Almost 50 years ago there was the infamous break in at the Watergate hotel. It was a tremendous scandal then and has not lost any seriousness despite having occurred so long ago. Yet this scandal has touched any and all issues since then which is intended to magnify the importance of the scandal at hand. Due to the frequency of its use as well as some of the unimportant scandals it has been associated with seems to actually diminish both the reported scandal as well as the Watergate scandal itself.
One of the most recent and quite laughable scandal is Italygate. In a nutshell, this conspiracy theory, is that votes in the US 2020 presidential election was stolen from President Trump. This general talking point is not so unusual considering all the similar talk since president Trump lost in 2020 but what is interesting is how this was supposedly achieved.
The claim goes that people working for the Italian defense contractor are working with senior CIA officials and using military satellites to switch votes from Trump to Joe Biden to bring about a swing away from President Trump for Presidential candidate Biden.
This does sound a bit far fetched especially considering that not all voting is done with computerized voting machines but more importantly because they are not connected to the internet specifically to prevent these types of security problems.
Now if you are a true believer then somehow this might sound a bit plausible but there are a few observable reasons why this is not true. I don’t ever remember hearing about space programs, as it relates to satellites, being described in connection with Italy. A quick look into Wikipedia, which despite being a volunteer effort is right quite often, actually shows that the Italians do not have a space footprint at all. The closest you can get is the European Space Agency and their space program.
If the fact that the Italians do not send up satellites is not enough, what about the fact that connecting computers together is difficult. Apple is getting much better but that is connecting its own hardware together. The task of different machines, which again are not actually reachable by internet or satellite, made in different years and perhaps running different operating systems would be huge.
If you don’t believe me, ask my wife. She still has problems with Windows 10 connecting to a HP printer – and the printer was purchased in the same year as the laptop. Networking is hard, connecting computers without generating noticeable errors (in certain situations) is hard and having a good international conspiracy is also hard.
