Rudy Giuliani was once supposed to be Donald Trump’s cybersecurity advisor, even though his only credentials in the field of information security were that he scammed some people into thinking he was a cybersecurity expert.
This week, Giuliani proved once again that he has no idea what he’s talking about.
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In a Zoom call with Georgia legislators on Thursday, Giuliani went on one of his usual baseless rants about election fraud, claiming that the Democrats are covering it up with the aid of Republican politicians in the state. He then said something that we have spent hours trying to decipher.
He said that some people were “quite obviously surreptitiously passing around USB ports as if they are vials of heroin or cocaine. It’s obvious to anyone who is a criminal investigator or prosecutor that they were engaged in surreptitious illegal activity.”
Later, he claimed that prosecutors should search poll workers home for “evidence of USB ports, for evidence of voter fraud because they were obviously engaged in it.”
Do you have any idea what the hell Giuliani is talking about? We’d love to hear from you. Using a non-work phone or computer, you can contact Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai securely on Signal at +1 917 257 1382, OTR chat at lorenzofb@jabber.ccc.de, or email lorenzofb@vice.com.
I really wish I could explain to you how anyone could be passing around USB ports. A port is where you plug something, not something you carry around, unless you’re carrying around a computer or laptop. It’s more likely Giuliani was referring to USB drives, which are used in some states to move votes from voting machines that should be isolated from the internet. For the record, there has been no evidence that moving data from voting machines to other computers’ via flash drives led to any fraud whatsoever. In fact, of the roughly 50 lawsuits filed by Trump’s elite team of lawyers, 35 have already been dropped or dismissed as of Friday.
And even if we accept that he meant USB drives, I wish I could explain how that’s comparable to passing around drugs.
It’s almost as if Giuliani’s cyberbrain was hacked into by a Cyberpunk 2077 character who’s talking about black market cyberdecks or something. Ultimately, it’s impossible to say what he means because he has no idea what he’s talking about.
An election board employee who works in Pennsylvania, and is familiar with voting machine technology, said that what Giuliani is referring to “is nonsense.” The man, who asked to remain anonymous because he wasn’t allowed to speak to the press and to avoid retaliation, said that USB sticks used to move votes are encrypted and can only be read by computers that have the encryption key needed to decrypt their content.
This story has been updated to include quotes from an anonymous Pennsylvania election board employee.
