20) In a September 1, 2022, live chat, Catherine Engelbrecht (@truethevote) and Gregg Phillips (@onwardsocial) discussed the FBI's betrayal, Konnech programming software for China's National People's Congress, and the company's storage of U.S. election data on Chinese servers.
In January 2021, Phillips said that the cyber analyst he had been working with encountered an “oddity in some of the URLs” such as http://vote4la.com, http://vote4detroit.com, and http://vote4boston.com, which Konnech’s “PollChief” software application used to gather personally-identifying information about poll workers.
Using Binary Edge, a software product companies use to identify and assess the risk of cyber breaches, “We began to look at where these URLs resolve to.
We found that most of them resolve to one I.P. address and that I.P. address — the URL resolved in China,” Phillips said. “What we also learned in our review, http://apps.konnech.net, resolved into this same URL in China, meaning that the application itself was residing in China,” he continued.
“In Binary Edge, you can figure out what type of database they are using, their database port, and all the different services offered by ports in this particular application living in China. It turned out that not only did it live there, but they left the database open.”
This database “stored the personally identifying information of over a million Americans,” he emphasized. Engelbrecht and Phillips decided that “this was a major national security risk” and immediately took the information to the FBI.
When Engelbrecht and Phillips took this information to the FBI, the FBI “said the information was forwarded to their counter-intelligence operation, and a counter-intelligence op was opened up in January or February of 2021,” Phillips said.
Phillips described how he and Engelbrecht played an active role in the FBI’s operation, “They engaged us in the operation, they were communicating with us on a regular basis. They were communicating with Catherine regarding communications with the target and this went on for approximately 15 months.”
Phillips and Engelbrecht noted that the field office they worked with for those 15 months was “legitimate” and not “political law enforcement.”
“These were legitimate people who believed that this software posed a national security risk to the United States of America and they were working with us closely to try to stop this from being in place during the midterms,” Phillips said.
“The focus point was always we needed to remove this software from the election, but taking a step further, there were a lot of other concerns that the bureau had.”
In April 2022, Engelbrecht received a call from one of the FBI agents, who informed her that the FBI’s “Washington D.C. headquarters” was now involved in the investigation.
Engelbrecht described how everything changed after this call, “There was no more goodwill, there was no more let's work together, the script had been flipped, and now we were the target,” she said. “That was a very disturbing call.”
The agent informed Engelbrecht that “two women” at the FBI’s headquarters believed that Phillips and Engelbrecht were “in the wrong for doing this” and that the D.C. office was now trying “to figure out how you guys broke the law to find all of this.”
Engelbrecht added, “which of course we didn't, but that was kind of their Modus Operandi, they were going to try to pin something on us, and today you can pick your headlines about how the FBI has done this time and again.”
Phillips remarked, “The problem is they know about this, and they chose to do nothing. They chose to investigate it, and in the end, they chose to blame us, but this is China. These are Chinese operatives in the United States; these are Chinese citizens who are programming this.”
Engelbrecht explained how the FBI agents initially hoped they could persuade the Washington D.C. office to do the right thing, “Our contacts were saying we are going to try and smooth this out, but as the days clicked on, they re-contacted us and one of them said you may need to be ready to — his term was to use the nuclear option and go to the press,” she said.
With the FBI no longer interested in pursuing Konnech, Englebrecht and Phillips organized an event for Saturday, August 13th in Arizona called “the Pit” where they brought together about two hundred “researchers, independent journalists, and big thinkers” to share their story.
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2:25 PM · Jun 7, 2023·41.8K Views
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