-back-door-access

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

Ben Cotton conducted and investigation of Michigan voting information for the 2020 election.  He found the primary electronic record of the election has not been preserved in a forensically admissible manner.

The EPB USB  is original evidence.  The basic principle governing the preservation of electronic data and ensuring that digital evidence is the best evidence.  Preserving a digital device in an original state ensures that the evidence is reliable, dates and times are factual, and that the data has not been altered.  Failure to preserve digital evidence in a digitally sound manner can result in charges of spoliation and the inadmissibility of that evidence in court.  Based on Cotton's review of the Hart InterCivic voting machine manuals and the Secretary of State's instructions to the municipality election officials, he does not see any method or procedure to forensically preserve the voting systems or the digital media used in Michigan election.  The Electronic Poll Book thumb drive is the device of record for the election.  The ebp is generated  on the voting machine and stored on the thumb drive and contains the Qualified Voter Record and the poll books.  The voting data is stored in a Microsoft Access database on the thumb drive.  There is no process in the State of Michigan for preserving the original files of the EPB on the thumb drive or the election systems.  There are missing data elements in the machine generated election reports that should be preserved under federal statutes.  Failure to forensically preserve the EPB USB would have effectively deleted and wiped these elements of information as they are not present or preserved on any other component of the voting system.  

Cotton reviewed data from voting for the Adams Township, MI election.  The official state count of total voters is 30 votes short of the machine USB poll book tally.  There is a difference of 79 names of people who reportedly voted at the county level and at the report for the same area at the state level.  The combination of different names voting/not voting is 11.5% of the total vote cast.  Since the EPB USB has not been preserved in a state admissible in court, there is no way by which these discrepancies can be investigated or reconciled.  

Adams County shows people that voted but who did not register to vote until up to seven months after the election.  Again the lack of a useable ESB USB prevents reconciliation of these discrepancies. 

The Michigan November 2020 election data does not appear to be certifiable as required by law. 

https://t.me/real_DonaldJTrump/15222

An examination of the Election Systems & Software (ES&S) EVS 6.1.1.0 voting system was conducted by Brian Mechler at the Texas Secretary of State Elections Division offices on August 21, 2020.  EVS 6.1.1.0 (as well as other EVS versions) has multiple issues with its prescribed hash verification procedures. Hash verification is the process that is used to ensure that the software and/or firmware of a voting
system matches exactly with what was certified by the EAC. A hash is the output of a cryptographic function run on a file or program executable. If a file or program is changed in any way, it will produce
a different hash result. Hash verification is a critical component of acceptance testing to ensure the proper delivery of voting systems. In Election Advisory No. 2019-23, jurisdictions are directed to perform a complete system validation which includes the verification of hashes [17].

It was disclosed during the concurrent EVS 6.0.3.0 exam that ES&S personnel have performed the hash verification process instead of their customers. Jurisdictions should always perform this process
themselves. To have the vendor perform a required component of acceptance testing creates, at best, a conflict of interest. The Secretary of State Elections Division has taken an action to work with ES&S
and their Texas customers to better define their roles and responsibilities with respect to acceptance testing and hash verification.

The hash verification process involves the creation of two USB thumb drives; one containing the system export data of the system to be verified and the other containing the verification scripts and
trusted hash file. A host separate from the EMS is booted using a live Ubuntu DVD. The live Ubuntu DVD allows the user to run the Linux OS from the DVD without altering the non-volatile memory of
the host computer. The export and scripting media are then mounted and a set of scripts are run to configure the user’s environment, compute hashes of the system export data, and compare those hashes
with the trusted hash file. While working through this process, I initially overlooked the instruction to add the trusted hash file to the scripting media. Despite the missing trusted hash file, the verification script erroneously reported that the exported hashes matched the trusted hashes.

It could be very easy for personnel performing hash verification to assume a good result when, in actuality, no hash comparisons were made. Within their scripts, ES&S should have performed explicit
checks on the existence of the two files being compared; failing loudly if either does not exist. A common open-source application, diff, is used to compare the hash files. In order to determine if they
match, ES&S only examines the text that diff writes to the standard output stream. In doing so they miss the error messages written to the standard error stream. In general, it is bad coding practice to
condition a critical decision on the written output of a 3rd party application. The reason is that the developer would have to know every possible output (intended or otherwise) in order to craft a reliable
conditional. A more robust way to check the result of the diff call would have been to query its exit status. The diff manual clearly defines the meaning of its exit status as [18], “0 if inputs are the same, 1 if different, 2 if trouble.”

It is my opinion that this bug (in addition to the overall process) indicates that ES&S has not developed their hash verification process with sufficient care, quality assurance, and concern for usability.
When jurisdictions run their hash verification, they should carefully examine the media they create for correctness and carefully monitor the output of the verification scripts to make sure no error messages
are printed along with text claiming a successful result.

JRJ Comment:  Examiner Mechler ran the test without the definitions inserted and the system should have loudly set off alarms. Instead, system reported everything looks just great.  Obviously, this is no bug. This is a pre-programmed test result to say everything looks good even when it most certainly is not good.

https://www.sos.state.tx.us/elections/forms/sysexam/brian-mechler-ESS-exam-report-EVS6110-aug.pdf

THE DEEP CAPTURE CAMPAIGN
RESPONSE TO ROBERT REICH: I CHALLENGE

BY
PATRICK BYRNE
OCTOBER 8, 2022

Dear Professor Reich,

First things first: we had a mutual friend in Professor William Slesnick. Though I knew him many years after you did, he often spoke to me of his admiration for your mind, your drive, and your character. He was fond of saying that if you had set your sights on playing center in the NBA, you would have succeeded. Bill did not grade on a curve, as you may remember, and that was indeed high praise

Second, I see that you have taken to living under a rock. Your recent essay, “Robert Reich: A Personal Question To Powerful People Who Continue To Deny Results Of 2020 Election” (Eurasia Review, October 9, 2022) has been brought to my attention. In it, you write:

“I have a serious question for people who have power in America and who continue to deny the outcome of the 2020 election and enable Trump’s Big Lie: What are you saying to yourself in private? How are you justifying yourself in your own mind? I don’t mean to be snide or snarky. I’m genuinely curious…. I’m asking you, Peter Thiel, and you, Stephen Schwarzman, and Ken Griffin and Steve Wynn and Mike Lindell and Patrick Byrne and others: Is this really the way you want to spend your fortune? Is this your legacy to the nation?“

I accept your invitation, Professor Reich, to bring you up to speed on what it is that we of the election integrity movement believe we are doing.

On June 3, 2022 DHS – CISA issued a 5 page report that could have been titled (I facetiously suggested), “Patrick Byrne was right again. Again.” In five succinct pages, it explains that the most common election system in use in the USA turns out to be riddled with nine major security “vulnerabilities” so gaping that in my view it is more appropriate to call them security “failures” than “vulnerabilities”. As apparently you missed this development, I will quote their descriptions of nine hacks of Dominion equipment that tabulate 43% of ballots cast by Americans on November 3, 2020:

1. “An attacker could leverage this vulnerability to install malicious code, which could also be spread to other vulnerable ImageCast X devices via removable media.”

2. “An attacker could leverage this vulnerability to disguise malicious applications on a device.”

3. “…which could be leveraged by an attacker to gain elevated privileges on a device and/or install malicious code.”

4. “An attacker could leverage this vulnerability to escalate privileges on a device and/or install malicious code.”

5. “An attacker could leverage this vulnerability to spread malicious code to ImageCast X devices from the EMS.”

6. “An attacker could leverage this vulnerability to escalate privileges on a device and/or install malicious code.”

7. “An attacker with physical access may use this to gain administrative privileges on a device and install malicious code or perform arbitrary administrative actions.”

8. “An attacker could leverage this vulnerability to gain access to sensitive information and perform privileged actions, potentially affecting other election equipment.”

9. “An attacker could leverage this vulnerability to print an arbitrary number of ballots without authorization.”

– DHS-CISA ICS Advisory (ICSA-22-154-01)
So this past summer, DHS-CISA acknowledged that Dominion boxes are hackable nine ways from Sunday.

In addition, if one clicks through to the CVE database where one would normally find patches for software vulnerabilities such as have been announced here, one finds that there are no patches available and that all these gaping failures are simply, “Under Assessment”.

That is to say, the same federal organization that 20 months ago boldly praised itself for overseeing “the most secure election in history” now meekly reports:

“While these vulnerabilities present risks that should be mitigated as soon as possible, CISA has no evidence that these vulnerabilities have been exploited in any elections.”

– ibid
That is a considerably weaker statement. They have gone from saying We know it did not happen to the much weaker claim: We have no evidence that it happened, but we are not going to tell you if we looked, how much we looked, and the machine vulnerabilities must be “mitigated” but there are as yet no patches.

It is my burden in life that from time to time I interact with a life-form called, “journalists”. Some, after reading this DHS-CISA litany of horrors, have had the gall (I-shit-thee-not) to reply along the lines, Well this shows that they can be hacked, but it is not proof that they were hacked!

That logic may pass in an undergraduate Lesbian Dance Theory seminar at Berkeley, but as a fellow who built a $2 billion eCommerce company that faced 1,000 daily cyber-attacks for 20 years and was never defeated, I assure you, it is an absurd response. One cannot release such porous code into the wild and hope it is not hacked. Given the prize (US elections) and the shit-code, there is no realistic chance these vulnerabilities were not exploited.

In case there is any question about that, however, perhaps we should just examine the election databases stored on the hard-drives of election equipment in question. Just to be sure. Just in the six places which saw odd activity on that election night, the unprecedented act of vote counting being shut down, things like that…. Perhaps we should just look at the election databases of those six machines, so we know for certain.

For some reason, since November 4, 2020 that suggestion has sent the intellectual class into paroxysms of outrage. No one will explain why. But massive legal efforts have been mounted to prevent anyone from getting access to those six hard drives in those six counties. Massive, expensive legal efforts. And in the one county of the six where legal authority to examine was granted (in the form of a subpoena issued by the Arizona Senate and enforced by a court), the county workers deleted the election database the night before turning the machine over.

And yet, a media which normally would waste not an instant in reading meaning into that chain of events, is so disinterested in it now, one would think it was Hunter Biden’s laptop.

Thanks to the work of an American hero named Tina Peters, the County Recorder for Mesa County, Colorado (roughly speaking: “Grand Junction”), the election database of that county for November 2020 was recovered. Analysis of it revealed (in Mesa County Forensic Report #3) to have a cloaked script that created an illegal database, shifted thousands of votes, and generated thousands of others. This is exactly what the DHS-CISA warning is about: that such “malicious code” and “malicious applications” could be installed on a machine without its operators’ awareness.

Mesa-County-Forensic-3Download
In Williamson County, Tennessee, the October, 2021 municipal election produced such extraordinary anomalies (e.g., 163 ballots fed into a machine generating only 79 votes counted) that the State of Tennessee investigated…. and found 7 out of 18 machines generating remarkably erroneous miscounts. Feed the machine 167 paper ballots, and only 19 get counted. In one machine, 330 ballots were inserted, but only 98 votes were counted.

Tennessee called the federal EAC, who called the Pro V&V and SLI, who called Dominion…. And their consensus is that there is indeed “erroneous code” in the machines but that they cannot find that bad code.

Which, incidentally, is not a Root Cause Analysis, though they try to pass it off as one. It is a failure of a Root Cause Analysis. They are saying, in effect, Yes the machine generates fake tabulator counts, and we cannot find the cause, but it is still certified.

The corruption is being noticed by Democrats as well as Republicans. In Cherokee County, Georgia, Michelle Long Spears, running for a seat in the US Congress, placed 3rd in the Democratic Primary earlier this summer. She noticed that though she had received 24% of the vote, there were many precincts where she had received 0 votes. That itself was statistically improbable, she knew. Then she noticed that in her own precinct she had received 0 votes, which she knew was impossible (Michelle had voted for herself, as had, presumably, her husband). Michelle demanded a hand-count, and it turned out she had in fact won with a landslide 60% of the votes.


Fulton County, Pennsylvania has had their equipment tested by a Michigan forensics lab named, “Speckin”. The Speckin Report shows that the Dominion machines in Fulton, PA generate fake results like the machines in Williamson, Tennessee (as is admitted now by the EAC and Dominion itself). In addition, the Fulton machines’ logs show that during the November 2020 election they had not just outside connectivity, but international outside connectivity (in this case, to Canada), which is significantly illegal. Now Fulton County, Pennsylvania is suing Dominion for their money back. Eight other counties have similar lawsuits in the works, I hear.


In an August 2022 primary in Cherokee County, Kansas, Dominion equipment was discovered to have taken thousands of votes from District 1 County Commissioner Myra Frazier and given them to her opponent, Lance Nichols, who was initially declared the winer then stripped of it once the vote-flipping was exposed.

It Happened Again: Cherokee County, Kansas Election Results Reversed After “Vote Flip” Discovered

Tests have been performed in 67 Georgia counties, and erroneous code spitting out fake results has been found to exist in 65 of the 67 counties. This past week, emergency relief was sought.

Georgia-State-Elections-Board-Emergency-AppealDownload
Ongoing examination of the much-maligned Maricopa Audit’s preliminary results (which in fact proved that the election database had been erased and there were hundreds of thousands of votes lacking chains of title) continues to surface clear proof of criminal activity in Maricopa’s election administrations:


I could go on and on, Professor Reich. Outside of intellectual backwaters such as Berkeley, citizens are paying attention. Citizens know of such developments and dozens more like them across the nation. In over 3,000 counties across the country, citizens are digging into the US election systems like they never have in my lifetime. Everywhere they do they are finding causes for deep concern, while being met by Government Fundamentalists challenging the right of citizens to seek transparency (though a fundamental principle elections globally is that an election lacking transparency has zero credibility). In a further sign of the corrupt times in which we live, the investigators are themselves being investigated by authorities rather than the horrific data they have unearthed.

So let us turn, Professor Reich, to those six locations which experienced blackouts/shutdowns while counting ballots on the night of November 3, 2020. The six counties have been the center of our attention since the morning of November 4. All six of those counties fought letting their election databases be examined. In one of those counties (Maricopa), the Arizona Senate got a subpoena to examine the election database, Maricopa County fought the subpoena for five months, and then when a court declared it valid and enforceable, deleted their database the night before turning over the equipment.

No one will explain why, for the first time in my lifetime, such a constellation of facts is not supposed to raise suspicion. Perhaps you can try, Professor Reich.

What we of the Election Integrity movement believe we are doing is saving our nation from a soft-coup perpetrated through sophisticated long-term exploitation of our election systems and the corruption of institutions which we citizens created and funded to protect us from such an event. That is our reality. We are peacefully saving the America republic from a tragic fate.

Of course, in your paradigm, citizens’ attempts to have transparent elections is disrupting American democracy. (Incidentally, would it hurt you to use the more accurate term, “republic”? It shows that you understand it is about both consent of the governed as well as constitutionally limited government. You would not want it to be thought of Democrats that you secretly support mob rule, would you?)

Fortunately for our nation, this does not have to continue as though we were debating the number of angels dancing on the head of a pin. This whole matter can be resolved in a matter of a week or so. Perhaps in just a few days. All that needs to happen is that the computer science professors who wrote Mesa County #3 get a chance to inspect the election databases of those six counties in question. Now that we know what to look for, I believe they can even do it in a few hours. When set against the tragic national fate about which you are so concerned, Professor Reich, surely letting sophisticated cybersecurity professionals access images of six hard drives for a few hours each… surely that does not strike you as unreasonable?

You who are so concerned with what fate may befall our nation, surely this seems like a reasonable request to you, right? So may we count on your voice to join ours in saying, Let the citizens’ experts inspect those six hard drives for a day!

If experience is any guide, I can make two predictions comfortably:

You will quickly say, “No that’s a horrible idea.”
Then you will search for a reason to rationalize why it is a horrible idea. I have heard them all. I have heard that we cannot resolve this by conducting an afternoon’s inspection of six hard drives because:
We don’t want to set the precedent.
If we give you an inch you will take a mile.
Why should we? Let citizens look at pieces of paper but they cannot inspect the machines that count them. For this, there will be no good reason adduced to explain why, for the first time in US history, citizens can have transparency to an arbitrary level determined by government officials, but not beyond that.
And so on and so forth.
So I challenge: I predict you will not join me in this call to look at six hard drives and resolve this dispute in a day, rather than face the risk to our nation of which you have written. Whatever your reasoning, that will be your conclusion.

And that is how we will know you do not really believe what you have written.

THE DEEP CAPTURE CAMPAIGN

BY
PATRICK BYRNE
OCTOBER 8, 2022

Eugene Yu is CEO of of the U.S. election software company Konnech. Yu, Chinese national also known as Jianwei Yu, was arrested October 4th in Michigan by investigators from the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office with assistance from the Meridian Township Police Department. Investigators allegedly found U.S. poll workers’ information stored on servers in the People’s Republic of China. China considers all data on the internet in China to belong to the state.  Hence, Yu allegedly gave poll worker personally identifiable information (PII) to the Chinese Communist Government.  Research into Yu revealed that Yu registered numerous Chinese websites to his Konnech email addresses, including “hongzhengtech.cn.”  

The DoD-funded company “Konnech” has an untold number of vulnerabilities in its Election Management System, which has been used in thousands of counties across the United States. Products within this system are often connected to the internet, tracking data of all sorts down to a specific geolocation of ballot workers. These apps are invasive. Konnech collected Personal Identifiable Information (PII) on poll workers (names, addresses, patterns of life, etc.) and election products like XORA, ClickSoftware, and Field Force Manager are strongly connected to China. I showed through Binary Edge that China had transferred data from the Chinese UNICOM Backbone to associated Konnech domains in the United States. Personally Identifiable Information may have been leaked by Konnech as President Eugene Yu was arrested yesterday in connection with the Theft of Personal Data. This data was sent back to the United States through Konnech-related domains on different IP addresses coming from the same port in China. Once again, any data that touches the Chinese Internet is owned by The Chinese Government.

Konnech voting equipment is reportedly used by thousands of voting entities across the US.

Summary of Devolution - Addendum Series - Part 4 by Jon Patel, 22 Jan 2022 

https://patelpatriot.substack.com/p/devolution-addendum-series-part-4

Here is part of a draft executive order by President Donald J. Trump that was acquired by the J6 committee and subsequently obtained by a FOIA action and released to the public:
I, Donald J. Trump, President of the United States, find that the forensic report of the Antrim County, Michigan voting machines, released December 13, 2020, and other evidence submitted to me in support of this order, provide probable cause sufficient to require action under the authorities cited above because of evidence of international and foreign interference in the November 3, 2020, election. Dominion Voting Systems and related companies are owned or heavily controlled and influenced by foreign agents, countries, and interests. The forensic report prepared by expers found that "the Dominion Voting System is intentionally and purposefully designed with inherent error4s to create systemic fraud and influence election results. The system intentionall generates and enormously high number of ballot errors. The intentional errors lead to bulk adjudication of ballots with no oversight, no transparency, and no audit trail. This leads to voter or election fraud". Teh report found the election management system to be fraught with unacceptable and unlawful vulnerabilities--including access to the internet. This fact alone gives probable cause to find evidence of fraud, and numerous malicious actions.

[Jon Patel] The draft order also states there is “evidence of international and foreign interference in the November 3, 2020, election.” The fact that this order was on standby and ready to be issued (and we don’t know for sure it wasn’t), tells me they had evidence of foreign interference. They then go on to list multiple entities with issues:

[Part of a draft presidential executive order by President Trump]: There is also probable cause to find that Dominion Voting Systems, Smartmatic, Electronic Systems & Software, and Hart Inter Civic, Clarity Election Night Reporting, Edison Research, Sequoia, Scytl, and similar or related entities, agents or assigns, have the same flaws and were subject to foreign interference in the 2020 election in the United States. There is probable cause to find these systems bear the same crucial code "features" and defects that allowed the same outside and foreign interference in our election, in which there is probable cause to find votes were in fact altered and maniulated contrary to the will of the voters.

[Jon Patel] The key takeaway is that the above companies were all “subject to foreign interference in the 2020 election of the United States.”

[Part of a draft presidential executive order by President Trump]: Dominion Voting Systems is based in Toronto, Canada, and assigns its intellectual property including patents on its firmware and software to Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank Corporation (HSBC), a bank with its foundation in China and its current headquarters in London, United Kingdom.  The Dominion Voting system is owned and controlled by foreign entities.  Multiple expert witnesses and cyber experts identified acts of foreign interference in the election prior to November 3, 2020 and continued in the following weeks.  In fact, there is probable cause to find a massive cyber-attack by foreign interests on our critical national infrastructure surrounding our election--not the least of which was the hacking of the voter registration system by Iran (B.O. 13 800 of May 11, 2017). 

[Jon Patel] The draft order also states there is “evidence of international and foreign interference in the November 3, 2020, election.” The fact that this order was on standby and ready to be issued (and we don’t know for sure it wasn’t), tells me they had evidence of foreign interference. They then go on to list multiple entities with issues:

[Part of a draft presidential executive order by President Trump]: There is also probable cause to find that Dominion Voting Systems, Smartmatic, Electronic Systems & Software, and Hart Inter Civic, Clarity Election Night Reporting, Edison Research, Sequoia, Scytl, and similar or related entities, agents or assigns, have the same flaws and were subject to foreign interference in the 2020 election in the United States. There is probable cause to find these systems bear the same crucial code "features" and defects that allowed the same outside and foreign interference in our election, in which there is probable cause to find votes were in fact altered and maniulated contrary to the will of the voters.

[JRJ] This draft Executive Order is significant, so let’s do a quick recap:

[Jon Patel] This order would draw upon authorities from:

      EO 12333: United States Intelligence Activities

      EO 13848: Foreign Interference in a US Election

      NSPM 13 (21): US Cyber Operations Policy

The order itself tells us that there was foreign interference in our elections and even the machines it came from.

The order alludes to involvement from China.

The order allows for the military to step in and “interdict” in our federal elections.

The order tells us there is a separate operation order.

The draft Executive Order is telling us that President Trump received intelligence (EO 12333) that there was foreign interference in our election (EO 13848) and based on the inclusion of NSPM 13. Remember what we know about NSPM 13.

This means that the intelligence that there was foreign interference in our elections would have been gathered in a military operation. It would have been CYBERCOM or the NSA, both of which are headed up by General Nakasone.  The more important aspect here for us to understand is that there was evidence of foreign interference, and this circumstantially proves our military found it. This draft order lets us into the mindset of Trump. He was doing things behind the scenes to counter the theft.