So, Just What Is Sidney Powell's Kraken?

My earlier post today discussed a pretty simple evidentiary question that might be used to establish that election data was unlawfully manipulated on Novembr 3-4, and it could conceivably be used to challenge election results during an audit or recount. I also assume the Trump election team is on top of this. But is it a kraken?

I'm wonderimng if there's more than meets the eye here. On Friday, Rep Louie Gohmert told Chris Salcedo on Newsmax that computer servers were seized by a US Army force in Frankfurt, Germany. The report suggested they were owned by a Spanish company, Scytl. Gohmert, Sidney Powell,, and attorney L Lin Wood all issued cryptic tweets referring to this alleged raid.

The raid, or at least specific details of it, were then fact-checked by corporate media and designated false. The AP said,

False. Both the Army and Scytl told The Associated Press the claim is not true. Furthermore, Scytl does not have offices or servers in Frankfurt, Germany.

Scytl itself announced, in part:

• We do not have servers or offices in Frankfurt
• The US army has not seized anything from Scytl in Barcelona, Frankfurt or anywhere else

However, this may be carefully weasel-worded. Two posts at the Gateway Pundit suggest that whatever the details, a server in frankfurt was seized, whoever owned it or used it. This post says, quoting a "source":

The US government, once they determined that this Dominion server was involved in switching votes, then the intelligence community began a search for the server and discovered that the server was in Germany. In order to get access to that server and have it available for use in a legal manner they had to have the State Department work in tandem with the Department of Justice. They had to request that the government of Germany cooperate in allowing this seizure of this server.

The appropriate documents required to affect that kind of seizure were put in place, signed off on, and it appears there was also US military support in this operation. The US military was not in the lead. But this helps explain why Esper was fired and Miller and Kash Patel were put in place — so that the military would not interfere with the operation in any way.

An article by Larry Johnson, a highly controversial former CIA and State Department analyst, also at Gateway Pundit, added further possible details:

The U.S. Army did not conduct a raid in Germany on either Sctyl or Dominion offices or servers. They are foreign nationals and we must operate in accordance with German law. Moreover, the U.S. Army does not have law enforcement powers with respect to such entities.

So what happened? I am reliably informed that a unit under the command of USEUCOM (i.e., United States European Command) did in fact conduct an operation to take control of computer servers. But these servers belong to the CIA, not Dominion or Sctyl. The U.S. military has full authority to do this because any CIA activity in the European theater is being conducted using military cover. In other words, CIA officers would be identified to the German government (and anyone else asking) as military employees or consultants.

. . . I also have confirmed what Jim Hoft reported the other night–the CIA’s Gina Haspel was not informed in advance of this operation. Based on this fact, I think it is correct that action was taken in Germany on territory under U.S. control and that a CIA facility was targeted.

I also have learned that FBI Director Christopher Wray was excluded from this operation.

So the debunking fact checks from corporate media are literally true, but apparently something did happen in Frankfurt, and something was seized and taken away, probably by the Justice Department. There's pobably a great deal else we don't yet know, and may never. But it sounds like we're in Jason Bourne territory.

And if there's just a back door to Dominion software, why did Sidney Powell say Gina Haspel should be fired immediately?

[It] makes me wonder if the CIA has used [Dominion] for its own benefit in different places. And why Gina Haspel is still there in the CIA is beyond my comprehension. She should be fired immediately.

Now, that would be a kraken.

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.