FCC feedback on net neutrality faked and the FCC blocks investigation, NY attorney general says

[cellio]

The New York Attorney General is investigating fraud aimed at FCC commenting. The FCC refused to cooperate. According to this post, tens of thousands of New Yorkers, and many more people elsewhere in the US, had their names falsely and illegally used in fake feedback on net neutrality.

Successfully investigating this sort of illegal conduct requires the participation of the agency whose system was attacked. So in June 2017, we contacted the FCC to request certain records related to its public comment system that were necessary to investigate which bad actor or actors were behind the misconduct. We made our request for logs and other records at least 9 times over 5 months: in June, July, August, September, October (three times), and November.

We reached out for assistance to multiple top FCC officials, including you [Chairman Pai], three successive acting FCC General Counsels, and the FCC’s Inspector General. We offered to keep the requested records confidential, as we had done when my office and the FCC shared information and documents as part of past investigative work.

Yet we have received no substantive response to our investigative requests. None.

Net neutrality is important. The integrity of the public record is even more important, as it is used to support policy changes (not just this one). And right now it looks like we've lost both.

You can use this site to look for fake comments using your name and, if you find them, file a complaint. With, um, somebody -- I didn't find any under my name, so I haven't gone down that path.

Comments

[madfilkentist]

No results for me, either.

I wish the site explained better what it was doing. When it said that only "suspicious anti-net neutrality comments" would be reported, I wondered why it was giving information only about comments opposing the Obama-era regulations, when content analysis is a hard task. The article linked to said that all the sock puppet comments were identical, so I assume it's filtering only for exact-match comments. But unless all the forged comments stem from one bot that's so inept it can't vary the message, it would make more sense just to let people check for whether their name is on a comment at all.

The site has other problems. It implies that Comcast is behind the forgeries, calling them "comcastroturf," without mentioning any evidence for this. Also, the "Submit a real comment to the FCC" link doesn't link to the FCC, but to a blatantly non-neutral site.

The FCC's inept response adds to the case that it shouldn't be trusted with Internet regulation.

[hudebnik]

I didn't find any comments under my name, so I chopped out a bunch of the URL so it was ONLY searching for my name, to make sure my real comment got through. I found three hits: two were mine, on the same date (presumably I hit "submit", got no feedback after a minute or two, then hit "submit" again), and one didn't look like my writing style, although it made some of the same points. I was momentarily worried that somebody on our side had ALSO sent in fake comments, but then I realized this was a different person with the same name, living on the opposite coast.

In short, nothing wrong here.

[osewalrus]

Pai and friends have indeed worked fairly hard on this, given what happened last time. This scam has been going on since Pai opened the docket in May.
http://www.wetmachine.com/tales-of-the-sausage-factory/will-pai-pull-a-putin-and-hack-the-fcc-process-or-will-he-get-over-himself-and-start-acting-like-the-chairman/

As I told reporters at the time, members of Congress know who is melting down their phones.

[jducoeur]

See also this interesting analysis, which suggests that *most* of the comments from the FCC process were from reasonably well-programmed spambots. Not conclusive, but fascinating support for the theory that somebody went to quite a bit of effort to stack the deck. I'm increasingly curious who...