Sidney Powell And The Kraken

Over the weekend, Sidney Powell, a prominent attorney best known as Gen Flynn's lawyer but currently working with the Trump election team, teased that she would "release the Kraken" regarding election fraud. On Sunday, she gave at least two interviews with additional details. The more informative was on OAN, as reported at Gateway Pundit. Referring to a system capability allegedly available with Dominion voting machines, she said

Sidney Powell: They can watch the voting real time. They can run a computer algorithm on it as needed to either flip votes, take votes out or alter the votes to make a candidate win… It’s massive criminal voter fraud, writ large across at least 29 states… It’s obvious the algorithm and the statistics that our experts are tracking out are batches of votes and when the votes changed. It’s going to blow the mind of everyone in this country when we can get it all together and can explain it with the affidavits and the experts that have come forward.

I spent most of my career in IT, often in documentation and security. To demonstrate this more conclusively, Powell would need, first, to show that this is a documented feature of the product. If so, this should be fairly easy to point out, since it would be a sales feature covered even in marketing brochures, and it would need to carry detailed specs and operating instructinos for use by operators during an election. There are potentially thousands of customers for such a system worldwide, and each customer would need multiple people on staff who would need know how to operate such a feature.

So I've got to assume that if this is true, there must be product manuals out there, even on line. (In this day and age, almost certainly on line.)

Second, the system must have audit trails that document when and where every vote was received and how it was counted. If indeed blocks of votes were switched, which is what Powell clearly alleges at OAN. the audit trail would report this event and who did it. Normal computer security controls limit an extremely powerful capability like switching blocks of votes to specified "superuser" IDs. You would normally want such a capability to be strictly limited to a small number of higher-level users, if only to prevent ordinary clerks from inadvertently switching votes.

As someone who's worked with such features in the real world, I recognize that not all organizaions are this careful, and low-level people can certainly do high-level things -- but the action will have been recorded, even if the actor isn't easily identifiable.

It does sound as if Powell has some familiarity with the product featues and how they operate. If the set of circumstances she outlines is credible, it ought to be possible to discover them pretty much as a routine matter in an election challenge or recount. If such actions were taken -- the scenario she outlines would suggest some person, signed on to the system, reviewed projected electoral results and then acted, using the documented system feature, to switch votes in order to change the projected results. This would have been done at an identified time, in an identified transaction, and probably by an identified user.

If that's the case, this would indeed be a Kraken. We'll have to see how this plays out. However, I saw a reference, which I'll need to track down, to the head of Trump's electoral team being a computer security specialist. Sounds reasonable, but all this needs to be filled in much more fully in coming days.

UPDATE: This interview on OAN indicates, in part, that the "superuser" type ID that can change results is widely available, which would be one of the first issues I would look at. But again, any action taken by a user should be recorded on an audit trail.