The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office did not immediately respond to questions about the arrest.
Konnech has come under scrutiny this year by several election deniers, including the founder of the nonprofit True the Vote, which claims it is committed to cracking down on election fraud. True the Vote said its team downloaded the personal information of 1.8 million American poll workers from his Konnech-owned server hosted in China. It said it retrieved the data using the server’s default password, which it said was a “password”. Stated.
The claim went viral online, with some supporters expressing concern about China’s influence on the U.S. electoral system.
The Konnech allegation reached Dekalb County, Georgia, which was trying to sign a contract with the company. Her Marci McCarthy, the county’s Republican chairman, voiced her concerns during her public comment period at the county elections commission on Sept. I questioned whether
Konnech refuted the allegations, telling the New York Times that it had records of less than 240,000 workers at the time and had not detected a data breach. Konnech had a subsidiary in China that developed and tested software. The company said programmers were always using “dummy” test data. The subsidiary will be closed in 2021.
Last month, Konnech sued True the Vote, its founder Catherine Engelbrecht, and election opponent Gregg Phillips, who has worked closely with the group. Konnech alleged that the group was involved in defamation, theft, and violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Prevention Act, which makes unauthorized computer access illegal.
The judge in the case granted Konnech’s request for an emergency injunction, requiring True the Vote to disclose who allegedly accessed Konnech’s data. Indeed, the vote released the names in sealed court filings.
“Certainly the vote is honored to have played a small part in what must have been a broad and complex inquiry,” the group said in a statement. We are deeply grateful to the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office for their swift action.”