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

what is the site doing?

[hudebnik]

The form creates a query with your name and a bunch of other search terms:
filers.name:(${YOUR_NAME_HERE}) AND ("Chairman Pai" OR "Mr Pai") AND (", " OR ": ") OR "") AND "I" AND ("would like to comment on" OR "have concerns about" OR "am a voter worried about" OR "concerned about") AND ("net neutrality" OR "Network Neutrality" OR "Internet regulation" OR "the FCC rules on the Internet") AND "I" AND ("urge" OR "encourage" OR "ask" OR "recommend" OR "request" OR "advocate") AND ("the commission" OR "the commissioners" OR "Ajit Pai" OR "government") AND "to" AND ("reverse" OR "repeal" OR "undo")) OR "The unprecedented regulatory power")

So no, it's not an exact-match on the whole comment, but the conjunction of a bunch of exact-matches on phrases. Each phrase by itself could match a lot of pro-neutrality comments too, but presumably the whole collection of them are taken from a sample of sock-puppet anti-neutrality comments.

(In case the parentheses in the above don't match up, I just copied the URL and manually replaced %20 with a space, while not wearing glasses, so there may be clerical errors.)